Video: "Ice Cream Man" - Randy Kaplan

I'm sorry, Mr. Randy Kaplan -- despite your claim in your song "Ice Cream Man," from your new album Mr. Diddie Wah Diddie, I am the official ice cream king.

Even if you do have a cape.  And a crown.  And, er, an ice cream truck.

OK, I concede my title to you, sir.  Where's my ice cream?

Randy Kaplan - "Ice Cream Man" [Vimeo]

Interview: Rick Dobbis (myKaZoo)

Richard and Rick 3_low.jpgRick Dobbis' resume is a lengthy one, with many stops in the music and record business, including a stint as president of Sony Music International. His latest effort targets a younger audience than one he's spent much of his career focusing on -- preschoolers and elementary school-aged kids. Along with business partner Richard Ellis (that's him on the right, Dobbis on the left), myKaZootv and myKaZoo Music are attempting to bring a wide variety of music videos in one centralized (and curated) place as well as seeing if the idea of a kids' record label can be saved. Their label's first release, Farmer Jason's Nature Jams, comes out February 7, and the myKaZoo website will be up and running this month. They've got ambitious plans in a field that has seen many ambitious plans -- and seen many of those fail. Dobbins chatted with me this week about his introduction to kids music, why he thinks myKaZoo is good for the genre and not just his artists, and one inspiration for the site's name. Zooglobble: What are your earliest musical memories? Rick Dobbis: I grew up with a sister six years older than me. She was a huge, huge rock 'n' roll fan. This was the early '50s, so folks like Elvis Presley, Connie Francis. My sister was a huge Connie Francis fan -- my father once brought her an autographed picture of Francis and she just about died. My father... the name "myKaZoo" isn't specifically named for my father, but he was an amateur kazoo player. He opened for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes at an annual show three years in a row. My first kids record was the theme from Davy Crockett. My first album was "A Taste of Honey" by Jimmy Rodgers. How did you get into kids music? Well, Rick Chertoff, who's a distinguished producer, he and his wife and others formed Dream Jam Productions to do stuff related to music and movement. It'd primarily been focused on books. We were sitting talking one day, and we asked, "why don't we create our own music -- good music that shares the values we're trying to convey?" That struck a chord with me, so I worked with them and that's when the Dream Jam Band came into being. I worked with every genre over my career, and internationally at a particularly good point, a great time to open my mind. It was new, and new is healthy. There's some wonderfully creative content in the genre. It's also under-resourced and underrepresented in the marketplace.