Don’t tune your radio dial to “Greasy Kids Stuff” if you want to hear Raffi, Barney the purple dinosaur or anything else you’d expect from a broadcast devoted to music for kids.
Hova and Belinda are on another wavelength.
Next month marks nine years the married deejay duo – he’s Hova Najarian, she’s Belinda Miller – have been hosting the hippest kids’ show on the radio. And they’ve just released their second CD, “Greasy Kid Stuff 2,” as well. (See review, below).
From 10 a.m. to noon every Saturday on WFMU (91.1 FM), they play by their own rules – jumping from, say, “Happy Noodle vs. Sad Noodle” by Logan Whitehurst & the Junior Science Club to Rosemary Clooney singing “The Syncopated Clock” and on to a ruff version of “Ob-La Di, Ob-La Da” by the Beatle Barkers.
What they spin, says Belinda, “is usually silly or has groovy sounds, makes your butt move and is about animals, bugs or space.”
“We play music for kids, but it’s not ‘kids’ music,'” says Hova. “And if we don’t like it, it’s not ‘Greasy.'”
Adds Belinda: “It has to be fun, but not ‘Hey kids! This is fun!’ If you have to tell a kid it’s fun, it’s not that fun.”
Their fans know what fun is. Longtime listener Simone Manwarring, co-owner of Williamsburg kids’ clothing store Sam & Seb, loves their tongue-in-cheek style.
“The problem with a lot of children’s shows or music is it’s aggravating for grown-ups,” says Manwarring, a mother of 3- and 1½-year-old boys.
She says she tried Radio Disney once, but found it “disgusting” – filled with “mini bad pop.”
There’s no bad pop on “Greasy Kid Stuff.” With the deejays’ quirky cuts, weekly “Birthday Hollers” to listeners of all ages (their pets, too) and an occasional squeal from the couple’s 8-month-old daughter, Georgia, it’s the type of independent free-form radio that appears on the dial with less and less frequency.
Lately, they’ve been playing a lot of Soupy Sales – thanks to a listener who send in copies of his old LPs.
Like the other deejays on WFMU, Hova and Belinda (he’s 40, she’s 38) are unpaid volunteers. “We have fun,” says Belinda, who, like her husband, has an office job. “There’s no other reason to do it if we didn’t have fun.”
We dropped by the FMU studio in Jersey City the other day to get a look at the fun.
There we found Hova, keeping his “Accu-playlist” updated for those listening on the Web (wfmu.org), with little Georgia on his knee, a denim jacket over her onesie, little red bows on her feet and binky in her mouth.
Belinda was standing by the console, microphone at the ready.
Georgia pulls on her daddy’s headphones – “We’re having a headphone emergency here,” he says over the air.
Belinda answers the phone and politely tells a listener, “She’s our baby. We didn’t just recruit her from somewhere.” Then she puts on “Kitty Kat Max” by 1,000 Clowns and sets up a playpen.
The weekly Birthday Holler is a Greasy tradition. And instead of the usual “Happy Birthday” tune, they play the greed gagfest song “Gimmie,” from Fatcat & Fishface (on their album “Selfish Shellfish”).
“About 10 percent of what we play is planned out ahead of time,” says Belinda, displaying a page in her Powerpuff Girls notebook with a few song titles and other notes.
“Like the day we went to the dentist, we’ll play some dentist songs.” That would include GKS fave “That’s Where the Plaque Is” by Michael Shelley.
As the program draws to a close, Hova begins dismantling the playpen. They gather their records and CDs. After an odd tale about a sheep who supplied enough wool for 21 suits, Belinda blows Georgia a raspberry and cues up the Cowsills singing “Hair.”
“Look,” says Hova, “Mommy’s doing her ‘Hair’ dance.” Belinda shakes and shimmys, turns up the volume. She tells Hova, and the listeners, “Thanks for letting me play the ‘Hair’ song, Hova – even though you don’t have any.”
She grabs her Elvis travel coffee mug and heads back to the library to feed Georgia some mashed peas. The two first met while attending Indio HS together, in Southern California, and began dating when Hova was a freshman in college in 1981. (At the homecoming dance, their first dance was “to a slow song” says Hova, “and probably terrible.”)
Thinking back, Hova says the first record he ever bought was “Elton John’s Greatest Hits.” For Belinda, it was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” – the Bee Gees’ version.
And where do Georgia’s musical tastes lie when she’s not in the “Greasy” studio?
“In the car,” says Hova, “she likes opera and the Spanish station.”