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From The Desk Of Don Fleming: Sky King Wins Again

Even if you don’t know Don Fleming by name, chances are you own a ton of records he’s helped make. As a producer, he’s collaborated with the likes of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, Screaming Trees, the Posies and Hole, to name just a handful. He works for the Alan Lomax Archive and has done archival work for the estates of Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey and others. He’s fronted such groups as the Velvet Monkeys, B.A.L.L. and Gumball and was a member of the band that provided the music to 1994 Beatles biopic Backbeat. Fleming also runs the Instant Mayhem label, which recently reissued the Velvet Monkeys’ 1982 debut Everything Is Right and is about to release the solo Don Fleming 4, which features Kim Gordon, Julie Cafritz and R. Stevie Moore. If all that weren’t enough, Fleming is guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Fleming: “Penny’s in a fix!” When I was a kid in the early 1960s, I watched Sky King a lot. The show was on for 12 years and mixed the popular cowboy TV genre of the 1950s with an airplane (the Songbird) and other radical, advanced technologies like tape recorders and metal detectors. Sky King was assisted by his niece Penny and her brother Clipper. The plots revolved around various bad guys in the vicinity who would always be tracked down in the Songbird and then given a big wallop on the chin by Sky King. I met him at a circus in Homestead, Fla., and got his autograph when I was about eight years old. Sky King was the last of the good guys in a white hat.

Video after the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7W1_8ozEiE

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