Murdering the Classics on WFMU

A good cover tune is truly something to behold. A cover can even surpass the original. This can even happen with top-tier artists. The Jimi Hendrix version of "All Along the Watchtower" is so solid that people forget that Bob Dylan wrote it. Aretha Franklin owns "Respect" so hard that she pwns Otis Redding. I'd argue that Nine Inch Nails and Johnny Cash tie with their respective version of "Hurt". But that's not true of Yo La Tengo. Their request-only WFMU benefit covers are classic in their own way, but it's in that different, Gen-X ironic sense of the word.  They strangle these poor songs. But with that special, car wreck way it makes for irresistible, unforgettable live radio. On March 7th, 2020 they held their 25th annual Yo La Tengo Request-a-thon. 

The date of the show has always varied, and the show they guested on was also quite variable before 2015. But the co-host has almost always been Gaylord Fields. My list below has a lot of gaps in it. WFMU blogged it some years, posted a playlist other years and some years apparently left no searchable virtual record. Beware of the Blog only began in 2005, and information before that is scant.  On different years Yo La Tengo performed on slightly different dates, and on different WFMU programs but always during the WFMU fundraiser. If you can fill in any of the blanks please comment on this post.

YEAR	SHOW	AIR DATE	PLAYLIST
2021	Todd-O-Phonic Todd	03/13/2021	PLAYLIST
2020	Todd-O-Phonic Todd	03/02/2020	PLAYLIST
2019	Todd-O-Phonic Todd	03/09/2019	PLAYLIST
2018	Todd-O-Phonic Todd	03/10/2018	PLAYLIST
2017	Todd-O-Phonic Todd	03/18/2017	PLAYLIST
2016	Todd-O-Phonic Todd	03/12/2016	PLAYLIST
2015	Todd-O-Phonic Todd	03/14/2015	PLAYLIST
2014	The Evan "Funk" Davies Show	02/26/2014	PLAYLIST
2013	Hello Children with Faye	03/14/2013	PLAYLIST
2012	Pseu's Thing With A Hook	03/02/2012	PLAYLIST
2011	Trash Flow Radio	03/04/2011	PLAYLIST
2010	Pseu's Thing With A Hook	03/05/2010	PLAYLIST
2009	Pseu's Thing With A Hook	03/13/2009	PLAYLIST
2008	Bob Brainen's Show	03/02/2008	PLAYLIST
2007	Gaylord Fields & Tom Scharpling	03/16/2007	PLAYLIST
2006	Gaylord Fields & Tom Scharpling	03/07/2006	PLAYLIST
2005	Gaylord Fields & Tom Scharpling	03/15/2005	PLAYLIST
2004	Gaylord Fields & Tom Scharpling	03/20/2004	PLAYLIST
2003			PLAYLIST
2002		03/16/2002	PLAYLIST
2001			PLAYLIST
2000		03/07/2000?	PLAYLIST
1999			PLAYLIST
1998			PLAYLIST
1997			PLAYLIST
1996			PLAYLIST

So when the band released Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics in 2006 it removed that spontaneous rubber-necking experience and replaced it with a car crash montage that feels somewhat anemic by comparison. It lacks the visceral qualities, the fits and starts, the technical difficulties, and the unintended absurdities. The fund-raiser compilation includes covers from between 1996 and 2003. The 30 tracks make for a somewhat comedic 76-minute slog. But it's all for a good cause. Interestingly the existence of the disc seems to have further popularized the live radio program.

They way it works is that all listeners who pledged money during the band's appearances are offered a chance to request one song that the band would then attempt to perform. Yo La Tengo has no way to know what songs might be requested and therefore reserve the right to play the song, or fragment of a song in any form, tempo or key they see fit —acapella, instrumental or otherwise. Some tunes are therefore unrecognizable, or may even be a bluff. We have no way to know. The WFMU benefit compilation album compiles 30 "highlights" broadcast between 1996 and 2003.The breakdown of the full track list is below:

SEQUENCE	TRACK	PERFORMANCE
1	Tighten Up	2001
2	The Night Chicago Died	1997
3	Raw Power	2000
4	Sea Cruise	1997
5	Favorite Thing	2003
6	Baseball Altamont	2000
7	Meet the Mets	2002
8	Oh Bondage, Up Yours	1997
9	Ding dang/Interplanetary Music	1999
10	Captain Lou	1999
11	Oh, Sweet Nuthin'	1999
12	Route 66	2001
13	Roadrunner	2000
14	Tijuana Taxi	1998
15	Mendocino	2000
16	Sweet Dreams	2000
17	Baby's On Fire	2003
18	Mary Anne With The Shaky Hand	2001
19	The Hokey Pokey	1998
20	You May Be Right	1999
21	Mama Told Me Not To Come	2002
22	Roundabout	2000
23	You Ain't Seen Nothing yet	1998
24	Don't Worry Koko	2003
25	Downtown	1999
26	Let the Good Times Roll	1997
27	Never On Sunday	1998
28	20th Century Boy	2002
29	Rock The Boat	2000
30	Shotgun / Medley	2002

News and Reviews 2012

I've been blogging Arcane Radio Trivia since April of 2005. As of this date, that works out to more than  1,900 posts. It's a time-consuming hobby.  2012 has been a good year for this radio man. I was interviewed by a French audiophile magazine, Discuts. I've digitized dozens of acetates. Two of my cranky letters to Radio World were published. I read several dozen books. I learned a lot more HTML. A year has passed. So the time have come to reflect and review.  It's a good time to look at my previous top 10s, and "Best Of" lists.You can see previous years lists at the links below:

• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005

Best Posts: 
My favorites are never my readers favorites. I was recently got name-checked at the Society of Lathe Trolls (which is an honor and a privilege) for one of my weekly acetate rips. I really liked my post about Alan Freed and the artist genuinely known as Moondog. I also liked the post on WKDU vs. WPWT vs. WEXP, because it was a bit of Philly radio history. I also posted a much more detailed history of broadcasts from trains because I got called out on a technicality. I also had the pleasure and honor of blogging my own grandfather's radio history in two segments, here and here.

Most Popular Posts:
I had an unexpected bump from Reddit this year which had a bit of a long tail as other sites recycled their content including my link. It totally rearranged what posts were popular, and continues to feed me a river of web traffic. So that Reddit link and it's after effects produced over 100,000 hits, over half of which happened within about 24 hours beginning on June 27th. It was re-blogged by several sites including "Did You Know?" a Tumbler site, the Straight Dope message board, Josh Withers, and several others. It led to increased hits on related pages and a generally higher level since. This redefined "popular" for my blog. My average daily hits since then are up 5k. This all because of a post I wrote on peter Tripp in 2009.

Best Music Blogs
I still read Built on a Weak Spot, more often than I read the Newspaper.  I'd also like to note that  Aversion Online was a rock solid resource until writer Andrew went on hiatus. I hope for his triumphant return. I think every new CD/vinyl and download I bought in the last few years was because of these two blogs.

Best Radio Station:
This year I'm picking the College of Staten Island radio station 88.9 WSIA. Hurricane Sandy dealt a harsh  blow to the whole Metropolitan New York area. Worst hit were probably Hoboken and Staten Island. WSIA is the only radio station local to Staten Island, and they like most took some damage.  Their  transmitter site took severe damage in the storm, but their campus opened it's doors to the beleaguered residents of Staten Island. We all hope for their swift return. Also laudable is WCPR the Cable & webcast station at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. Other stations, including WFMU took a hit as well but they are in a much better position fiscally to recover.

Best Radio Show:
Tin Pan Alley on WDVR. What an odd little program this is. Host Barbara Zentner plays pop music from 1920s through the 1950s with an ear for oddities and a mind for themes and lost causes. She truly has made a format of all the record I always toss after buying a lot wholesale. Somehow she ties it all together like some kind of mad crate-digging anthropologist. More here.

Best Record Store:
Willimantic Records was so good that I bought their T-shirt. They have vinyl, classic punk, used CDs, a nice book section, xylophones, shirts, magazines, and of course... 78s. You can't beat that.

Best Zine
It's more of a weekly than a zine, but this year I have to give it to the New Miami Times for their high brow writing on voter suppression, mosquito borne diseases, Art & Vinyl and a feature on the zombie apocalypse. It sounds like fiction but you should have heard the AM band down there light up when that dude ate that other dude's face. It made great reading while trapped in a Pinecrest hotel room. they are a sister publication to the Village Voice and a fine read.

Top 10 Records of 2012
1. Pile - Dripping
2. Metz - Metz
3. Killing Joke - MMXII
4. Staer - Staer 
5. Teenanger - Frights
6. Future of the Left - The Plot Against Common Sense
7. Crocodiles - Endless Flowers
8. Gay Witch Abortion - Opportunistic Smoke Screen Behavior
9. Fast Citizens - Gather
10. Thy Art Is Murder - Hate

Honorable mentions: Tendril - Smear, Sky:lark - 2012 demos, Father John Misty – Fear Fun, Desaparecidos - Marikkkopa 7-inch, Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel, Deftones - Koi No Yokan, Anchor 3 - Whir, The Soupcans – Good Feelings,Various Artists - The Reverb Conspiracy,  The Algorithm - Polymorphic Code, Ruiner - Whores, Hawks - Rub, Noxious Foxes - Leggings, Converge: All We Love We Leave Behind, Old Man Gloom - No.

Radio Unnamable

Free Form radio didn't happen in just one place, on one station or in one city. It had no single progenitor, or single origin. Despite that, Bob Fass deserves a lot of credit as an early DJ in the earliest days of the format. Giving a DJ total control was madness and it often sounded that way. There were other prototypical DJs who were on air at the same time such as John Leonard at KPFA and Clyde Clifford on KAAY-AM. The prototype for it all was probably Henry Jacobs but he was pursuing another idea entirely. I could write for a week on the origins of free form FM. But tonight let's focus on Fass. More here.

Fass, a native New Yorker was working in theater in the 1950s so it isn't surprising that a friend from high school, the novelist and poet Richard Elman got him in the door. Elman was producing drama programs for WBAI at the time. Fass started as an announcer, with a midnight to 6:00 AM shift, and he brought a sense of drama with him. He opened each show with the line “Good morning, cabal.”  He had live guest performances, you should know a lot of the names: Townes Van Zandt, Jose Feliciano, Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie, The Fugs, Patti Smith... the list is endless. He also did interviews with people we now consider iconic: Paul Krassner, Kinky Friedman, Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, even beats like Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso. —I'll just stop there abruptly.

He sometimes played records of course. He played them forwards, backwards, and on top of each other.  Inspired by John Cage he would sometimes layer multiple records and tapes into a cacophonous medly. Did I mention the drugs?  I'll say no more.  He named his program after a work by Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable.  It's no Malone Dies but it was pretty good. His show grew in influence, he covered the police riots at the DNC in 1968. Abbie Hoffman called him daily with updates from court. Anti-draft protesters would call his program from the court house to try to raise bail from his audience. Fass had become an icon himself. More here.

But in the 1970s a change in management routed him out. After management tried to parse out chunks of his program to various advocacy groups Fass joined a group of DJs trying to unionize. Management forbid him to speak on the air about the dispute. Fass did it anyway. The event ended with some staff barricaded in the studios live on the air, until the phone lines were cut and the police dragged them out. Fass was banned from the station for 5 years. Fass defiantly spent the duration at WFMU. He was reinstated at WBAI in 1982, but with a show just once a week, Midnight to 3:00 AM Thursdays. He is still alive and show is still on the air; the music is a bit dated, but his politics certainly are not.  

**********UPDATE**********

Bob Fass is to be the subject of a documentary film out later this year. See trailer below:

Kokaine Karma

The Kokaine Karma radio program began it's long sojourn on WFMU. It was a radio program that would move from station to station and city to city. It's unusual but I should also note that Dennis Frawley and Bob Rudnick wrote a column for the East Village Other, often abbreviated as just "EVO". It was a 1960s bi-weekly freak beat magazine. (It was published from 1965 to 1971 and is worth exploring.)  Kokaine Karma comes up a lot in the context of the MC5 because it was Frawley and Rudnick who wrote so glowingly of them in the EVO.  More here.  They then booked the MC5 for an infamous New York concert of the psychedelic era: the Peoples Concert. More here. It was through the column that Rudnick and Frawley came to have a show offered to them on WFMU. So we begin there.

Today WFMU is considered a monster of independent music and general freakishness. But in 1967, FMU was only 10 years old. Free-form FM was in it's ascendancy, and WFMU was a property of Upsala College. Things were different and budgets were smaller. By his own accounting it cost $50 a week Rudnick $50 a week in gas to do the show.

They left New York around 1968 and got involved in the White Panther Party and moved onto a commune called "Trans-Love Energies Unlimited." Though John Sinclair (manager of the MC5) Rudnick met John Detz the station manager of WABX.  Kokaine Karma was re-launched as an overnight program 2:00 AM to 7:00 AM Sunday nights. But when Sinclair got busted for weed. Rudnick and Frawley took to the airwaves to defend him. Accounts generally indicate that this led to the departure of Kokaine Karma from WABX in the summer of 1969. The station offered to rehire them Frawley stayed and Rudnick left. Dave marsh briefly described the program in a 1970 issue of Creem:

"The Kokaine Karma show was one of the better utilizations of air space in radio history; besides the music, which ranged from Fats Domino/Little Richard segues to whole sides of Archie Shepp, the show also had Bob's acid tongue and Dennis' laconic wit to comment on some of the more controversial aspects of the alternative culture's contemporary affairs."

When Cy Fruchter bought WGLD in Chicago Rudnick tried again. He tried to name the program Kokaine Karmel but this was not permitted. But it was his politics that got him in trouble again. He was severely reprimanded for saying on air the Chicago Police murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton. (It is ironic that this was later proved to be true at trial.) Rudnick walked out. He briefly tried again on WEAW exploiting an equal time requirement but that didn't last either.

Rudnick moved out west and tried on 98.5 KOME in San Jose. Ron Cutler and Mel Gollub bought the station as KRPM and flipped the format to free-form rock. But as good a fit as that sounds, the station wasn't all that free and infighting broke up the gig. Rudnick walked out again and went down the street to WMET for another try. It lasted all of 6 months.

So in 1972 he tried 88.7 CJOM in Canada. He described it himself as "pirate radio." It was another free-form rocker. his program ran 6-10 PM at first but then it ran all night. Cy Fruchter set that up as well and I wish I knew more about that guy.  Nonetheless is was a series of obscenity complaints and the content-concerned CRTC that brought pressure to bear on the station. Rudnick fled to 102.9 WNRZ back in the states. He did afternoons 10:00 Am to 3:00 PM this time. But in 1973 the station flipped format to country and all the staff were let go... at least all the long-haired hippies. the country format only lasted until they flipped to quadrophic rock in 1975 but Bob wasn't there to see it. It was the end of Rudnick's radio career and soon the end of free-form rock radio. His personal downfall was long, slow and painful to watch. More here.  Rudnick died in 1995. 

WAAM is Radiosonic

I was reading about the recovery of a Pallophone recording, and the preservation and digitization of a broadcast by Edison on WGY-AM. [Link here.] It's fascinating, but more to the point he is not an inventor of the radio era. For all of the amazing creations on his resume (1093 patents total), most were at best, component parts by the time broadcasting was born. But late in his life, at the age of 81 he entered the radio business for the first time.

In the year 1929 the Edison Company purchased the Splitdorf-Bethlehem Electrical Company of Newark. His son Charles Edison was elected president. In that era his diamond discs had lost out big to the Berliner style discs and he'd taken a bath. Taking over Splitdorf-Bethlehem meant that Edison Co. now could produce radio-phonographs. Splitdorf-Bethlehem had working products in the pipeline and patent licenses from RCA and Hazeltine which he needed to make a competitive product. By March they were shipping new products. The first line of Edison neutrodyne radios was introduced around March 1929.

The Company was renamed "Edison Radio." The first three model numbers under that name were: R-1, R-2, C-2 and C-1. These played both lateral cut and diamond disc records. (I confirmed that in the Encyclopedia Of Recorded Sound by Frank W. Hoffmann.)  But two things were happening here. First Edison was expanding into making consumer radios. But despite his effort to make his players backwards compatible with his unpopular diamond discs The Edison Radio Co. would be out of the record business by the end of October.

It's all the more strange that in the 8 months between March and October they were still making programs for radio on long-playing discs. Radio station 1250 WAAM-AM of Newark, New Jersey, had previously agreed to use his  new "Rayediphonic" Reproducing Machine and Radiosonic records.  These special diamond discs spun at about 30 rpm. In some ways it predicted the later dominance of the vinyl LP, but it was also rooted in the old vertical cut technology that had been already doomed for 2 decades.

The first Rayediphonic broadcast was aired on WAAM April 4 1929. More here. More strangely some of these programs were saved by Edison and are were re-broadcast on WFMU on Thomas Edison's Attic. For example, WAAM's Happy Hour group had their 1928 Edison program re-aired in November of 2003. More here. I don't know how many more of these are in the archives at the Edison National Historic Site. There's one on Archive.org here.  After all that effort to maintain his empire, he died in West Orange on October 18th 1931. WAAM later merged with WODA-AM in 1934 and became WNEW-AM, a station that survives to this day.

INTERVIEW: Antique Phonograph Music on WFMU

This week I interviewed Michael Cumella, ak.a. MAC the host of the Antique Phonograph Music  Program at 91.1WFMU.  It runs Tuesdays at 8:00 PM. His show is one of a handful of radio shows in America that still plays music from before 1930.  Not only does he embrace the music, he plays it from the original shellac pressings, both 78 rpm platters and cylinders. His program is conducted hand-crank phonographs with mikes in the horns —and it's live. There is nothing more authentic in all of radioland. More here.

His focus on early 1920s music makes his program an anthropological statement on a lost era of music. But his commentary is so light, that he keeps the program accessible to laypeople. At the same time, his analog playback makes his program eerily similar to the programming of early experimental radio stations. The earliest broadcasts by DeForest and even Fessenden were comprised not of only of live music but of 78s played on acoustic phonographs. More here. For those of us born after 1910, this is as close as we'll ever get to the real thing.

JF: Could you describe the Antique Phonograph Music Program for a new listener.

MAC:  I play must from the acoustic era, which is roughly pre-1925, when music was recorded and played back without electricity. The recordings were played back on what you might think of as the quintessential antique: the horned phonograph or a Victrola. These were crank-up machines with a big steel needle, spring-driven motors and a very distinct sound. There’s no nostalgia for it, because anyone who listened to it in that period is dead. But, there were huge stars of that period, and also interesting kinds of music most of which are also dead. But many styles survive like blues, jazz and country. Many kinds of music debuted in that period. So it’s an interesting time in American recorded history that really doesn’t get much play anywhere. So I enjoy collecting the records and sharing this period of music with people.

JF: Care to tell me about your playback devices?

MAC: I use three machines, two disc and one cylinder phonograpg in the studio. I use a Victrola XIV, that's one of those upright machines, which you might think of with the tall cabinet with a lid and the little doors that act as volume controls. It has an internal horn. Then I use a Victor II which is an external horn machine from about 1905. Then also I use an Edison Standard that plays 2 and 4 minute cylinders.

JF: When did the program Antique Phonograph Music Program debut?

MAC: I started around 1995.

JF: Did you do any radio before WFMU?

MAC: I did one other thing on this cable channel radio thing, but that was playing rock music and other things. It was in Jersey, this guy had an audio feed going to a Public Service Announcement video channel on the local cable network. He had a feed from his basement going to the channel that went to everyone in that cable system. It was free-form. That’s fun.

JF: Did you have any connection to The Thomas Edison's Attic Program?

MAC: I knew Jerry [Fabris]. We had shows alternating weeks. He was playing super rare stuff from the Edison Archives. He had access to incredible material. He had access to sound tests, unreleased recordings, diamond disc cylinders, rare live radio recordings, and live broadcast recordings... an incredible amount of material. I play more common stuff that anyone might have gone into a record store in 1910 and bought and played on their home phonograph. My show is about playing what people might have been listening to in 1905 or 1920.

JF: You ever have technical difficulties with that antique hardware?

MAC: That’s part of the show. Sometimes I’ll be playing a record and it starts to slow down. I was having a problem with the brake last week on my show; it was kind of messing up and stopping the record in the middle. Parts break. When that happens I try to fix it and I talk it through.

JF: What gets a piece of shellac spun on your program?

MAC: I’m not really playing stuff I like all the time. Partly it’s a historical show. I’m playing music from the period. Stuff people might have bought during that period. If I’m playing say a string quartet, it’s not anything I’m really into but it’s period music. I’ve come to love zither records and there were quite a few zither records. I play ethnic music. There were a lot of ethnic groups of course immigrating to the United States at that time. I do some early electrics sometimes, but I don’t get to 1930. I get to the late 1920s. There were some cheap labels that were making acoustics in the late 20s. I’ll do some Victors from the late 20s that were electric. I definitely don’t get to the 30s. I rarely get to 1928. I want people to hear what was out there then. Some ballads are the same crappy ballads you’d hear on the radio today. The same format existed in 1905.

JF: Most of what you play is in the Public Domain then.

MAC: Mostly it is. That only goes back 75 years.

JF: what’s the oldest thing you’ve played?

MAC: An 1896 cylinder. But it wasn’t mine. It might have been a Columbia recording.

JF: Is there anything you won't play?

MAC: I used to think that about the coon songs and the nigger songs: Stuff like "If the Man in the Moon were a Coon," "Nigger Loves his Possum." People who listen to the show understand I’m playing music from the period. Here are some more records from the period that people could go into a store and buy. I don’t try to give it a big disclaimer or explain it way or talk about the historical significance of it. That’s what they were and it’s what people listened to. Actually I find the context is not negative. They’re happy. But it’s a caricature we don’t like to see, it’s a terrible stereotype but there’s no hate in it. There are Irish, German rube, and Southern [stereotype recordings] too.

JF: Is there anything you won’t play for fidelity reasons?

What I do with those is I save them. Every 2 or 3 years I’ll do a fake show as a collector who has come on and someone else will host it. I’ll be the embodiment of every cranky, odd, eccentric collector I’ve ever met or heard of. I’ll save the noisiest and most annoying records and come on and be very serious about it. I play with that whole idea. One of the last ones I did I got in a fight and broke the records and stormed out. If I find something that’s really torn up it goes in that pile.

JF: have you heard things from that era that really blew your mind?

MAC: Sure, There’s some early country music that’s been great. There is some pre-Jazz orchestra and band records that you can hear the steps between Ragtime and Jazz. I love early blues lady singers, Bessie Smith is of the period. There are some other early Blues women who are really fantastic. Eubie Blake had a fantastic Band.  W.C. Handy was also fantastic. I also personally like early yodeling records. I have some German acoustic yodeling records. It’s not like what you think of yodeling. This is coming out of Austria in 1915.

JF: How do you put together a show playlist then?

MAC: I don’t put a tremendous amount of thought into it. Sometimes I’ll put things aside, or if I bough some new records I’ll play that. I usually do it in sets: some blues, some country, some instrumentals…I’ll do 3 or four of each. It’s only an hour show so that’s about 15 or 16 records. What’s happened in the last few years is that I’ve been asked to do appearances so I’ll go out and DJ with two horned phonographs. I enjoy doing it. I like getting people’s feedback.

Driving to the 585

*This post is brought to you in part due to the mighty Fybush. Without his driving directions I'd probably be lost and looking for a hotel in Irondequoit.

Back in upstate New York again. This time I drove essentially straight west from the Boston area.  As you may have heard the weather was terrible. The so-called blizzard of 2010 only dropped 6 inches where I was, but the high winds maintained white-out conditions for 15 hours or more. I stopped a lot, and listened to the radio the whole way thorough. It's that semester break between Xmas and New Years day.  It's when everybody breaks schedule, and everybody else is on vacation. you never know what you'll hear. 

On the drive up, I caught little of interest.  I heard Kayak Jack on WNTI who is one off the worst DJs I've ever heard on any station in all my travels. But on the upside I also caught the Antique Phonograph Music Xmas Special on WFMU.  That was truly amazing.I've emailed the host and hope to interview him in the near future. There isn't a lot of shellac let out there in radioland.

The first station I caught was 91.3 WUNH.  They were running a funk program at the time.Their online schedule is inscrutable.. so I have no idea of the program name or the host. Inexplicably I was still getting them well down I-495... well outside their normal range. Of course there was the ubiquitous WUMB. I heard them both on the mother-ship 91.9, but also on 91.7 WNEF. I know it's also on 1170 WFPB-AM but I'm not going near the cape after a blizzard. I listened to WUML, the under-rated UMass/Lowell station, but the kids were all gone so they were airing some medical program about seasonal affective disorder. I also caught bits of what gets called the Jazz Juggernaut on 88.1 WMBR, they have a set of jazz shows that run Mondays from 2:00 starting with Research & Development, then the Jazz Volcano at 4:00, news break at 6:00 followed by Sound Principles until 8:00PM.  It's six solid hours of far out jazz. You can't beat it.

On the way out of Mass I kept tuning into different WFCR repeaters trying to listen to a program on Solitary Confinement and one on the citizens of he Louisiana coast after the oil spill.  It was some really great radio: good editing, good music, good ambiance.. but I never caught the program name. They have 5 repeaters
plus WNNZ-AM on 640. In Springfield I could also hear 91.7 WHUS and some random metal show. I'd also like to say now for the record that WAMU has too many affiliates. Their top of the hour ID takes almost 9 minutes. I caught WSKB 88.9 briefly who had a great country oldies program. I kept getting it intermittently on the hillsides approaching the border.

Heading over the border into New York state I caught 88.3 WVCR who was running a really good oldies mix. Up in Syracuse WAER was rocking some Cannonball Adderly while 90.7 WRVD was doing something a tad more twangy. WRVD of course is a simulcast of 89.9 WRVO, Fingerlakes Public Radio.  I'll also admit I was sucked into a few minutes of 96.9 WOUR as they were spinning the long versions of songs... some of which were incidentally mentioned on the best of "Fresh Air." Terry re-ran interviews with Brian May of Queen and  Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Thankfully the classic rock was readily accessible on the dial.

As I headed west I caught the Moth Radio Hour on WEOS which was also on WRVO though it was now far behind me. The Moth is only about a year old now, but what a strange hipster spoken-word sort of gig it is. There are a number of lesser known PRX programs like this that are really worthwhile.As I got to Rochester I tuned into WITR who was spinning Free Blood, a band I once interviewed and still truly dig.
Just today I spent a little time at 1370 WXXI-AM which is also the shared facilities for 88.5 WRUR, Classical 91.5 WXXI, 90.1 WITH in Ithaca, 90.3 WXXY.. and the TV side of course.  Their studios are some of the nicest I've ever been in. I had the opportunity to meet up with none other than the mighty Fybush himself and talk a little shop. If you don't read his North East RadioWatch —you should.

AIRCHECK WEEK: The Black Pope

What is there to say about the Legendary Black pope. He was an obscure but amazing radioman, a DJ of indescribable temperament and ego. I first heard a clip of him on WPRB courtesy of Mr. Jon Solomon. But his audio originates on the infamous WFMU Radio Archival Oddities Vol. 2 CD.

Online references are many, but information is thin. He was a cult-ish popular DJ in Beaumont, TX and New Orleans, LA during the 1970s. I wish I knew more but truly his is a mystery. Moistworks name checked him (archived copy here).

Thurl Ravenscroft

I was browsing the perpetually entertaining WFMU Beware of the Blog. And read a spectacular post aboutThurl Ravenscroft, the famous bass singer. He was the voice of Tony the Tiger and sang the Xmas tune "You're a mean one Mr. Grinch." He had a notable singing career, and has a nice long entry at imdb. As I always do, I begin to thing... I bet he started in radio.

Thurl's career began on radio in the mid-1930s. He was in artschool and starting to get some die work in theatre, and doing vocals. Then he scored a regular gig as Grandpa Hortle on The Goose Creek Parson, radio show. [I cant find anything about this show.. anyone?] CBS Radio network picked up the show for syndication and carrie dit three nights a week. The show lasted a few more years, but thurl had already bolted. He left to sing at The Kraft Music Hall backing up Bing Crosby, as part of the Paul Taylor Choristers. Download here at Wilderworld Blog.

It there that Thurl first met Spike Jones then just a wacky member of the NBC Studio Orchestra. Spike would later collaborate with Thurl and later tapped him to perform on a now cultish Halloween themed horror/comedy LP called Spike Jones in Stereo. (A.K.A. Spooktacular in Screaming Sound.) More here.

Later in his career he cut colo albums, and eventually scored hsi most famous roles as the lead vocal on the Dr. Suess Xmas cartoon in 1966 his esteemed perennial gig as Tony the Tiger. NPR did a great biography show of him afterwards. You can hear it here . Everyone starts in radio.

How Awful Is the Radio in Your City?

Dave Mandl put together a little quiz (well actually it's quite long) that scores your city in terms of radio quality. To be honest it was too long for me to take the whole test but it was so telling about the FMU'er that probably made the test and just as telling about the state of radio today.

http://wfmu.org/~davem/docs/radio.html

My favorite questions:

DJ mispronounces person or place name
- subtract 25

Excessive time spent reading personnel or session information for a track
-subtract 4 for each minute over 1 minute

Use of the expression "politically correct" by right-wing talk-show creep
-subtract 30

Its a statement about the homogenization that's taken place in radio; ALL RADIO.
give it a browse.