Author: DOuG pRATt

A Progressive Meal

After my freshman year of high school, until I left for college in Western Massachusetts, I mostly listened to WBCN, the legendary alternative radio station in Boston at 104.1 FM. ‘BCN was where I first heard David Bowie, Ten Years After and Captain Beefheart, along with the comedy troupes Firesign Theatre and Monty Python. Progressive music was well-represented on WBCN, and I remember enjoying this King Crimson record in particular.

Wiseman’s Radio Menace

One of my favorite comic books as a kid was Dennis the Menace. I had a favorite Dennis artist, but I didn’t know his name was Al Wiseman until I was an adult. With the exception of a couple knobs for dials, this is an accurate drawing by Wiseman of a 1924 RCA Radiola AR-812.

The AR-812 is significant, because it was the first set available commercially to include the invention that made radio broadcasting a practical medium — Edwin Armstrong’s Superheterodyne circuit.

I Remember…

… Iron Butterfly, Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath. But do you remember BLOODROCK?? “We were flying low, and hit something in the air.”

There’s a really obvious splice in there from where the album version was cut down for the single. If four-and-a-half minutes of somebody being “self-aware” they’re dying isn’t enough for you, here is the classic “D.O.A.”