Author: DOuG pRATt

Click and Clack, “National Treasures”

As a member of WBUR in Boston, where Car Talk is produced, I received this message from the manager of the station, regarding the end of the show:

We all knew this day would come but it is still not easy to announce a milestone on the highway of life. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, better known as “Click and Clack,” will end new recordings of Car Talk in October, after 35 years of continuous production at WBUR.

On behalf of everyone at WBUR which has proudly been the home of Car Talk, I want to express my gratitude to Tom and Ray and Doug Berman and his whole team. Their extraordinary work and endless hours of wit and wisdom and entertainment have delighted audiences across the country and the world. As most of you know, Car Talk began as a little experiment on WBUR and reached national distribution when Susan Stamberg heard about it and put a regular segment on Weekend Edition. The rest is history. Special credit goes to Doug Berman, without whom Car Talk would never have reached its levels of success or been sustainable for all these years.

Tom and Ray are a national treasure. They have a special place in the history of public radio. They taught us all about the broadest possibilities of providing wonderful entertainment that is funny, smart, self-deprecating and surprisingly wise. Because of their work, we have been able to broaden our perspectives on how to serve our communities of listeners like you with creativity, intelligence and warmth. How lucky we have been to have them on our air for all these years!

We’re pleased that Car Talk will continue to be produced from its archival material. Doug assures me that there is years’ worth of material that has yet to be aired.

We hope you’ll help us honor this legacy by continuing to tune in as you always have.

On behalf of everyone here at WBUR, I hope you’ll join me in expressing our gratitude for Tom and Ray.

Sincerely,

Charlie Kravetz
General Manager

It should be noted that a previous manager of WBUR, Jane Christo, got NPR to syndicate Car Talk. When Christo was later forced out of the station, it was reported that she regretted letting the Magliozzi brothers own the show.

The Tappet Brothers close up shop

What the heck is going on with Boston radio? Steve LeVeille retired today and now the Car Talk guys, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, have announced that they’re quitting. I’ve been listening to their on-air antics for more than 20 years. Cartoonist Jimmy “Arlo & Janis” Johnson is a fan of theirs, and some years back he even wrote ‘Click and Clack’ into the strip.

The “other” June 6

Denro points out that when the Beatles first walked into the EMI recording studios at Abbey Road, it was the 18th anniversary of another noteworthy date — the Allied Invasion of Europe or, as it’s more commonly called, D-Day. He says…

If you listen to the start of the news reports, they actually say that it may be a hoax by the Germans, as there was no confirmation from Allied Forces. Talk about tight security. The largest Invasion in history – and no leaks. The only reports were from the various German news agencies. Now, there’d be pictures taken by the French on their cellphones, tweets from the front lines, troops updating their facebook pages as they advance, satellite views of the ships at sea and the beaches…

Here are a few edited radio broadcasts from OTR.com, with those qualified announcements that the invasion had begun.

[audio:http://www.otr.com/ra/news/dday_kallen.mp3,http://www.otr.com/ra/news/1st_bulletin_CBS.mp3,http://www.otr.com/ra/news/1st_bulletin_NBC.mp3|titles=WOR radio announcement of D-Day,CBS Radio network announcement of D-Day, NBC Radio network announcement of D-Day]

A complete set of radio recordings from June 6, 1944 is at Archive.org.

It was fifty years ago today…

… George Martin told the band to play.

http://youtu.be/i1mgIZrlLSE

From Bruce Spizer’s Beatle.net.

June 6, 2012 is the 50th anniversary of the Beatles first visit to Abbey Road Studios. The group, consisting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best, arrived at what was then called EMI Studios on June 6, 1962, for a commercial test (an evaluation of a signed artist). Two days earlier, the band had signed a recording contract with “The Parlophone Company Limited of Hayes in the County of Middlesex.” The group was paid Musicians Union rates for the June 6 session, indicating that the Beatles were in fact EMI recording artists by the time they arrived at Abbey Road.

Engineers attending the session in Studio Two remember the poor shape of the group’s equipment, particularly Paul’s bass amp, which was deemed unusable due to its rattling and rumbling. Engineers Norman Smith and Ken Townsend improvised and created a bass rig by soldering an input jack to a preamp and combining it with an amp and a large Tannoy speaker taken from Echo Chamber No. 1. A string was tied around John’s amplifier to prevent it from rattling. After resolving these problems, the Abbey Road staff was ready to record the group.

Four songs were recorded that day… What four songs were recorded by EMI at the Beatles commercial test held at Abbey Road Studios on June 6, 1962? Besame Mucho, P.S. I Love You, Ask Me Why and Love Me Do. The first tune, written by Consuelo Velazquez and Sunny Skylar, was a Latin standard that came to the attention of the Beatles by way of the Coasters, who issued the song in two parts on Atco 6163 in 1960. The other three songs were Lennon-McCartney originals. The tape containing the songs was sent to EMI headquarters for evaluation and is presumed lost; however, acetates of Besame Mucho and Love Me Do survived. These songs were released in 1995 on Anthology 1. All three of the Lennon-McCartney songs were later re-recorded for commercial release, with Love Me Do and P.S. I Love You issued as the Beatles first single and Ask Me Why appearing as the B-side to the group’s second single.

The Father of Modern Science Fiction

Ray Bradbury has died. He called himself a writer of Fantasy fiction, but I think of Bradbury the same way as I do Vonnegut, as a writer of “soft” Science Fiction, and he helped to redefine in my mind what the genre was, and could be. “Hard” Sci-Fi is old school, with an emphasis on getting the science right, or at least making it somewhat plausible. Bradbury’s plots include space ships and time travel, but these are merely the trappings of his stories. In contrast to the strength of Bradbury’s ideas, his prose has a delicacy that isn’t found in the work of Asimov or Heinlein.

Denro had these comments:

I recalled that everyone I knew read “Martian Chronicles” in Jr. High… not because we had too, but because we wanted to. That was my intro to Bradbury and still my favorite, I guess. Plenty of comic stories came out of there! Along with a comic book store name.

Being a collection of related short stories, The Martian Chronicles is a particularly accessible book for young readers. Not since reading Rusty’s Space Ship by Evelyn Sibley Lampman in the third grade had I been affected as much by a book as I was by The Martian Chronicles. Later, I was pleased to learn that in the 1950’s some of Bradbury’s stories had been adapted in comic books and in radio shows like X Minus 1.

[audio:http://archive.org/download/XMinus1_A/xminusone_550508_MarsIsHeaven.mp3|titles=X Minus One: Mars is Heaven by Ray Bradbury]

The Million Year Picnic is a comic book store in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. It was named by its founder Jerry Weist after the last story in The Martian Chronicles, and having opened in 1974 it was one of the first shops dedicated to selling comics.