With no formal, or even informal, announcement, Drew Carey’s Friday Night Freak-Out is no more. I hoped he was just taking a summer break, but Carey’s show is no longer listed on the SiriusXM schedule and his name doesn’t appear as a host.
Update:
Category: Music
Week #5
MIT Technology Review profiles Tom Scholz.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/27/1095835/not-just-another-band-from-boston/
This is the breakthrough album that made Scholz’s non-existent band, Boston, an overnight sensation.
I caught some of this BBC podcast today, and I’m sufficiently interested to start listening from the start.
So, how am I doing, on the home stretch of cancer treatments? It’s like he said in a galaxy far, far away.
Checking the Calendar
I’ve completed Day #15 of my treatments, out of 28. The final day will be September 5, the 18th anniversary of this weblog. With the toughest part yet to come in the second half, I’m going to watch a favorite video. The best of Scopitone, presented in a gorgeous, newly remastered HD transfer.
Hogg Warts
The PBS NewsHour profiles Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
Not Fakin’ Mono
Mono vs. Stereo is an endlessly interesting aspect of Sixties Pop music.
The rise of FM radio in the late 60’s was, I would conjecture, a reason why “folded mono” became standard for singles after albums were produced in stereo exclusively.
Mono FM receivers collapse stereo broadcasts into mono. So, if that was what people were already hearing, why bother laboring over dedicated mono mixes for singles played on AM stations?
Barnes Newberry opened this week’s “My Back Pages” on WMVY with selections from Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends album.
“Fakin’ It” from Bookends is an all-time favorite of mine. There’s so much creativity in the production. I love the “Strawberry Fields Forever” fade-out. All it needs is “I buried Paul (Simon).”
The true mono mix for the 45 provides a striking contrast to the album’s stereo mix. Note the running time.
Tom Fooler Me
Towards the end of Tom Hanks’s “Here Comes Summer” show on Boss Radio 66, he played “Time Won’t Let Me” by the Outsiders, a #5 hit from 1966. The record sounded so different from my memory of it, I wondered if it had been remixed.
So let’s compare a mono reissue 45 of the single from the early 80’s, with the mono recording Tom played. See what you have time to do when you’re retired and recuperating from surgery?
This is my single.
This is what Tom Hanks played.
The mixes are very similar, and yet they sound very different. Although Tom apparently played a mono copy of the single, there’s no way a modern remix would be done in mono. At first I thought the effect must have been the result of a clean remastering, but then I remembered something and discounted that idea.
Some of the records heard on “Songs From the Back of the Station Wagon” are in stereo, but played in mono. All of them were given the mono treatment for Tom’s “AM Gold” show a month ago. Here is a Facebook exchange I had with Boss Radio 66’s Debbie Daughtry.
So the most likely explanation is, the two recordings of “Time Won’t Let Me” are indeed different mixes. My copy is an original mono mix, and Tom played the stereo mix of the song in mono.