I first heard Claire Bolderson in the mid-90’s, when WBUR in Boston (which gets $60/year from me) added the BBC World Service to its broadcast schedule. I also heard the World Service on shortwave radio, then later the BBC became available over the Internet. Through the years I’ve been listening to Bolderson’s distinctive voice and her intelligent reporting and observations. Yesterday, I caught Claire on the World Service saying goodbye. WBUR’s Robin Young talked with Claire about her departure from the Beeb.
[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2012/03/hereandnow_0320_claire-bolderson-bbc.mp3|titles=Claire Bolderson on ‘Here & Now’]Category: Radio
Don’t Click That Mouse, Hand Me the Keyboard
A Mr. D.F. Rogers of Massachusetts writes:
Check out the pricing on this very essential and cool mp3 item. I think there is still a logic problem with digital/mp3 pricing… 😉
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Crush-That-Dwarf-Pliers/dp/B00138KN6O/
You can buy each side of “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers” for only 99 cents each — since each side technically has only one “track” — but if you want the whole album (both tracks!), well then it is $9.99!
The same goes for “All Hail Marx and Lennon” (How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All) — it’s cheaper to buy the cuts than the whole album, though only by a buck or so. BUT you can get “Nick Danger” — all 28:00 mins of it — for just 99 cents! I think I’ll do it!!! Just $2.97 for three sides of mp3 side-splitting fun, and you didn’t even know that an mp3 had sides!
I think Firesign Theater would appreciate the absurdity of this, although they are getting very little monetary gain from it.
Denro has since reported that he has indeed taken advantage of this big boggin — two tracks for two dollars, instead of the same two tracks as one album for ten dollars, and the Nick Danger track, too. I already have both albums on CD, but come to think of it I haven’t seen Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers in a long time. I’ll invest two dollars worth of time looking for it before buying the MP3, which should make the CD magically appear.
Emitt’s Merry-Go-Round
On my Logitech Media Server network I’m listening to Barnes Newberry’s online radio show, My Back Pages. Barnes played a couple of songs by Emitt Rhodes, who’s one of those musicians that seemed to have all of the ingredients needed to be a big name, and yet superstardom eluded him. Rhodes did some excellent stuff, and I remember alternative FM station WBCN in Boston playing his solo album, with the song Fresh As a Daisy.
Emitt was only seventeen when his band The Merry-Go-Round had a minor hit with She’s a Very Lovely Woman, and it holds up very well today.
‘BZ Boston notes
Back in September, WBZ 1030 AM in Boston celebrated its 90th anniversary. On WBGH TV, Boston’s PBS station, veteran ‘BZ announcer Gary LaPierre, now retired, talked about his start at the station, only a few months before the Beatles came to Boston. Note: Paul and Ringo are still working!
[jwplayer config=”wide” mediaid=”17585″]
Another great veteran of WBZ radio, Dave Maynard, died recently. After retiring, Maynard’s familiar voice continued to be heard on the station, doing commercials and promos.
Samjay pointed out that the thing everybody uses to set their car’s dashboard clock, WBZ’s on-the-hour tone, is gone. I had noticed a while ago that it was about ten seconds late, and under the assumption it had mistakenly been put before the delay circuit, I sent a note to the station asking about it. Not much later, the tone once again was synched with the radio-controlled wall clocks in my house, but now the tone is gone. Whuzzup with that?
Follow-up: I wrote to the WBZ engineer, and didn’t receive a reply, but the time tone is back. It’s not hitting exactly on top of my radio-controlled clocks, but I’m not going to quibble over 8-10 seconds.
Dragnet on the Net
A TV show I enjoyed a lot as a kid in the 60’s was Dragnet. When I was older I learned that Dragnet had not only been on TV in the 50’s, it had first been a radio show. The revived Dragnet returned with its old formula, and supporting cast members, intact. In the intervening years Sgt. Joe Friday had apparently been overlooked for promotion, despite his unbroken string of cracked cases and successful arrests.
In the Fifties, Dragnet dealt with some hard facts of life, such as drug addiction and sex crimes. When Jack Webb returned as Joe Friday ten years later, he used the show to crusade against the growing influence of the youth culture. There was an anti-Summer of Love attitude, and Hippies were depicted at best as misguided and confused kids, or as drug addicts hiding behind the trappings of Eastern religion. Parents were concerned about the rapid pace of change in Sixties, and many were struggling with rebellious teenage children. In 1968 the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams, and Webb offered a clear, unwavering view of right and wrong. It’s my opinion that the popularity of Dragnet helped to get Richard “Law and Order” Nixon elected in 1968.
Even the growing ranks of comic book collectors, empowered by the Batman TV show, weren’t spared Webb’s critical gaze, as seen in the infamous “Superfan” episode. I saw this when it first aired, and it starts off nicely enough, with a brief history of Hollywood, but towards the end it’s painful for an old fanboy to watch, because I have to admit there’s a lot of truth in what Stanley says.
Getting back to Dragnet in the Fifties, the link at the end of this sentence searches eBay for Dragnet OTR. “OTR” stands for “Old-Time Radio,” and as you can see there are plenty of sellers offering Dragnet radio shows. Anybody who buys one of these collections is wasting their money, because they’re available for free on Archive.org, from a wonderful organization of enthusiasts called the OTRR — the Old Time Radio Reseachers Group.
If you don’t feel like downloading and unzipping the files, you can listen to Dragnet on Tunein.com. I’ve been having a lot of fun doing that for the past few weeks. It’s interesting to compare the radio and TV versions of Dragnet. For example, here’s an episode from 1955 called The Big Deal.
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2012/01/The+Big+Deal.mp3|titles=Dragnet “The Big Deal” 4/19/55]Will there be Tintin fever or failure in America?
Personally, I don’t think Steven Spielberg was the right talent to bring Tintin — who is only a couple of years younger than Mickey Mouse — to the big screen. But it’s too late now, because ready or not, America, Tintin is coming to a movie theater near you for Christmas. Last week, Tom Ashbrook, who apparently has a soft spot for the intrepid boy reporter, devoted an installment of his radio show On Point to the world of Tintin.
[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2011/12/onpoint_1216_2.mp3|titles=On Point with Tom Ashbrook: Tintin!]