Category: Radio

Cousin Brucie on WABC Saturday Night Oldies

Cousin Brucie on WABC

Tonight I happened to catch a few minutes of the legendary disk jockey Bruce Morrow on WABC’s Saturday Night Oldies with Mark Simone. Cousin Brucie talks about meeting the Beatles.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/MAR07/CousinBrucie.mp3]

Bruce Morrow with Beatles

If you haven’t checked out my tribute to New York radio in the 60’s, click here. The picture above of Bruce Morrow interviewing the Beatles in 1965 is amusing, because the boys appeared bored and disinterested. Maybe they were stoned. Or perhaps they’d had their fill of New York DJ’s. Murray “The K” Kaufman had leveraged his contact with The Beatles during their first visit to shamelessly further his own career.

All-Classical WGBH

Boston’s commercial Classical music radio station, WCRB, is struggling at its new frequency, according to a recent news account, as seen below. The moment it left its original frequency can be heard here.

Meanwhile, public station powerhouse WGBH is now offering its HD Radio all-Classical music channel on the Net. Bravo. Way to go. Encoding runs at 128 Kbps, and it sounds fine. I just added this link for it on my Windows desktop.

Reception is mixed to new WCRB signal, programming

By Clea Simon, Globe Correspondent | January 25, 2007

Is WCRB-FM fading out?

While the Dec. 1 move of the commercial classical station’s frequency, from 102.5 to 99.5, has made tuning in troublesome for some listeners, changes in the station’s programming have raised other questions. In Boston’s classical music community, the reception to both the signal and the revived station has been mixed.
Continue reading All-Classical WGBH

Guerilla Lawsuit Day

It was supposed to be Gorilla Suit Day, and instead it turned into Guerrilla Lawsuit Day!

The spin machine is working. There’s lots of tough talk, and an arrest has been made in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force “guerrilla” advertising campaign.

Artist arrested for planting marketing figures

By Maria Cramer and Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff

The man who sent city and State Police rushing to defuse what they believed were explosive devices around the Boston region was arrested tonight.

Attorney General Martha Coakley scheduled a 9 p.m. press conference to announce the arrrest of Peter Berdvosky, an Arlington artist.

What stopped the city was the way the situation was handled. Here’s audio from WBZ radio. You’ll hear some of a news report, the beginning of Paul Sullivan’s talk show, and part of the opening statement at that 9 p.m. news conference by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley. Lots of talk about getting tough, along with the usual compliments about how well all of the various agencies cooperated, and what a great job everybody is doing, blah, blah, blah…

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/WBZBostonTerror.mp3]

The Boston Globe has posted this editorial, and I’m glad it includes the following comment:

Homeland Security experts will need to review the response of local law enforcement. Public safety personnel may have overreacted; local bloggers apparently identified the guerrilla advertising campaign early on.

The fact that the promotional campaign was orchestrated by an advertising agency on behalf of The Cartoon Network isn’t incidental or irrelevant, but these mysterious objects could have been a stunt by college kids. Does this mean that ANYthing out of the ordinary, no matter what it is, can result in an emergency response of such magnitude? If so, then we’ve lost the war on terrorism.

Turn Me On Deadman

Roby YongeMy twin sister Jean and I caught up with the “Paul is Dead” phenomenon when it was picked up by WKBW in Buffalo, NY. The rumor got traction when Roby Yonge on WABC (about which there is more here) in NYC got himself fired for promoting the idea that Paul McCartney had been killed.

The audio player below has an aircheck of Yonge from October 21, 1969. Part 1 starts with his first mention of the speculation that Paul McCartney was dead, and part 2 ends with the moment he was replaced on the air by Les Marchak.

Yonge, working the overnight shift, was fired for breaking format, as it’s called in the radio biz. But ‘KBW followed ABC’s lead by running with the story, presenting every single alleged clue, in a heavily-promoted special presentation. I didn’t believe it, but I learned a valuable lesson about how easily people can be misled into believing something that is completely untrue when conjecture is presented as fact.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/pauldead.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/pauldead2.mp3]

One of the clues was the infamous “turn me on dead man” that was heard when “Revolution 9” was played backwards. Here is the first minute of the track, presented backwards, followed by the opening seconds with George Martin and Apple Corps publicist Derek Taylor apparently having a disagreement.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/Revolution9.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/GeorgeMartin.mp3]

DeSouze, Glick, Maynard, LaPierre

lapierre

You’ll recognize the names in the subject of this post only if you live around Boston. Gary LaPierre, the morning man on WBZ 1030 AM, is the fourth major ‘BZ radio announcer that I can think of at the moment to retire since my family moved to Massachusetts when I was 13.

Carl DeSouze, Dave Maynard and the uniquely quirky Larry Glick all called it quits many years ago. I believe DeSouze is now deceased, but the voices of Maynard and Glick can still be heard from time to time as guests.

LaPierre’s last day on the air was Friday. At 64 he’s still in fine form, but he had coronary bypass surgery last year. A couple of years ago he was cornered into making the embarrassing admission that during the winter he was rattling off the school snow cancellation lists from his home in Florida.

I admire anybody who can make a lifelong career in the radio business, let alone become something of an institution in a major market. Gary LaPierre is a top-notch announcer who I enjoyed listening to, and he deserves a long and comfortable retirement.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/DEC06/GaryLaPierre.mp3]

The audio player has some of LaPierre’s farewell, and a three-minute tribute. Take note of the Acton and Acton-Boxborough (the regional junior and senior high) school cancellations. What a perk it was, going to a school that’s always first on the list!

Christmas Eve 1906

fessenden

It was exactly 100 years ago, Christmas Eve 1906, that Reginald Fessenden first transmitted audio, rather than just telegraph sounds, over radio. There is controversy surrounding some of the details of the event, but nevertheless it was a monumental achievement. The transmission was made from Massachusetts, as told in this radio report.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/DEC06/fessenden.mp3]

Picking up the story from there, American Radio Works has a 1-hour radio documentary on the history of music on radio, that you can get to by clicking here. If you have trouble listening to it let me know, and I’ll post it here.