Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Folk Singer Pete Seeger Dies At 94

I remember listening to a lot of Pete Seeger growing up...yet another great folk singer has gone to the Studio In The Sky:




http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2014/01/28/folk-singer-activist-pete-seeger-dies-at-4/



When America was going through growing pains, Pete Seeger was singing about the real issues...rest in peace, brother....



Bud S. (staceys4@hotmail.com)

Monday, January 20, 2014

KAAY Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford - June 26, 1970


Here is more than an hour of untelescoped Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford on Friday night, June 26 1970, from 11:00pm to 12:14am.   This is submitted by Thomas Connelley of Carbondale, IL.

This aircheck has surfaced before -- it was posted in September 2008 on the old AJ Lindsay KAAY Blog.  However, that aircheck was of lower audio quality and contained some music spliced in at the beginning and end, perhaps as a reconstruction of the original aircheck.

This new aircheck submittal is longer and superb quality, it sounds like an in-studio tape of the show.  Tom sent us a few comments about the aircheck:

“The history of how this made it onto CD can only be speculated.  This was among my younger brother’s music collection when he passed away.  He and his roommate had a CD recorder.  There are a couple of short glitches in the audio that sound like a tape deck auto-reversing or the CD recorder being paused to resume with another tape.  The show is uncut other than the short glitches where practically no music was even lost.  The last song is a 19+ minute song, so only the first couple of minutes are on this CD.  But it is a Beaker Street classic, so please include the part that is there.”  (note: it is India, by The Corporation).

“As a matter of personal history, I grew up in Little Rock.  And as with others that I have spoken with, Beaker Street changed my life.  The music on the show prompted me to become a professional musician.  I played my first professional (paying) gig in the seventh grade in 1968!  I also had dreams of being on the radio which I accomplished later in life.  I wish that I still had the armful of cassette tapes that I had back in the day of KAAY and Beaker Street.  Little did I know how important the memory of this radio station would be to me and so many others 45 years later!”

Beside the question of how this aircheck originated, there is also a mystery over Clyde Clifford’s opening remark where it sounds like he is saying goodbye to another jock at the station.

Clyde:  “Hmmmm, you say this is your last night, eh?”
Unidentified voice: “Ah, feels like it”.
Clyde:  “Feels like it.”
Unidentified voice: “Feels like it, man…”
Clyde:  “Well, that’s the way it goes.  So let’s go…”

Does anybody know who this guy was???

A big thank-you to Tom for submitting this aircheck, and for compiling a discography of the music:

            Sugarloaf – Green Eyed Lady
            Sugarloaf – Train Kept a Rollin’
            Temptations – Ball of Confusion
            East of Eden – Xhorkom/Ramadhan/In the Snow For a Blow
            Flow – Arleen
            East of Eden – Gum Arabic/Confucius
            Grand Funk – Hooked on Love           
MC5 – Rambling Rose
Bob Dylan – Like A Rolling Stone
John Hartford – To Say
Amboy Dukes – Prodigal Man
The Corporation – India


(or download here)
Greg Barman

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Teenage Wasteland II: A Moment Of Grace (Slick)‏

Have there ever been 16-year-olds who weren't alienated? I can't remember meeting any. Fortunately, when I was 16, I had a pair of wonderful escape hatches: my radio and my car. Actually, my mother's car. A silver-gray 1965 Ford Galaxie 500, but it--and the world--sure felt like mine when I was at the wheel. And if the engine was running, so was the radio. As loud as I could get it, locked in to that Mighty 1090. KAAY, Little Rock.




The second time the earth moved for me was in August of 1967. (One Fab guess as to the first time). I had just pulled up in my grandma's driveway and was about to cut the engine when this voice--this thing like a banshee from Mars--came howling out of that six-by-nine oval in the dashboard:



"When the truth is found to be lies

And all the joy within you dies,

Don't you want somebody to love?"



Dang (which ain't exactly the word). Some woman was driving a freight train right through my skull--and the band behind her was trying to blow up the boiler! Jefferson Airplane had me in the crosshairs.



"Tears are running all around and down your breast

And your friends, baby, they treat you like a guest.

Don't you want somebody to love?"



You bet your hindquarters I did! I was wasting away for somebody to love and had not the first clue of what to do about it. Though I somehow knew that girls held the keys to the Universe, they scared me to death. And so did Grace Slick that day. (She still does, but I'm used to it now.)



Somehow, this crazy hippie chick from San Francisco had wiretapped my brain. She had just barged in and started chewing on all my fears and anxieties. She was reading my mind and singing about it! The greatest part of that moment was that Grace was singing to me alone. That song wasn't for anybody else on the planet, it was mine! And how exquisitely fitting that it should be delivered by my own personal radio station. (Teenagers sure think some weird stuff.)



A few months later, in cold, gray 1968, The Doors would do the same thing:



"People are strange when you're a stranger,

Faces look ugly when you're alone.

Women seem wicked when you're unwanted,

Streets are uneven when you're down."



Well, hindsight is 20/20 and 3D. KAAY was sending me a message, a lesson, with those two songs. Scarcely three years later, Mike McCormick II (the great Barry Wood) would teach me to pick out one person in the audience and talk to them alone--exactly the way those songs had found me!



David B. Treadway

Doc Holiday VII

The Last PD

Friday, January 10, 2014

A Belated Happy New Year To You All!

Wow, how time flies...and it's flying faster the older I get!  It just seems a short while ago that my daughter had major surgury and that I started a second job to pay the bills that insurance didn't pick up; in reality, it's been a whole year.  Some of you, dear reader, may have read the post last year where Dave S. explained my absence from the blog.  What with 18-hour days, working 7 days a week, time is precious and I sleep when I can.  Heck, I only had five complete days off last year from both jobs.  Things ARE getting paid down, and things will get to an "old normal" again one day.  Until then, I am forging ahead, taking my vitamins and eating my spinach. 

I wanted to take time to wish you all a happy, prosperous and SAFE New Year, even though we're a few days into it.  I also wanted to thank my friends, Dave Schmidt and Greg Barman, who both have admirably picked up the reins and kept this blog alive- what a wonderful job they've done! 

Even though material continues to trickle in, we hope to continue to find more...and some has been offered and we're making arrangements to obtain same and bring it to you.  Sometimes, time and physical logistics hamper us, especially where jobs and job changes occur, but rest assured, we'll keep digging for all the material we can get! 

By the way, thanks also to David B. Treadway and Jonnie King for their continued support and contributions!  Many thanks, guys!  David's wonderful prose and Jonnie's holiday offerings make great entertainment, don't you agree?

Here's to YOU, dear reader- without YOU, we wouldn't be having this much fun bringing this blog to you!



Bud S. (staceys4@hotmail.com)


Monday, January 6, 2014

Baby Phil Sings With The Angels

The news came early in the morning of January 4, 2014: Phil Everly had passed at the age of 74. Complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. COPD. One too many cigarettes of the tobacco kind (a distinction that must always be made when speaking of musicians).


He was the fresh-faced younger half of the Everly Brothers, often called "Baby Phil" right to his face onstage by brother Don. Sometimes he looked as if he didn't like it, but that quickly passed when they launched into the next song. Any song. Didn't matter if it was one of theirs or if someone else had written it, they owned it. They wrote the book on two-part harmony, sung as only blood relatives can. Sometimes they sounded like one voice, other times you'd swear there was three of 'em, but you'd never mistake 'em for anyone else. Two notes and you knew it was the Everly Brothers.

They came from that mystic borderland between Country and Rock And Roll, a place inhabited by Johnny Cash, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and, later on, Creedence Clearwater Revival. They could jump either way and just flat nail it, same as their peers. With their high-piled pompadours and matching black Gibson guitars--not to mention killer good looks--they were the concentrated Essence of Teenage Heartbreak. Love Hurts? You dang bet it does! They knew it and the kids knew it. Every time they sang, ten million teenage hearts sang right back. Even in bleak and grimy Liverpool, there were four kids paying rapt attention to the Everly Brothers, learning how to sing.


The Everly Brothers are one (two?) of the few artists who were not first brought to me by KAAY. That honor goes to my cousin Wanda Lou, a woman of impeccable musical taste, who must have had every 45 the Everly Brothers put out--along with Johnny Cash and Flatt & Scruggs. Wanda's got to be ten years older than her brother Calvin and me, but she'd let us use her record player any time we asked. And we asked plenty; her record collection was a treasury of white girl soul in the late 1950s!

Right from the 1962 get-go, KAAY did Souvenier Weekends, solid gold blasts-from-the-past mixed in with the hits of the day. Boy, the Everly Brothers sure knew how to jump out of a two-inch speaker! Bye Bye Love, Wake Up Little Susie, Let It Be Me, they figured large on any given weekend--and I knew 'em by heart, thanks to Cousin Wanda. For me, the ultimate goosebump-skin-tingle-stand-every-hair-on-end moment was Cathy's Clown, wherein the Brothers taught us that the word "love" had five syllables.


In that First Era, KAAY was never afraid to go out on a limb for a new record, so I got to hear lesser-known Everly works like Gone, Gone, Gone and The Ferris Wheel. Had it not been for those four kids from Liverpool, both songs might have landed in the Top 10. Ah, but it was 1964--and we all know how that turned out!


So, while the angels up there part in the middle to make him a place in that choir, as we hand him off to the Skywave to groove unto Infinity, let us all raise a Glass of Whatever(ly) to Baby Phil and give thanks for the gift of magnetic tape.


David B. Treadway
Doc Holiday VII
The Last PD

(I, and many others, enjoy David B. Treadway's prose...I have been pestering him to write a book and I would be first in line, elbowing my way up the line!  Too often, he's commemorating someone's or something's passing, so we need to encourage him to write of things positive!  Thank you, David B.!  Bud S.)