From Tom Wright: the latest discovered airchecks (see earlier post from Tom, reprinted below), including one from the last day of the Sixties (12-31-69) with Ron Wortham. Also a 1963 broadcast revealing KCAC’s earlier incarnation, and a 12-31-69 KRIZ broadcast.
Open the playlist in a new window here, or stream each show to your usual MP3 player, or download the whole set.
All airchecks can now also be heard in the playlist in the sidebar (at left - scroll down).
Here's a reprint of Tom's original post, explaining what's on the recordings:
Thanks to collector Gary Pfeifer, I now have a brief tape (on CD) of Ron Wortham on the air at KCAC on New Years Eve 1969! It's short but sweet, most of the music is edited out (just fragments of Creedence and Led Zep), but there's about 8 minutes worth of talk and commercials. Ron mentions how cold it was that morning at his "house in the country" (Starbrite) and that his car was iced over and "Bill's car broke down." There are also commercials for Wallich's Music City and for a New Years Eve show that night with Waylon Jennings at JD's.
On the same disc is - get this - a brief recording of KCAC in 1963, when it was an R&B station! Only about 6 minutes long but it contains a mix of DJ chatter, commercials (including one for an upcoming show by James Brown), and music (one complete song by Jimmy Reed). The date is November 21, 1963, the day before a somewhat more ominous event.
The disc also contains a non-KCAC aircheck, again from December 31 1969, of Phoenix Top-40 station KRIZ. This aircheck runs 32 minutes and the DJ is Mark James. It seems to be intact and unedited - i.e., music, commercials, everything that aired during that 32 minutes. Music ranges from Zeppelin to "Gimme Shelter" to whatever else was in the Top 40 at that time.
Quality of the tapes is variable (and mostly pretty hissy) but they are all perfectly listenable. Don't ask me who recorded them, or why, or anything else - this information doesn't tend to travel much in the community of aircheck aficionados, where the recording itself is the object of interest, and it passes through many hands and much copying along the way. The important thing is that the tape has been added to the growing KCAC archives!!!
4 comments:
I CAN'T TELL you guys how grateful I am to hear this thing. It was right after the Nuclear Christmas Brownies of 1969 by "Crazy" and I promise E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G was in those brownies!
Thanks so much, eapecially Tom, for locating that aircheck.
CHALLENGE: In 1970 I think it was, I did a short stint at KWFM in Tucson using the airname "Shadow". I have seen the legendary Sha-do Stevens credited with some Tucson airwork on some historical online airchecks... and I just wonder. I DON'T think he ever worked that market.
Hank Cookenboo covered a few shifts there later, as well. I remember "The Point" by Harry Nillson had just come out and the wife of the stations' owner was obsessed with it. Also Jim Morrison's drunken oratory (featured in "The Doors") was released to some stations at about that time. If I remember right it was a 45 RPM pressed on a 12" LP.
Poetic it weren't - but that white-cover LP would be worth a fortune now.
Ronco
Ron-
I have a recording of KWFM Tucson on August 1, 1971, but the DJ is Mark Young. Total time is about 1 hour. The music has been professionally “scoped out” (cross-faded or edited to include only beginnings and endings of songs), reportedly by Mark Young himself to avoid copyright issues, so most of what’s here is DJ talk, commercials, brief public-affairs programming, and news. Sound quality is excellent. There’s some interesting Vietnam War-oriented material in the last half of the hour, plus a vintage newscast. I'm not sure of any other KWFM airchecks but I'll check with my local pusher.. er, source.. Gary Pfeifer of Scottsdale, who has a truly amazing and extensive collection of airchecks from across the country.
Tom
Yo Tom... Mark hired me at the station and I stayed a few nights at his fraternity house. Other names in the crew were Harry Teasdale (Hairy Tea), Jerry Penguin and a couple of others who would probably best be ignored. The studios were upstairs at a downtown building. A few intense memories there including a head shop down the street with a couple of boa constrictors for decoration.
Definitely 1970. I made it out of Tucson with $75.00 - $74.00 of which were spent on the old blue school bus. Details are irrelevant and the radio wasn't all that good but it would be fun to hear my alter-ego again. Ha.
Ronco
As I recall, KWFM was up a flight of stairs behind a non-descript entrance to the tallest bank building in town at the time. The studio was a closet...truly, maybe four by eight as I recall. Really tight. Alan Browning was the PM Driver I think. He went on to PD for a while.
Mark Young hired me for mornings in '72..."Stairway" and "Roundabout" were still fresh and I was living with my brother, sister in law, two big dogs, a fresh litter and a new baby nephew in a small trailer waaaaayyyyy off in the desert on Valencia road.
What fun:)
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