WQAX MP3s on MFT??

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Permalink Reply by Ed on February 1, 2010 at 11:48pm

Going far off topic--I saw a The Hound show with the title, "Link Wray vs Bo Diddley"--so I guess his niche is what Fools Paradise with Rex is filling at WFMU right now?

mike whybark said:The Hound, of whom I've rhapsodized in the past, is the subject of a third-party fan-hosted website featuring digitizations of his 1985-1995 WFMU shows.

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Permalink Reply by mike whybark on February 2, 2010 at 1:54am

Ed said:

Going far off topic--I saw a The Hound show with the title, "Link Wray vs Bo Diddley"--so I guess his niche is what Fools Paradise with Rex is filling at WFMU right now?

Yeah, that sounds about right. listen to some o the old shows. The Hound was part of the founding generation of NYC transplants in the mid-70s, along with Miriam Linna and others. He currently owns the Circle Bar in NOLA where Matt Uhlmann has been known to spin a few slabs. My understanding is that the Hound veered off seventies punk and into obscure regional-label madness in the mid-eighties, following or accompanying the lead of such luminaries as Lux and Ivy.

Yukki/Kurt's Beantown (?) pal Kogar is of this ilk as well. The Hound's amazing blog is a deep well of interesting old music and home to what appears to be the definitive Lester Bangs reminiscence online. There are other recollections of desperate musicians and burning-headed people strewn through the blog as well.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Sharrow on March 20, 2010 at 10:47pm

I have a lot of airchecks too, including a box full of reels from the week when the cable company was threatening to shut us down for promoting illegal cable hookups, and John Smith (GM at the time) said it might be the last chance to record the station. I recorded a bunch of other people's shows, so I have that in addition to my own. Not that mine are necessarily that interesting. And not that I'm in a position to volunteer any time digitizing them at the moment either. Anyway, since it had been discussed I just thought I'd mention here that it's ridiculously easy to convert a stereo digital file into mono, which as Mike suggested would cut the file size in half.

mike whybark said:

Think we should adopt a similar approach. It's probably a pain in the ass to merge the channels, but dropping half the data makes the file half the size. Archive.org is an excellent place to start. I am NOT providing a time commitment on this by any means. But I will set aside my aircheck motley for digitization in the name of cultural preservation and the most intense sort of personal humiliation and embarassment.

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Permalink Reply by Ed on March 20, 2010 at 10:51pm

Sounds like you have quite the stash of WQAX treaures!

Neil Sharrow said:

I have a lot of airchecks too, including a box full of reels from the week when the cable company was threatening to shut us down for promoting illegal cable hookups[...] I recorded a bunch of other people's shows, so I have that in addition to my own.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Sharrow on March 20, 2010 at 10:55pm

Well, you know what they say - "one man's treasure is another man's ..." But yeah, I had a deep personal investment in the station from '73-'83 and kept a lot of print items too. Some day, someone will find the time to scan them.

Ed said:

Sounds like you have quite the stash of WQAX treaures!

Neil Sharrow said:

I have a lot of airchecks too, including a box full of reels from the week when the cable company was threatening to shut us down for promoting illegal cable hookups[...] I recorded a bunch of other people's shows, so I have that in addition to my own.

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Permalink Reply by mike whybark on March 21, 2010 at 12:58am

Neil, when was that "cable company was threatening to shut us down for promoting illegal cable hookups" firedrill? It rings a bell!

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Permalink Reply by Neil Sharrow on March 21, 2010 at 10:54am

I had to go look on the tapes to check that. Luckily I'm at least organized enough to be able to find them easily, having all my tapes in the same corner of the basement. That was March 1979.

I also found a few tapes from the last day that the studio was in the IMU, July 1983. There's other stuff too, some random Gizmos thing, various interviews, live remotes of the IU Jazz Ensemble etc. Like I said, someday ...

Does anybody else remember when we moved the whole station to Mother Bear's during the blizzard of '78 (or was it '77), so we could continue to operate while IU was shut down?

mike whybark said:

Neil, when was that "cable company was threatening to shut us down for promoting illegal cable hookups" firedrill? It rings a bell!

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Permalink Reply by mike whybark on March 21, 2010 at 2:43pm

a random Gizmos thing, huh? I would very very much like to hear it! Hey, weren't you involved in the 'gagage band' video shoot right before they split town? I capped it and made a DVD if you want one.

March of 79 would indeed have been during my first tenure, probably right about when I first started.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Sharrow on March 21, 2010 at 3:48pm

I took a closer look at the box for the Gizmos tape. Apparently from a Public Library simulcast, with MX-80 and Loner. The date is 4/9/77. I must have most of it somewhere on cassette - the reel is marked as "overflow stuff" - studio break music and bridges between the sides of the cassettes (so I wouldn't miss anything when I flipped it over).

Yes, I was on the crew for the Gizmos "garage" studio shoot, after hours at the old WTTV Channel 4-Bloomington studio. Would be fun to see it again. Does BCAT (or CATS, or whatever it's called these days) ever dip into their archives and replay any of that ancient stuff? They have such a huge collection, they could do it as a series.

mike whybark said:

a random Gizmos thing, huh? I would very very much like to hear it! Hey, weren't you involved in the 'gagage band' video shoot right before they split town? I capped it and made a DVD if you want one.
March of 79 would indeed have been during my first tenure, probably right about when I first started.

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Permalink Reply by Jbarge on March 21, 2010 at 7:39pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJi_VU5uuE
Here's a piece of it on Youtube.

Neil Sharrow said:

I took a closer look at the box for the Gizmos tape. Apparently from a Public Library simulcast, with MX-80 and Loner. The date is 4/9/77. I must have most of it somewhere on cassette - the reel is marked as "overflow stuff" - studio break music and bridges between the sides of the cassettes (so I wouldn't miss anything when I flipped it over).

Yes, I was on the crew for the Gizmos "garage" studio shoot, after hours at the old WTTV Channel 4-Bloomington studio. Would be fun to see it again. Does BCAT (or CATS, or whatever it's called these days) ever dip into their archives and replay any of that ancient stuff? They have such a huge collection, they could do it as a series.

mike whybark said:

a random Gizmos thing, huh? I would very very much like to hear it! Hey, weren't you involved in the 'gagage band' video shoot right before they split town? I capped it and made a DVD if you want one.
March of 79 would indeed have been during my first tenure, probably right about when I first started.

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Permalink Reply by mike whybark on March 21, 2010 at 8:54pm

I have a vague recollection of seeing rebroadcasts of that MX-80 show; I don't recall any of the other bands. That Gizmos stuff sounds very interesting to me.

Send me your mailing address and I'll burn a copy for you (use the send message icon, it gets forwarded to my email - if you include your email we can go direct).

Bill Weaver still works at CATS part time, last I heard, and Mike White is still in charge. There were, twenty years ago, rebroadcasts of a bunch of interesting stuff from the archives on going but on an ad-hoc, as-requested basis. I -think- that got reshuffled into a more-standard for the rest of the country 'ongoing shows' basis, for example, Bart's "J&B on the Rox" and Weaver's and Smedberg's freeform "Eyes."

I seem to recall that there is a request-to-digital-transfer policy in place, where you can book time to go in, find the piece, rip it, and burn it. My understanding is also that much of the pre-digital archives are relatively neglected because so much was produced on VHS and so does not meet generalized broadcast quality standards and because it's harder to work with the older stuff.

Mike had done some conversion and uploads to YT of his material (Haunted Indiana, I think, and some other shows) but last I heard there was no ongoing digital conversion project, it was just happening on an as-demanded basis.

Neil Sharrow said:

I took a closer look at the box for the Gizmos tape. Apparently from a Public Library simulcast, with MX-80 and Loner. The date is 4/9/77. I must have most of it somewhere on cassette - the reel is marked as "overflow stuff" - studio break music and bridges between the sides of the cassettes (so I wouldn't miss anything when I flipped it over).

Yes, I was on the crew for the Gizmos "garage" studio shoot, after hours at the old WTTV Channel 4-Bloomington studio. Would be fun to see it again. Does BCAT (or CATS, or whatever it's called these days) ever dip into their archives and replay any of that ancient stuff? They have such a huge collection, they could do it as a series.

mike whybark said:

a random Gizmos thing, huh? I would very very much like to hear it! Hey, weren't you involved in the 'gagage band' video shoot right before they split town? I capped it and made a DVD if you want one.
March of 79 would indeed have been during my first tenure, probably right about when I first started.

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Permalink Reply by mike whybark on March 21, 2010 at 8:57pm

Also, I think Bob Gulcher released the MX-80 thing as a CD within the past few years.

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