Teh debil made me rawk out

A diversion today from my series of local radio stuff into the crazy world of anti-rock preachers (though I'm certain that I picked this up at one of my radio station jobs, so it's at least peripherally connected).

Kingsport's own Marty Tinglehoff is today's ranter, featured in a series of four poorly-recorded cassettes from the mid-80's titled "Expose on Rock, Soul, and Country Music."

Marty seems to have disappeared, though he apparently (back in the day) had a song written about him by a Johnson City band. Some sources place him in Atlanta after an embezzlement scandal, but I can neither confirm nor deny those reports.

Enjoy and or/repent at your leisure:

Marty01
Marty02
Marty03
Marty04
Marty05
Marty06
Marty07
Marty08

Waves Rock 104's boat

I listened to WIMZ (aka Rock 104) since before it was WIMZ - when it was WBIR, and played some sort of alternative/outlaw country format (I had gotten bored with WRJZ and WNOX and their top-40 format). I have to admit that during most of the time that I lived in the area (about 20 years) they mostly sucked - how many times can a man hear Light My Fire and survive? (I suspect that that may actually be a long-running WIMZ project, perhaps funded by DARPA in the name of national security).



Sometime in late 1980 or early 1981 I got tipped off to a show called Waves that was hosted by Jeff Huggins and aired on either Monday or Tuesday night after midnight (If I had been blogging this 10 years ago, I would be able to remember exactly. Now, not so much). I think Jeff may actually have been the second host, but at this point I haven't found any tapes that confirm this vague memory.

I don't remember how long the show ran, but I don't think that I have any tapes past about 1982.

Waves (the snotty punk younger brother), along with UNRADIO (the hip, older uncle), were glorious beacons of hope to a Murvil youth stuck in a town of Freebird fanatics.

These recordings are presented as they appear on my tapes - pause button editing included - as tremendously important artifacts of my youth. It's a tribute to (in this case) Memorex that the tape is still playable, because I played it over and over.

WIMZWaves1981-part01

WIMZWaves1981-part02


P.S. Jeff Huggins - if you're out there, I'd love to talk to you about this show.

Getting Away With Radio Murder

This post will definitely fall into the genre of "limited appeal." These tracks are from another of what must have been a boring night for me manning the controls at WUOT while hour-long reels of UNRADIO played (not that the shows were boring, but just sitting there was, and there were only so many times that I could smuggle my girlfriend out of her house and up to Knoxville).

The board op got to do one hour of live programming each show, usually between 3 AM and 6 AM, with the "big shot" hosts (Mike Dotson, Cy Anders, Paul Parrish) taking up the prime hours from midnight. Somewhere I probably decided that almost nobody was actually listening, so I determined to see if I could provoke any response from whatever audience might be out there.

I must have planned it ahead of time, as I didn't normally carry Donnie Osmond and Partridge Family records around with me to regular UNRADIO shows, and I don't think that I had ever played the Dry Lungs industrial comp on the air before, either.

Regardless, I decided that a Partridge Family and German industrial band P16D4 remix and a Donnie Osmond-Maybe Mental remix were what the airwaves of East Tennessee needed that morning.

Partridge Family-P16D4 remix

Donnie Osmond-Maybe Mental remix

Nope, nobody called to complain.

UNRADIO Part the Third

It's Saturday, so it's a good time for another UNRADIO post. These two shows (from an unknown date in the mid 80's - but it's no earlier than 1985) feature Mike Dotson.

UNRADIO-Mike Dotson 01 (this show starts out with a rough-sounding section of crumpled tape, but clears up eventually)
UNRADIO-Mike Dotson 02

The Blast From The Past

From somewhere around 1986 up through about 1990 I hosted (along with, initially, Walt Montgomery, and then Scott Carpenter) an oldies show* on WUTK. Initially called the Midnight Mouldies (due to its airtime of midnight to 2 AM on Fridays) the show eventually expanded to four hours under the name The Blast From The Past. The four-hour version of the show first aired from 10PM-2AM on Fridays (after which I would drive to my 6 AM job at WATE - I would sleep for about three hours in the haunted Greystone), and then midway through the run we switched to 6PM-10PM on Saturdays (presumably so that I could make 10PM showtimes with the increasingly-busy Sea 7 States). The show petered out in 1989 as a one-hour taped presentation under the regime of John Carr, the final show being a presentation in its entirety of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" (thanks to Jay Nations of Raven Records, who gave me an unopened copy when I indicated that I would play it on the air). I believe Carr's last words to me were along the lines of "don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out."

While it appears that I have random tapes of dozens of other peoples radio shows, I don't have a single recording of the nonsense that was TBFTP. So, in memorium, I present these silly promos.

*We defined "oldie" as anything recorded at least ten years prior to the date of the show, so in 1985 we could play pre-1975, etc. We tried to play the obscure and neglected (Fugs, Blues Magoos, rockabilly, odd album tracks) though often we had to break down and play a request for The Doors or freaking Steely Dan.


TBFTP Promo 01
TBFTP Promo 02
TBFTP Promo 03
TBFTP Promo 04
TBFTP Promo 05

In these days of Pro Tools production these ain't no technological achievement, but for a turntable, a cart machine, and a reel-to-reel they amuse me.