King Daevid MacKenzie

…many moons back I promised Jim Beaver that I’d put this thing up on my podcast page if I ever found it — and, just today, I did just that. It’s an mp3 of a KPFT Houston aircheck of two of my favourite wordsmiths, Studs Terkel and Phil Ochs, on Studs’ WFMT Chicago program in the Spring of 1971, after Phil’s Greatest Hits album (it was a gag title, containing all-new recordings and just packaged like an oldies compilation) took a huge crap in the record shops. The words these men left behind have gone a long way towards the preservation of whatever sanity I had left after my divorce …

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…I just sent this item for This Way Out to use in the next couple of weeks. How’d I do on it, guys?…

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…and here it is: starting today, Out Front, the BGLT news headline capsule, goes Tuesday-through-Saturday; the weekly cinema and arts critique and commentary podcast will start next Tuesday; a weekly Roller Derby news podcast, The Southwestern Derby Report, starts this Friday; and, starting this upcoming weekend, my news and commentary podcast will become a Saturday week-in-review, kinda like what Drew Pearson and Alex Dreier used to do on radio during World War 2. Hope y’all like what you hear…

…this is probably my favourite piece of Paul Harvey’s work, a short commentary on the night of 22 November 1963, after President Kennedy’s assassination. You may want to note how Harvey’s closing comments seem to mirror Chet Huntley’s commentary on that night’s Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC-TV. And, for those of you in Texas and Oklahoma confused by the station identification of WBAP as being in Dallas on 570 kHz, WBAP and WFAA Radio (the latter of which is now KLIF, itself a station unrelated to the original KLIF on 1190) had been locked into a confusing FCC licensing arrangement that, by 1963, dictated that the two stations would shift frequencies, networks, cities of license and transmitting power – ABC in Dallas on 570 with 5000 watts, and NBC in Fort Worth on 820 with 50,000 watts – several times a day. Eventually, everyone involved grew so tired of the shifting, which led to a lot of announcers’ gaffes over the years, that in 1970 WBAP finally paid WFAA $3,500,000 to stay on the weaker 570 with ABC while they kept the stronger 820 with NBC. Of course, in te years since then, WFAA Radio was sold by the Dallas Morning News, while NBC’s radio network evaporated into oblivion and WBAP was eventually bought by ABC…

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…today, I’m letting y’all have some pieces of the work of Paul Harvey that I haven’t seen floating around the Web as frequently as I’d thought they’d be this week. First being a mischievous little edit someone did of a Harveycast’s Bose Wave Radio commercial and a story (or two) about drug issues. Yes, it was naughty, but I still find it funny…

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…the Christmas greeting records by four certain Liverpudlians seems to have brought a huge group of new subscribers from Europe to this neck of the cyberwoods; for them, and anyone else who’s been wondering where these things went, here’s the repost of the lo-fidelity monaural aircheck of my Technicolour Breakfast radio show over WSUW in Whitewater, Wisconsin, the week before Spring Break 2001. (If, by any chance, one of the new fans of this podcast happens to be Program Director of Big L - http://www.bigl.co.uk/ - I am available should you have any thoughts of importing me to my ancestral land.) If any of my new European buddies would care to drop me a line at thevoiceoflabor@hotmail.com I would most certainly appreciate it. Same goes for whoever it is in Beijing who loves the Phil Ochs tune from a few months back, too…

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…and, no, I never got around to sending this aircheck to Harry Shearer. I don’t think so, anyway. I’m still trying to find out if I have the VHS tape of the C-SPAN simulcast of Ralph Nader guesting on Chuck Harder’s radio show in the ’90s. I promised Harry that one and still can’t find the thing, and you know how I am about promises …

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…I’m gonna devote the 12 Days of Christmas to writing a film script. So have a happy holiday, whichever it may be (I have the candles on my menorah ready to light) and make it out of 2009 alive …

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…throughout their collective recording career with EMI, The Beatles recorded and released special Christmas greeting records for the members of their official fan club. As one of my holiday offerings of this year, here’s the entire set of ‘em, all the way from 1963 (pre-Invasion of America, recorded in October, while JFK was still alive) to 1969 (wherein Ringo Starr contributes a plug for his movie with Peter Sellers, The Magic Christian — it turns out the plug was more imaginative than the movie)…

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…after all, I did name her after the tune …

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