Jay Philpott's ODDIO

This is a great example of how FM signals can skip around due to atmospheric conditions - in this case, thunderstorms near the transmitter.

One night during the summer of 1980, I was at KQRS (92.5 FM) visiting my friend Hal Hoover and there were savage thunderstorms centered over downtown Minneapolis. We could see the dark clouds positioned over the IDS building (the station's new transmitter site) and the downtown skyline from the KQ studios in Golden Valley, west of the city. During that storm, he got a call from a listener who said he was listening in Louisiana and played back a break that Hal had just done to prove it. The next break, Hal went into a great explanation of the nature of FM signals and how they can skip, and mentioned the Louisiana caller, as well as another caller from Virginia. A couple of weeks later, Hal got a tape of that break in the mail, postmarked from Sulphur, Louisiana!  

  

In the wild-west days of rock radio wars and station v. station battles complete with on-air warfare, Stereo 101 did a promo (a PPM unfriendly 1:40, no less!) making fun of KQRS's "Rock & Roll Air Force" buttons and took a shot at them about by describing it as "membership in a make believe club" and by offering to collect and recycle them.

In 1986, KISW in Seattle had Joe Walsh do their morning show for a day, and I thought it was some of the greatest radio I'd ever heard.  Joe clearly loved doing radio and had his own bits and little features that he tossed into the show, and along with his partner "Rick The Bassplayer", did some damn entertaining stuff.  About a year later, when I was working at WLZR in Milwaukee, when I found out that morning guys Bob & Brian were going on vacation, I suggested to PD Greg Ausham that we try to get Joe to do it.

Joe did a week of shows for the station, playing whatever music he wanted and telling stories about his life, career and friends in the Eagles and other bands.  He took calls from listeners, gave on-air guitar lessons and performed live.

Each night that week, different people from the station would take him out to various Milwaukee bars to hang out and meet people and at one called The Jabberwocky (70th & Greenfield in West Allis, now gone) he jumped up on stage and jammed with the band.

One of the days for lunch (and a good part of the afternoon), the staff took Joe and Rick to a place called "The Holler House" which was a cool neighborhood bar on the south side and had in its basement the world's two longest continuously operated manual bowling lanes, with manual scoring and a pinboy to reset each frame - they celebrated their 100th anniversary in 2008!  Upstairs, Joe found a piano that was turned backwards against the wall and hadn't been played for a long time.  He did a few tunes in it for us, including his own treatment of "Desperado".  Unforgettable.

This is a break from the Monday Feb 1, 1988 show where Joe plays "The Confessor", already a staple of Milwaukee rock radio, live in the studio.

RUTH HUTCHINSON started a jock on KSHE/Crestwood-St. Louis during its progressive rock days in 1975.  She was 81 at the time!  She was the mother of Nancy Pool-Leffler (one of the station's sales execs) and stopped by to pick up a pair of concert tickets for her grandson.  It was then that KSHE's legendary GM Shelley Grafman asked her to record a few ID's for the station.  She was such a hit with the listeners that she did a weekly show for the station approximately 8-9 more years!  This is a scoped recording of one of her shows from August 21, 1977, when it was known as "The Ruth Hutchinson Half Hour" and preceded the start of  the station's Sunday evening programming known as "The Seventh Day" (which is STILL running!).  This aircheck begins with a break from Randy Osheroff.

Here is the sound of the 13 year cicadas in the St. Louis area at their peak around June 8th.  The first part of the recording is inside the house, and the second part is what you hear as you walk out the door.  The rising and falling of their sound (their mating calls, actually) is natural and wasn't a manipulation of the recording device, its position or the levels.  Let's call it "cicada cadence".  Fortunately, these things seemed to be pretty much 9-to-5 bugs and were only active during the daylight hours.

When I was working for WRQC in Minneapolis, the General Manager was Marc Kalman.  I had expressed to Marc my deep admiration for WCCO's Steve Cannon and how much I would like to meet him someday, and Marc mentioned that they were good friends.  One day much later, and out of the blue - I got this voice mail at work.  Of course I dragged every person I could find into my office to let them hear who had left me a message. (The phone number has been partially obscured for the family's privacy).