Wednesday, April 08, 2009

The Late Night Diner

AllTheDigressionsThatFit
BluePlateSpecialistsVille



Tonight it's a site run by a couple of analogue (AVBoy?) nerds who had the foresight to let their tape machines run in front of their radios in Southern California back in the late '70's and early '80's.

And now they've made bunch of those tapes available through their blog "From The Garage".

The focus of the blog is 'The ROQ of Los Angeles!', KROQ, which at that time ran on a weird fusion format that seems to have been a mixture of the original Free Form FM, Top 40 AM Trash, and a dash of ShockJock.

Which, I guess, means that it just might have been the forerunner of today's ubiquitous Morning Zoos.

Sans the cynicism though, which is what makes it interesting to me.

Well, that and the fact that I'm a sucker for just about all things radio, especially when somebody is clearly doing their own thing.

Right now I'm listening to some bizarre late-night, speeded-up Wolfman-type rap b/w DEVO etc., from a guy named Frazier Smith who also ran a parallel universe, alternative-to-TV-pablum-voice over show of the Tournament Of Roses Parade every New Year's Day.

Crazy.


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I got there from here, another excellent site where the obsessions are more static, and visual, that goes by the fantastic moniker "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be A Whole Lot of Dead Copycats".
Can't help but wonder if maybe KROQ was, at least in part, ArtAlexakis' inspiration for this.
Image at the top of post, is the Jocks at KROQ, circa 1978.



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