ANOTHER ARCHIVAL HILLBILLY AT HARVARD
I hate starting a paragraph with “As I . . .” but, as I mentioned in the introductory announcement to tomorrow’s HAH Archive,
After just archiving half of a show from 1990 with two live performances, I began digitizing three other shows from the same tape. There were no live performances on these, but they struck me as plenty entertaining in their own right. So this week we’ll stick to the summer of 1990, July 14th to be exact. And we’ll do something else: we’ll play the whole show from that day. But since we’ve only got two hours, it’ll be in two separate halves.
Today, in the first half of the show from July 14th, 1990, we’ll meet record collector Bob Ford, from Brockton, who comes by in the second hour with records he had picked up on a trip to Nashville. And we’ll have a contest or two for tickets to a show called ‘Bluegrass Heaven’. Just remember, like all of the Country Calendar events we plug on these Archival shows, that they took place decades ago. Don’t circle your calendar, and don’t call any phone numbers, either!
That pretty much sums it up, but I also added, in the second announcement,
Note that the Compact Disk was new to WHRB’s studios in Memorial Hall back then, and there were not enough controls on the board for the CD players, so they used the same pots as the turntables, with switches from one to the other. This introduced an entertaining amount of confusion for us poor DJs. But it was all good fun, and I see no reason to edit out the false starts.
I think while we were still in the Memorial Hall studios, the board with the rotary ‘pots’ was replaced by one with faders, enough to accommodate all the inputs, and that new board went with us to Studio BC in Pennypacker Hall in 1994. Could be wrong about that, but it’s just inside baseball, of interest only to fellow WHRBies.
Anyway, you’ll hear Sinc and me complaining about the user-unfriendly additions in 1990, so I thought I should explain it. The CD was also new then, and as I was in the business of making them, I took the opportunity to pontificate on the lack of track numbers on some CD packaging. We were doing better at Northeastern Records.
Oh, by the way, there were lots of neat songs played in this show, some old, some new. First half tomorrow; second half next week, if all goes well. Tune in. /CL
PS Haven’t heard anything of Bob Ford in many years. If you have information, let me know.
Hillbilly at Harvard 