In 1957 the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants baseball teams simultaneously left New York, the Dodgers to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco. I was 10 years old. I loved the Dodgers more than anything in the world. I carried my large pre-transistor radio with me wherever I went so I […]
Archive | History
Exploring San Francisco’s vault of old car radio stereos
Just got a new car audio/radio device installed over at New Sound car stereos on Valencia Street in San Francisco. New Sound is an awesome place: great selection; fast service; I love my new system. But on top of that, it has a wonderful secret: a magnificent basement crypt of ancient car stereo/radios. To get […]
Pacifica Radio Archives gets $128k grant for US women history-makers project
The National Archives has awarded the Pacifica Radio Archives $128,241 to complete its “American Women Making History and Culture” project. Specifically: “To support a two year project to preserve and make accessible a collection of approximately 1,644 historical radio programs (2,013 reel-to-reel audio recordings) documenting American Women Making History and Culture from 1963-1982.” This is […]
“Elite Woodstock”: a history of Goddard’s 1970 Alternative Media Conference
Community radio pioneer Larry Yurdin has posted a YouTube account of the Alternative Media Conference held at Goddard College in 1970. “Many of the key players in the early days of non-commercial radio were there,” Yurdin notes, “as well as most of the pioneers of commercial FM rock radio.” The historic gathering of perhaps as […]
Yiddish or highbrow? WEVD’s uneasy bilingual history
I am reading Ari Y. Kelman’s excellent book, Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States, and agreeing with the admonition found in the tome’s introduction: radio historians don’t focus enough on non-English speaking broadcasters. “The presence of non-English language programming on U.S. radio has been almost completely overlooked,” Kelman writes. […]
Dr. Demento documentary close to Kickstarter goal
There’s a lot of love here at Radio Survivor for the most famous and prolific booster of humorous, novelty and parody music on the radio, Dr. Demento. Filmmakers Scott McKenzie and Devin Lucas want to document the life of the good Doctor in a movie titled “Under the Smogberry Trees: The True Story of Dr. […]
How television saved Janis Ian and The Beatles from radio
The other evening I was listening to KZSC, college radio for UC Santa Cruz. The deejays were pondering Michelle Shocked’s bizarre homophobic outburst at Yoshis in San Francisco (and for which she has apologized). As if to cleanse their palettes of this incident, they played a relatively early Janis Ian tune: “At Seventeen.” Suddenly I […]
The forgotten BBC radio history of Teddy Bear’s Picnic
The other day I looked up the history of the song “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” and found an interesting radio related connection. Apparently the formative 1932 recording made by BBC band leader Henry Hall offered such fine tonal quality that the Beeb used it for three decades to keep audio equipment up to speed. One BBC […]
Radio Scholarship Highlighted at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference
I am a radio scholarship nerd and get particularly excited when I come across other college radio scholars/theorists/historians. Today I learned that the upcoming Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Chicago (March 6-10) will feature more than a dozen papers and panels about radio. The organization also recently launched a Radio Studies Scholarly […]
Radio sings with memories of Van Cliburn
One of the great concert pianists of the twentieth century has departed. Van Cliburn died this morning at the age of 78. He is best remembered as the winner of the 1958 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow—a victory that contributed to the “thaw” of the Cold War in late 1950s and early 1960s. Van Cliburn […]