CHOO Radio Recollections

An on line scrapbook of images & text for former staff and listeners alike

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The Jeremiah Quigley & Burd Show 1971 (Continued )

The cassette recording: In 1971 cassettes hadn't yet come into their own. There were very few commercially recorded cassettes for sale yet as this was the time of the 8-Track player. CHOO didn't have a cassette player installed in the control room yet so the only way to make a recording of the show was with a hand-held Phillips Cassette Recorder. I set it up across the hall from the on-air booth in the news room.

They had a table top radio on a desk near the teletype machine so I pushed Record and aimed the mic at the four inch speaker. Unfortunately, someone went into the news room and turned the radio off about half way through the program. When I went in to flip the tape over (a Maxell 90 minute tape) I found, to my horror, that a lot of nothing had been recorded. About 37 minutes of the program was actually saved!

The Playlist from the program went something like this: "You're listening to Interphase on CHdoubleO Ajax."

Love Sculpture: The Stumble

Fleetwood Mac: Searching For Madge

The Byrds: This Wheel's On Fire

Then we gave out the number for Richard Nixon's Whitehouse: 202-456-1414

Alice Cooper: Fields Of Regret

Ads for Deluxe Shoe Store and John's Carpet Sales.

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: Woe-Is-Uh-Me-Bop

King Crimson: 21st Century Schizoid Man

Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Knife's Edge

Love Scupture: Mars and The Sabre Dance (Note: No CanCon played on this show. Shame on us!)

In the order of programs we did, this was an early one. Most likely our third or fourth show. I can tell because of the Amchitka nuclear bomb protests of October, 1971. That was why we gave out Richard Nixon's telephone number. Another clue: we were hitch-hiking. Usually Perry and I drove out to Ajax in his father's car or my mother's car. That day we had to hitch rides.

When we were signing off (over the Sabre Dance) I announced: "On behalf of myself, Burd, and Jeremiah Quigley, my accomplice, I bid you farwell till next time. And if you see us hitching on the highway with a knapsack and a Yonge St. sign, pick us up and give us a lift. Goodbye now."

We walked down the Harwood Road ramp to the highway and within minutes a car pulled over. "Hey, are you the guys from the radio? Hop in."

* * *

After a few weeks we started to feel the flow. Our technician told us that we were starting to sound alright and encouraged us to do our thing: in other words, "stick it" to the Program Director.

Every week he'd have something critical to say to us; sometimes he even ran into the studio to deliver it. We stuck to our guns reaching down into the bowels of creativity.

The show prior to ours was a great Detroit-sounding R&B show produced on tape by a draft dodger in Windsor. Each week he'd send in a tape and it sounded great. This got Perry thinking that we could pre-record our shows, which was cool with the tech guy.

Our last few shows were pre-recorded up at York University Radio, then a closed-circuit campus radio station with much better studio facilities than they had at the Double-O Ranch. There we had access to a vast record library which had really amazing records.

We mixed George Harrison's experimental recording, Electrical Sounds, with A Saucer Full Of Secrets by Pink Floyd. This got complaints from Eaton's Abstract Shop for being too weird. Now by pre-recording the show we didn't have to face the dreaded Program Director. We felt much freer to be more creative, to do the things we really wanted to do. To explore the far side of the moon. On our very last show we decided to play shock-rock group, The Fugs (5), singing 'Grope Need' in which the word "horny" was repeated about a dozen times. Calls came in and and we were summoned: "Guys, you've just done your last show here."

Sure was good while it lasted!

- Steve Fruitman

FOOTNOTES:

(1) CFGM became Canada's first full-time Country and Western radio station July 1, 1963. They had charts too, just like CHUM, but thinner and longer. Don Daynard did a country show from there. In 1988 they moved to 640 on the AM band but by 1990 they abandoned the Country Music genre and became The Hog.

(2) Little Marcy was a ventriloquist doll with the child-like voice of her operator, Marcy Tigner. She recorded a swath of albums, sometimes as many as five a year, of Little Marcy songs and stories. Her years of activity were 1964 to 1982.

(3) A song by Howard Johe and Dick Blankenship that was recorded by Billy Edd Wheeler and Leroy Pullins

(4) This was Canada's equivalent of Woodstock, attracting over 100,000 people. There is a lot of confusion about how this festival actually came to be. It was produced by John Brower (one of the architects of The Rock Pile, The Toronto Pop Festival and Festival Express). It was originally supposed to be The Toronto Peace Festival that Brower was planning with John Lennon and Yoko Ono but their plans ran into roadblocks and fell apart. Brower went ahead by renting Mosport Park near Bowmanville to stage an event billed as The First Annual Strawberry Cup Trophy Race, for motorcycles. In the US he was advertising a rock festival. Various attempts to stop the festival via court injunctions ultimately failed. Featured performers included Grand Funk Railroad, Procol Harum, Jethro Tull, Ten Years After, Mountain, Alice Cooper, Crowbar, Lighthouse, Sly & The Family Stone, Luke & The Apostles, Jose Feliciano and many others over three days (August 7 - 10, 1970).

(5) From The Fugs 1968 LP It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest, on Frank Sinatra's Reprise Records label.

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Thanks to Steve Fruitman for his really wild recollections! (This is a sample preview of his soon to be written book which will be published one day I feel certain.) Steve is currently a Producer and Host on CIUT-FM Toronto 89.5.

His website is: http://www.backtothesugarcamp.com