Tempe was still a pretty sleepy town when I moved there in 1985. It hadn’t changed much in the ten years since I first started visiting its head shops and record stores in my mid-teens. A block east of my house, downtown Mill Avenue was still “home to little more than biker bars, tattoo parlors, and other unsavory businesses.” But I was a young punker, and I took to my ratty neighborhood like a fly to shit. I used to love to to walk along the cracked sidewalks upended by roots from the overgrown yards that hid both crummy stone hovels and ancient Victorian style farm houses. It was a quiet neighborhood — the streets were usually deserted as everyone hid from the scorching heat, often with nothing to aid us but giant swamp coolers propped up against the walls with rickety wooden frames.
Archive for the 'Obsessions' Category
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It’s finally starting to cool off around these parts. Soon enough, I’ll able to once again take actual road trips to parts of the state I haven’t seen yet. But the internet still continues to offer an adequate substitute for real experience. I’ve recently found a few great sites that are new to me at least.
Aaron Walton’s Western Mining History site is probably my favorite, if only for the sheer perversity of its presentation. Clustered around its prominently displayed Google ads, the site’s photo galleries offer exquisite views of dilapidated small towns throughout the western United States. Its brief tour of Miami, Arizona is a real treat. The town’s hovels, back alleys and shuttered buildings are lovingly exhibited without commentary or any trace of irony, as barren as the streets of Miami themselves. Meanwhile, Globe and Bisbee look positively opulent by comparison.
Continue reading ‘Postcard Collection: Greetings From Arizona, Part One’
In this exclusive interview, Phoenix broadcasting legend and real estate celebrity “Wonderful” Russ Shaw reminisces about “Love Workshop,” the comedy show he co-created in 1976 with Tod Carroll for the progressive rock station KDKB-FM. He also shares stories about the early days of free-form radio in Phoenix and the various local luminaries he met along the way. he also talks about pirate radio, doing stand-up and selling houses.
Non-Phoenicians who maintain enough interest to keep reading this rather long interview to the end might gain context from this article about KDKB radio, as well as the KCAC Lives! blog, where surviving staff and fans share their memories of KDKB’s predecessor, the short-lived KCAC-AM. Honorable mention must also be made of the online station Radio Free Phoenix, Andy Olson’s tribute to the classic progressive radio format of the seventies, and KDIL-FM 666, the home of Phoenix’s infamous pirate station. Meanwhile, you can dig Russ firsthand on the Bloodhound Blog, which is predominantly – but not solely — about his adventures in the real estate trade.
Continue reading ‘Love Workshop – The Wonderful Russ Interview’
My “Love Workshop” collection finally reached critical mass last moth, thanks to fellow Phoenician and Verne & Craig enthusiast Wayne Butane. Wayne sent me a full five disks of shows, all lovingly digitized from his crumbling original cassettes. I managed to clean most of the hiss out of them, but they are far from master quality. Some even sound as thought they were captured by holding a microphone up to the radio speaker. But the riches contained therein are fully audible, two hours of which are new to my collection. Then, as if that weren’t enough, Wayne sent me the accompanying picture of “Love Workshop” creator Todd Carroll, hard at work presumedly preparing one of his “National Lampoon” contributions.
Continue reading ‘Love Workshop – The Wayne Butane Collection’
I first discovered Michael Monti’s “100 South Mill Avenue” blog after he dropped some praise on my scans of an old menu from his family’s La Casa Vieja restaurant. “As a restaurateur and history buff,” He wrote, “I can assure you that these will be appreciated as a goldmine of nostalgia and useful information about trends in dining and pricing.” Sentiments after my own heart. Michael writes from the vantage point of both a restaurant entrepreneur and a steward of Phoenix’s cultural history. His family happens to do business in one of the area’s most cherished landmarks.
Continue reading ‘Postcard Collection: Greetings From Phoenix’
The public spectacle of Elvis sleepwalking his way though the seventies is one of the more cliche metaphors of that decade. But the second half of 1974 is what many consider his absolute nadir. To help celebrate the 30th anniversary of the death of The King Of Rock And Roll, we present a compilation of live recordings taken from this period. Concentrating on his amazing rambling on-stage monologues, this collection documents one of the most difficult period of Elvis’s life.
When my spouse and I found out Scottish legends the BMX Bandits were scheduled to play at the 2007 NYC Popfest, we quickly booked some decent lodging and grabbed a red eye to JKF. For their first visit to our shores in a decade, the band played a poorly-attended weeknight show in Brooklyn and an afternoon acoustic pickup gig in the basement of a cafe on the Lower East Side. Then they scrambled back home on a red eye of their own in order to immediately drive four hours to the next gig. As if this weren’t excitement enough, one of their members was arrested and spent 20 hours in a Manhattan holding cell. Luckily, he managed to free himself in time for the show (which was great, by the way). In a nutshell, it was a textbook example of why I retired from touring.