howdy, and just a blurb here to let listeners of Gratuitous Echo know that the engineer of the show is still quite a ways away from the GE recording studio. it turns out that the blue skies of Utah are pretty doggone seductive.
so bear with me and i do expect new episodes of GE will appear sometime in the next two to three weeks. in the meantime, please enjoy the earlier GEs that we are now running. hope we run one or two that you missed the first time around!
~Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers @ Winterland Arena-San Francisco, CA December 30, 1978~
There’s just not enough places in the world where the owner of the joint flies over the crowd…IN A GIANT DOOBIE! … dressed as Father Time and sprinkles them with fairy dust and actual doobies, hitting the stage at the stroke of the New Year (1978-79) in a cloud of smoke, confetti, & balloons as the Grateful Dead strikes up “Sugar Magnolia”, then plays for five and a half hours with breakfast served at dawn for 5500. Winterland’s Bill Graham made a habit of it every New Years Eve, sometimes delaying New Years an hour so he could do it cross town at another venue. Now THAT’S dedication to theater. Not enough places like that.
If you missed San Francisco’s Winterland Arena, HERE’S WHAT YOU MISSED.
[In the bottom pic, Bill/Father Time crashes into stage while Jerry Garcia & Bob Weir look on and Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd) exits stage right (in top of pic).]
“Billy’s Boogie” now runs Friday’s 4-6pm (pdt).
Bill Frater grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and was present during the magical birth of “free-form” FM radio with KMPX/KSAN and the psychedelic music scene of the 1960s. Starting in the mid ’70s, as a respite from his day job delivering mail in San Francisco, Bill began volunteering at stations like Berkeley’s KALX (one of the first stations to play punk music) and weekend shifts at KTIM before eventually moving to Sonoma County, where he hosted a 2-hour roots music show on KRCB for over 20 years. He then took his show to commercial station KRSH in Santa Rosa, which at the time was one of the few remaining stations giving DJs freedom to construct their own music sets in the classic free-form model.
Now retired from the Post Office and living in Salem, Oregon, Bill still hosts radio shows on a few stations nationwide; he is excited to be a part of the Jiveradio family and to continue to celebrate the magic of free-form radio.
Join us for “Billy’s Boogie” and please pass the Jive!
hey, the new Gratuitous Echo, which drops Saturday night the 14th at 9, wants in on all this Chuck E. Weiss tribute jazz! i mean, they don’t make em like Chuck E. any more, or, at least, not all that often. so to pay proper respects to one of the all-time cool cats, the second half of Echo will be a six song tribute to ole Chuck, featuring some of his under appreciated and superb songs, like the amazing Bomb The Tracks, the awesome rocker where Chuck comes out and asks Stalin, FDR, and Churchill why the hell you boys didn’t bomb the tracks that German trains were using to haul Jews to the Death Camps. an incredibly powerful and heavy piece of work, unexpectedly coming from the usually easy-going and carefree Chuck E, and it’s delivered with Chuck’s sly offbeat and semi-surrealistic style. it’s easily the best rock song i’ve heard in 2021, and it was released 7 years ago on Chuck E’s. “Red Beans and Weiss” cd. better late than never!
so if you dig Chuck E., or if you wanna dig him…….get down and get widdit saturday night at 9 on Echo. it’s half off night at the rebop shop, sucka!
There’s not a radio station in the world that plays more Chuck E. Weiss than we do. For years & years. He was a cat’s cat.
Now, the years of waiting for a new album or a chance to see him live at his favorite dive piano bar in L.A., are over. Here’s the ‘obit’ story in the L.A. Times: [HERE]
His music will live on on the airwaves, at least long as Jiveradio exists. This week will be Chuck E. Week, so plan on loads and loads of real Weiss all week. That knucklehead stuff.
More reading: [HERE]
“He is a distant relative of Houdini’s; he’s a praying mantis riding an egret through a bad neighborhood. He’s a reverend waving a pistol around.” ~Tom Waits