Transmission 10508

The soundtrack to our Motorcade is provided by Ultravox, The Teardrop Explodes, Magazine, Midnight Juggernauts, Brian Eno & David Byrne, Steve Tibbetts, Funkadelic, James Carter, Mark Ronson and Think.

T10508 is a 59.6mb 128k mp3 1:05:07 in length made loud to be played loud!

"in the boulevard, the motorcade holds sway"

RFW

In observance of Memorial Day and for your B-B-Queing pleasure, take a RFW Flashback with T10607!

Transmission 3416 - Duck And Cover

We remember.  

We can't afford not to.

Lowell Blanchard & The Valley Trio

Todd Rundgren's Utopia

Blues Creation

The Scientists

The Police 

Nathaniel Meyer

Motorpsycho

Spoon

The Runaways

Ramones

The Wildhearts

Primal Scream

Grinderman

Flipper

10cc

T3416 

"don't you ever forget"

RFW

* Dedicated to all women and men killed in past, present and future wars 

and our governments 

(who occasionally blow smoke up our collective ass when deemed necessary).

Happy Memorial Day

Peace

The Official RFW Memorial Day BBQ & Free Hot Dog Dance Party

 Present this at the door for your delicious frank!

*While supplies last. There are very few left. Ok, I ate them all.

Could you pick up a few packages on your way?

Actually, I need ice and a few other things, too!

 Call me ......

Bloodkin

Wall Of Voodoo

ZZ Top

Motorhead

Ween

Yoko Ono

The Cribs

The Vaccines

The Standells

Iggy & The Stooges

Alice Cooper

The Pretenders

The Beatles

Michael Jackson

Teddybears
Ramones
Flamin' Groovies

Faith No More

MDBBQ

"It's Gonna Be A Long Night"

RFW

Transmission 10607

Happy Memorial Day from RFW! Today we take an hour to musically pay tribute to not only the men and women that we have lost in past and present wars, but to all people, pets, places, things and ideals that are dead or dying! Remember with help from The Clash, Johnny Thunders, George Harrison, Bang, The Mothers Of Invention, Atomic Rooster, Russian Circles, Whoognash and Stomu Yamashta!

T10607 is a 59.3MB 128k mp3 1:04:46 in length made loud to be played loud!

"All Things Must Pass away"

RFW

~Is Ever Long?~

Transmission 4015

Music to shimmy and shake with - Nils Lofgren, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Crosby/Stills/Nash & Young, Jeff Beck, James Brown, Joe Walsh, The Pretty Things, The Rolling Stones, Budgie, King Biscuit Boy, Graham Parker & The Rumor, Foo Fighters!

Click here to listen on Soundcloud T4015.

"you gotta promise not to stop when I say when"

RFW

*This show has been on the shelf since Memorial Day weekend. I have all but given up on DivShare and am trying alternatives. Soundcloud allows you to stream on the RFW site on your pc or laptop, listen on our smartphone, notebook or tablet and if you download the app you can take the file with you.

Transmission 5212

The RFW Memorial Day B-B-Q offers a full variety of tasty musical morsels . Dig in and eat to the beat of Nine Inch Nails, Primal Scream, David Bowie, Iggy Popp, Grace Jones, Talking Heads, Adrian Belew, Robert Fripp, King Crimson, XTC, Steve Hillage and George Harrison!

T5112 is a mb 128k mp3 59:00 in length made loud to be played louder!

"all aboard for Funtime"

RFW

Transmission 2210

We go under the covers with a thread of continuity and salvo sounds from The Hot Rats, Beastie Boys, Jimmy Smith, Slim Harpo, The Architectural Abdabs, Bob Francis and Three To One, Jimi Hendrix, Todd Rundgren, Don Dixon, The Moody Blues, The Doughboys, Bettye Lavette, Mushroom, Cornershop and Joe Cocker!

T2210 is a 62.8mb 128k mp3 1:08:37 in length made loud to be played loud!

" that's the funky shit"

RFW

*For a Memorial Day RFW Rewind check out T10607.

The Day The Music Died?

 

RFW Time Machine
 

 

 

 

Listen to This Chilling Audio as Crowd at the Boston Symphony Learns President Kennedy Is Dead.

One of the last remaining witnesses to the orchestra's funeral march speaks about his experience.

 By James Inverne

There are times when music can seem a solitary experience. That goes for the listener, sectioned-off from the world in headphones or listening solo and glorying in “their” music through speakers. It also goes for performers, so often portrayed as ego-driven – and indeed some soloists can only survive the nerves, the lonely travelling life and the terrifying exposure through an assertion of ego. In a cacophonous age, the choice of music can define and anchor the individual. But there are times, of collective crisis or celebration, when music can remind us what a society is. And on Friday November 22, 1963, at the top of a concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra that happened to also be a WGBH radio broadcast and so was captured for posterity, the BSO’s revered music director Erich Leinsdorf broke some unimaginable news to a crowded symphony hall. What was to have been a routine concert became a memorial to the 35th President of the United States, reduced audience members to tears and in some ways redefined what music could be for those present. It is also, surely, one of the most emotional pieces of radio ever recorded.

As can be heard from the broadcast, after the radio announcer’s introduction to the first scheduled work, a suite from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Le coq d’or, Leinsdorf emerged and spoke just 53 words, his voice sounding a bit odd, as if taking care to clearly and a little unnaturally project every word. He falters slightly only once, in his second sentence. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a press report over the wireless. We hope that it is unconfirmed, but we have to doubt it. That the president of the United States has been the victim of an assassination. We will play the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony.” Gasps and screams of shock can be heard after the statement of JFK’s death, and after the change of programme is announced there is a general panicked hubbub that takes its time to subside. Then, as the orchestra begins its funeral dirge more slowly than is usual, every note throbbing with pain, there is only a numbed quiet as the news, the awful reality, sinks in.
As is evidenced by the radio announcer’s preamble few in the hall, even backstage, knew in advance what had happened or what, as far as the concert was concerned, was about to occur. One of those few, and one of the only remaining witnesses to that event still with the orchestra, was its librarian, then and now, William Shisler. In a phone interview, he spoke publicly for the first time about his recollections. The memories, he confides, are still painful. He hasn’t been able to bring himself to listen to the broadcast in the 50 years since.
Along with many others he had already heard about the shooting and that Kennedy was hospitalised. “I was in the library working on scoring some music, when my wife called from our home in Needham, Massachusets – it’s around 10 miles from Boston,” he says, “She liked to watch the soap operas in the afternoon. On this day she was watching one called As The World Turned. And the world did turn. The program was interrupted to report the shooting in Dallas. So she phoned me immediately and I was one of the first to hear that in Symphony Hall.”
Word quickly spread, but as the musicians prepared for their afternoon concert and the audience started to arrive it was not yet known whether or not Kennedy had been killed. “Nobody in Symphony Hall was aware. It was near 1 p.m. in Dallas when they announced it, which was nearly 2 p.m. in Boston, coinciding almost exactly with the scheduled start of our regular Friday afternoon concert.”
With the show due to start in less than ten minutes’ time, Shisler got a relayed message from Leinsdorf himself. Run to the archives, put out and distribute the music for Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. The president is dead.
Such was the rush that Shisler remembers little of his feelings from that moment. His memories get clearer of the minutes immediately following, when it was incumbent upon him to hasten to the stage with scores in hand. “The musicians were already there on the stage, in their places and of course the hall was filled with people. I had to tell each of the musicians as I was handing out the music what was going on. That was the first they knew of the death. It wasn’t an easy moment, for them or for me.”
In the short pause before the conductor strode out with his own heavy burden, Shisler walked, in something of a daze, back into the wings and then out to the auditorium where he took up his favoured listening position, at the back of the first balcony where he could hear but not see. The entrance to the library is nearby and he would sometimes slip through the balcony door to listen in during rehearsals and concerts. He was an accustomed presence there, none of the ushers would have detected anything unusual. Everything seemed normal. Only Shisler knew how different this concert was about to be. “I was – standing there,” he says, haltingly, trying to express the strangeness of the moment, “Knowing he was going to make the announcement and I was about to witness that moment. I had already had my own gasp upon hearing the news, and now I’m standing there witnessing the audience about to have the same reaction. When it came, of course Leinsdorf came out and announced to the audience and there was this huge gasp, it was very emotional.”
Some people left, rushing out in grief. But most, he says, stayed as the orchestra played. Many cried. Shisler was among them. “I was brought to tears by the movement of the Beethoven. It’s such beautiful music anyway.”
Afterwards, he recalls, “everybody was on their own. We all had to deal with it in our own ways and there was no gathering, Leinsdorf didn’t call us together to make any comment, nothing like that.” Nevertheless the dynamic with their music director changed. When they came together again for the next night’s concert, “there was a new camaraderie. I strongly felt that. By the nature of things there’s a love-hate relationship between orchestra and conductor, and that was perhaps especially true with Leinsdorf, but a certain bond was created between us all with him that day.”
It was likely that Leinsdorf, a Jewish immigrant (helped upon arrival, coincidentally, by Kennedy’s eventual successor Lyndon Johnson) who had left his native Austria shortly before the Anschluss with Hitler’s Germany and had been drafted to the American military in the 1940’s, felt the killing of a leader of his idealised adopted homeland as deeply as anyone. He was after all a protégé of Arturo Toscanini, the most famous of Italian conductors, who had publicly made a point of quitting his own country with Mussolini’s rise. Some things, after all, are suddenly more important than ego, or battling for your personal authority over an orchestra.
But Shisler believes something more happened in that unforgettable Friday afternoon concert. “I sincerely believe that music played its part in the tragedy for all of us. Afterwards of course everyone was glued to the television sets for days and days. But in that period of time when we were all there, listening to Beethoven in that concert hall, we all had to respond to this terrible tragedy for ourselves. And the music sort of soothed us, reached out to each and every individual, and helped us to process what had happened.” On that day, for those sitting in a grand concert hall in Boston and perhaps for everyone tuning in via the wireless, a society torn apart by an assassin’s bullets perhaps, in a small way and already, began to be restored, by music.

James Inverne is a classical music consultant and journalist, former editor of Gramophone and European Performing Arts Correspondent for TIME

Transmission 5220 - The RFW Independence Day Companion

No Rush For More

 (On 7/4)

The Neil Young 100 Voice Choir

John Wayne

David Bowie featuring Ice Cube

Akira Ishikawa

Albert Brooks

Brian Eno & David Byrne

Luke Haines

The Nomads with Handsome Dick Manitoba

Grand Funk Railroad

Love & Rockets

Funkadelic

Prince

The Mothers Of Invention

T5220

"In the vastness - America"

*Suppose they gave a display and nobody came!

This interactive listening experience includes ample space to add 

your own personalized applause, chants and crowd-in-exile sounds .

Stay home, be safe and have a

Happy 4th Of July!

RFW

Transmission 5824 - Radio Hearts, Filth, Girls and Heavy Burdons

 

Señor Elvis Costello

*The Thom Lane Theme Song

Willie "Loco" Alexander & The Boom Boom Band

Jimi Hendrix Experience

Dave Edmunds

David Bowie

P.M. Dawn

Danny Gatton

Devo

Fountains Of Wayne

Tinted Windows

Cheap Trick

Smashing Pumpkins

The Animals

The Eric Burdon Band
War

The Rolling Stones

T5824

"I've got one, you've got one too"

*Rock On the Thom Lane Show was the theme song introduction of Radio Heart, a weekly solo radio show hosted by Thom Lane (pictured above) and heard by a legion of thousands in the late 70's on WTBS/WMBR, 88.1FM in the Cambridge/Boston area. He was one of my oldest, experienced (in all the senses of the word) and closest radio Brothers. We hit it off the day he wandered into the dungeon-like basement studio in MIT's Walker Memorial Building located on the Charles River on a Monday morning in the summer of 1976 during my radio show debut Son Of Rock, ETC and introduced himself as the new guy! Together in 1977, we joined forces to create and host the first daily "Punk/New Wave" show in the US - the legendary Late Risers Club, with a cast of like-minded nascent-talents including my future WBCN team-mates Carter Allen, Albert O and the wonderful late-great Carla Nolan(sigh). Our baby has grown much older, as the LRC is still rocking 47 years later (a real source of pride for the original air-staff)! The master tapes of this resurrected relic features Willie Alexander on vocals and were transferred by David Brown. It was written by Fred Pineau, with additional lyrics from another of my long-running Boston music allies

  "Count" Joe Viglione.

We lost Thom a few years back and, he's now fondly remembered as a storied radio and SPIT dj and a and well-loved scene-creator. Such a minor set back would not have stopped Mr. Lane 

and it obviously will never stop us from

Rocking with Thom "Coach" Lane!

RFW