As I’ve posted here before, I was a DJ on KYMC 89.7 FM from early 1984 through mid-1989, hosting a few different music shows including Pipeline Radio Fanzine. The show was originally called Ground Zero but I renamed it in honor of the original Pipeline radio show on KWMU after that program was canceled in September of 1985. “Radio Fanzine” was added to the name in honor of the short-lived punk rock fanzine I put out while in college at CMSU in Warrensburg (also called Pipeline). Sometime in the late ’80s I acquired a KYMC T-shirt, which I had almost completely forgotten about until a couple of years ago, when I found a photo of myself wearing it at my parents’ house in St. Peters in the spring of 1988:
So recently I used that photo to design a new, updated version of the shirt, complete with a Pipeline Radio Fanzine logo on the back! I added the shirt to the TIRC T-shirt shop on SpreadShirt.com and you can order one for yourself here. Here’s what it looks like:
The shirt is $16.99 plus shipping and features Spreadshirt’s awesome, durable “flock printing process” which gives the designs “a velvety feel, like a thin layer of plush.” Much nicer than any screen-printed shirt I have ever seen! I really made the shirt so that I could buy one myself and wear it, but I thought it might be a good idea to leave it up online in case anyone else would want one, too. If you’d like one of these WITHOUT the Pipeline logo on the back, you can have that, too, for just $15.99.
It looks like I’ll have to wait a couple of months to purchase the Appleseed Biodiesel Processing System that I found via the friendly folks at the St. Louis Biofuels Club. B100 Supply is in the process of reconfiguring the system, which means updating the instruction booklets and everything, which is great, because that means the new one will be even better than the previous. I’m planning on putting this kit in my garage, and to do that I’ll have to clear some room and get rid of some junk that’s in there now (always a good idea, anyway). The garage is a car and a half, so unfortunately I won’t be able to put my 300D in there with my Cuda, and since my Cuda has seniority, it will remain the car that I park there to keep it out of the weather. So until something happens by either me selling the Cuda (doubtful) or us moving into a bigger house with a larger, 2-car garage (probably even more doubtful), I’ll just have to keep the 300D parked out in the street and then bring it around back when it’s time to fill up the tank. No big wup.
Also, the 2-month wait until the new and improved kit is in stock and ready to ship should give me ample time to acquire the 40-gallon electric water heater I’ll need for it, as well as a 55-gallon drum. Those, and the chemicals (methanol & lye, mainly) are the only things that don’t come prepackaged with the system.
I was able to secure a source for the WVO (waste vegoil) that I’ll need, and it happens to be a restaurant in VERY close proximity to where I work, so that’s a big weight off my mind. And, thanks to biodiesel.org, I’ve also located several fueling stations over in Illinois where I can buy various blends of biodiesel/petrodiesel to run in my car to get it (and me) more acquainted with its new fuel.
Meanwhile, I’ve been reading up on the many articles available at the Collaborative Biodiesel Tutorial site, which I highly recommend for anyone else getting into this, as this seems to be the best site I’ve found anywhere for information on getting started. I also just ordered myself a copy of THEE biodiesel home brewer’s bible, Home Brew Biodiesel, so I’ve got some reading to do, too.
Here’s a photo of the of the old Kopp farmhouse on Henry Ave. in Manchester as it stood circa 1893:
Kopp Farmhouse circa 1893
In the early 1860s, my great-great grandfather, Charles (Andreas Heinri Carl) Kopp, bought this house and 16 acres on Henry Ave. in Manchester, Missouri. This house, located at 650 Henry Ave., is still standing today, although it has been extensively remodeled (see below and more photos on Flickr). His daughter, Elizabeth, was born here in 1867. This picture was taken ca. 1893/1894.
Left to right: Charles, grand-daughter Annie (Anna) Schroeder, 2nd wife Clementina (nee Weidner), Elizabeth Schroeder (nee Kopp), and a boy that might be his stepson, Charles Steinmeier.
And here is a photo I took of the very same house earlier this summer:
Check out this video of the installation of three new 9′x6′ Barack Obama paintings designed by renowned underground artist Shepard Fairey on the side of The Royale Food & Spirits on S. Kingshighway.
Richard Rodriguez created these paintings “to do my small part to get Obama elected president…”
If you like taking photos of live bands, please consider sharing them with the GaragePunk.com Flickr Group! Preferably trashy, primitive rock’n'roll of the garage, punk, surf, rockabilly, R&B varieties… Keep in mind the name of the group, please.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Doubleday Publishing had a broadcasting division. They owned stations in several cities: Denver had KHOW, Minneapolis had KDWB, Detroit had WLLZ, Washington D.C. had WAVA, New York had WAPP, and St. Louis had KWK (which, by the way, had been a prominent St. Louis R&B station in the 1960s).
Doubleday had purchased KWK in 1976. At the time, their frequency was dark. A flood had damaged the transmitter three years earlier. When they did sign on in November 1978, they began as Top 40. One year later, they (as well as other Doubleday stations) shifted their format to AOR, and added an FM. KWK’s tightly focused format proved very popular for several years, until CHR regained popularity in 1983.
What was unusual about this station was that both KWK AM and FM had separate AOR formats (not to mention the fact that AOR was a rare AM format anyway). They did a morning/afternoon drive simulcast, but they had different jocks at other times of the day.
KWK-AM featured a two-hour program called “Freeform,” which aired six nights a week. The show included a mix of new wave and progressive rock cuts.
I had been a fan of KWK in the late ’70s/early ’80s and listened to it probably more than I listened to KSHE-95. I was aware they were also broadcasting on the AM dial but I didn’t mess with that much since the signal was pretty weak and it sounded so good in FM, anyway. Why bother with AM, right?
John Hutchinson
Well, sometime in early 1983 my world was turned upside-down by the discovery of a nightly radio show on KWK’s AM side called “Freeform” that was hosted by a British DJ named John Hutchinson (”Hutch” would later go on to be the board op for David Lee Roth’s shortlived syndicated morning show in 2006). I stumbled upon this show one night while I was bored and flipping through the AM dial, just goofing around, basically. The funny thing is, I had the tape running while I was doing this…
But before getting more into that, a little background: Prior to hearing that show, I was your typical teenager listening to typical teenage rock and pop of the era, mostly the stuff that I’d hear played on the FM side of KWK… my favorite band throughout junior high (ya know, “middle school” as they call it now) was ELO and I also had records (and 8-tracks!) by bands like Foreigner, Queen, Blue Oyster Cult, AC/DC, REO Speedwagon, Rush, Judas Priest, Bowie, ZZ Top… you name it. I also loved ’50s and ’60s rock’n'roll and would often listen to (and tape record) songs off of the oldies station. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Creedence, Kinks, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Doors, Monkees, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc. I’d listen to Casey Kasum on the local Top 40 station and would make my own lists of songs that I liked, and run out to Peaches and buy the 45s… mostly early ’80s new wave pop hits by bands like Bow Wow Wow, Felony, J. Giels Band, The Vapors, The Waitresses, Wall of Voodoo, Missing Persons, The Tubes, The Fixx, Thomas Dolby, The Stray Cats, The Romantics, Romeo Void, Berlin, Blondie, The Cars… you name it. Looking back, I’m not sure why but I just never seemed to be exposed to any of the really early punk or new wave music that was making such waves internationally from around ‘77 through ‘82. It’s probably because I had other interests (baseball, girls, my silly coin collection, etc.) and I’d be one of those late bloomers when it came to going headlong into music.
Once I did get clued into the fact that there was something else out there aside from the bland and predictable AOR that I’d been listening to for so many years, I could usually find some of this stuff at Peaches, and would take chances on full-length LPs that had that new wave look about them (Devo, Adam & The Ants, Sex Pistols, Robert Gordon, X, B-52s, Joe Jackson, Fabulous Poodles, Gary Numan, XTC, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, Ramones, Elvis Costello, The Polecats, The Knack, Split Enz, The English Beat, etc.). This was before the days of challenging college or independent, public radio (for the most part), there was obviously no Internet and it was also before we had MTV. Jet Lag Magazine and a few other local punk & new wave fanzines had been in print for a couple of years, but it would be a while before I would know of their existence. Luckily, I didn’t live very far from KYMC, and I discovered that station (at the time with a power output of just 10 watts – barely covering a ten-mile radius around the West County YMCA) around the same time and that, combined with the aforementioned discovery of “Freeform,” greatly increased my interest in this exciting new music and also my desire in wanting to host a radio show of my own, and it wouldn’t take me long before I was on the air myself at KYMC, spinning, of all things, ska and reggae! (It wouldn’t be until my senior year of high school that I would hear hardcore punk for the first time, thanks to friends introducing me to bands like the Circle Jerks, Fear, Minor Threat and the Germs.)
Anyway, so here I was, a very musically curious 17-year-old kid hungry for something, ANYTHING different or unusual. I was already sick to death of the typical ’70s arena rock that I’d grown up listening to, so I would turn on the radio on my Zenith boom box and go up and down the radio dial, first FM, then AM, in search of whatever interesting stuff I could find. That’s how I discovered this show on KWK AM 13.8 with a host that was playing this great mix of new music without regard to your typical radio format boundaries. Punk, pop, new wave, rock… all on the same show, and a commercial station at that. Talk about a breath of fresh air! I was hooked. I made many tapes of this stuff that I’d hear on the radio, but unfortunately only kept a couple of them. I still have several tapes of my shows on KYMC and may put together a couple podcasts of that stuff in the near future… we’ll see.
Below I have a link to an MP3 that was ripped from a cassette tape I recently unearthed in my basement. I had obviously stuck the tape in the deck, hit record, then started scanning the dial for something worth taping. That is when I happened upon “Freeform”… you can hear it right there on the tape, flipping through some stations, then settling in on KWK, fuzzy static and all (the station had a pretty weak signal). The first song I heard was Sting’s version of “Tutti Frutti” from the newly released Party Party soundtrack. It sounded decent, so I kept the dial on the station and continued to record much of that show. After that I listened religiously. John Hutchinson was responsible for introducing me to a lot of artists I’d never heard before, and played others that I’d only heard on KYMC, heard about from friends at school, or had seen the records in the shelves at Peaches. Within a few months I had been transformed from being your typical ’80s teenager into a full-on punk/new waver.
So with that, I present for you, KWK Freeform, circa January or February 1983. As I mentioned before, KWK’s signal was a little rough when I recorded it, but I think you’ll enjoy this one:
I did some further digging online recently and found a couple of other recordings of the same program from a few months earlier that someone else had put online. I downloaded them, re-ripped the files in mono (for a much faster download) and added them to my Blip account, too. These are from October 22, 1982:
OK, I have to admit that this wasn’t the original idea I had when I decided that I would keep my Barracuda and seek out a more fuel-efficient daily driver, but I really wasn’t expecting to find a decent diesel-powered car for less than $10 grand, that is, until I started browsing eBay very thoroughly this past Sunday morning (when I should’ve been out working in the yard). Ever since first learning about biodiesel back in December 2005 (thanks to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code podcast), I’d wanted a late ’80s/early ’90s Mercedes-Benz 300D. These cars are amazing, and indestructible. Originally selling for upwards of $40 grand, they’re very nice mid-size luxury cars with lots of bells and whistles you just won’t get in a VW Jetta or New Beetle TDI. Plus, those engines last forever… it’s not uncommon to find people driving them in excess of 500,000, 700,000 and even a million miles… seriously! So that’s what I had always been looking for… it’s just that none were to be found anywhere near St. Louis. So, I decided to expand my search radius from 200 miles around St. Louis to “any distance” and suddenly there were several of them to check out, and I’ll be damned if the first one I clicked on wasn’t a real beauty:
My new baby
The $8,999 Buy-It-Now price seemed reasonable enough, I thought, especially if I could get it cheaper in the normal bidding process. I read the information presented thoroughly, looked closely at the included photos, and emailed the seller a couple of times with questions. I also took advantage of eBay’s AutoCheck option, which came back with perfect scores, jiving with the information the seller had provided.
The auction only had a little over 5 hours left, so I knew I would have to make a decision on it that day. The car (sorry, “auto” as MB owners insist on using) was located just outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, so buying it would also mean I would have to fly to Philly and drive it 860 miles back home, easily a two-day adventure. But I had never seen a 300D with under 100,000 miles on eBay, especially one that I had any chance of fitting into our budget. So after thinking on it long and hard, investigating airline ticket prices, etc., I took the plunge and placed my bid via eSnipe (highly recommended!) and set it at just over $7 grand, figuring that would be as high as we would want to go on a car of that age. The bidding rose a bit during the day, getting as high as $5,100 about an hour before the end of the auction, so my bid was good enough, eSnipe successfully placed my bid 7 seconds before the close of the auction, and I got the car for the seller’s reserve at $6,799. YES!!
So I’m pretty jazzed right now. I’ve already made the deposit, spoken to seller on the phone, booked my flight to Philly (just $79 plus tax on American Airlines… not bad!) for Tuesday July 29 and also booked a cheap motel room for my return trip in Zanesville, OH that night. I’m all set. I’ve also been getting more information on biodiesel from the St. Louis Biofuels Club and have located several recommended local auto shops that specialize in Mercedes. Hopefully the 14-hour journey back home will go smoothly (loudly, but smoothly), and I’ll be able to get this new baby fueled up with biodiesel in the near future. I will keep you posted!
The guys on the Early Valiant & Barracuda Club’s email list convinced me to keep it. Admittedly, that didn’t take much convincing. So, time for a Plan B. Will keep y’all posted.
It’s all about Kicks… SAVAGE KICKS! 70+ minutes of rock’n'roll included this time out as Kopper lets loose with an entire set of stuff dug up from the Podsafe Music Network as well as some ’60s classics and other stuff mixed in for good measure. Listen for cuts from bands like The Flakes, King Louie, the Horribly Wrong, the Hydeouts, the Chocolate Watchband, Los Hories, Chants R&B, the Separates, the Loons, Digger & the Pussycats, the Manikins, the Real Kids and lots more… Tune in and get your kicks.
