A broadcast pioneer just died in southern Mexico, a few weeks shy of his 87th birthday. Back in the 1960s and '70s, Lorenzo Milam helped launch about a dozen offbeat FM stationsâeclectic, adventurous outlets that tried to avoid the straightjacket formulas of both commercial and public radio. He also wrote one of my favorite books about radio, Sex and Broadcasting, and one of my favorite memoirs, The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues. (...) KRAB didn't run ads, and in those days it didn't get support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting eitherâthe Corporation for Public Broadcasting didn't exist yet. So it wasn't commercial radio, and it wasn't government radio either; it was, along with Pacifica, a model for something new, something that came to be called community radio. Though that wasn't how they initially saw themselves. "We weren't called community stations," Lorenzo told me. "We were called listener-supported stations. That was the keyâ¦.We were part of the elite, and we knew it. And we for no minute confused ourselves with being representative of the community. We were there to lead in an enlightened way." The community-participation part of the credo came later, as the '60s melted into the '70s.
Lorenzo launched more listener-sponsored stations after he left Seattle, in places ranging from Dallas to Los Gatos, California. He had an indirect hand in starting several more: If someone disagreed with him about how a station should be run, Lorenzo might stake him some money to start another outfit in another city and try things his way. Veterans of those outlets in turn started stations of their own. These stations then mailed tapes to each other, allowing their programs to pop up in other parts of the country. In this way they formed an informal network, dubbed the KRAB Nebula, parts of which persist to this day. (Lorenzo also co-owned, but did not run, one of the most gloriously quirky commercial stations of the '70s: KFAT, a free-form country station in Gilroy, California. Its motto: "It's all country music. It just depends on what country you come from.")
"IN THE NEWS ~ Oscar-winning Italian composer Ennio Morricone has passed away at age 91."It was a 1960s recording made in Rome of the Woody Guthrie song PASTURES OF PLENTY that launched Morriconeâs international career. The seemingly incongruous mixture of sounds in the orchestration â surging violins, the crack of a whip, church bells, an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, chimes and a chanting male chorus â so entranced movie director Sergio Leone that he ditched his original choice of composer and hired Morricone to score what became 1964âs A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS." The instrumental version of this performance by Morricone became the theme song to the film.https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2020-07-06/ennio-morricone-deadLISTEN to the original 1962 recording here ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAE9tFd6WkQ"
I scored a double DVD set of OUaTitW at a garage sale. $2. Just the scenes with Claudia Cardinale are worth more than that. c.
My mostest favorite Spaghetti Western. Love the opening scene with Fonda vs. the fly.
Not to be a stickler, Kurt; but I think you mean Jack Elam...
Oops! You can see it's been a while since I've seen that one.
Lol. I probably seent it 25 times. It's up there on my list. A lot of the reason is the music but it's so much more. So much detail and nuance. And what a perfect cast...
