Belew and Zappa Web Extra

As Tyrone might say, here’s how the McCheese is made. Well, one way anyway. Sometimes I get together with Tyrone on IM, and we trade music links. Sometimes, they wind up as a radio segment. Here’s one that did, and I’ve promised myself to post these more often. So, enjoy these links, and enjoy the music on the Radio InfoWeb stream as well! If the links have gone bad (as they will with time), the music on the stream remains!

David Bowie “Stay” ’78 Adrian Belew

Tyrone really likes the way Adrian, as a very young man, rips this up! Bowie obviously concurs.

David Bowie “Rebel Rebel” Belew ’78

After that experience (above), I thought I’d try out one of my favorite Bowie oldies that brings back good memories. Here it is from the same live set on German TV.

Frank Zappa – City of Tiny Lites

Adrian Belew tries this out on a track on the InfoWeb set you’ll hear on the stream. It’s not included here. Adrian’s version gave me a taste for hearing composer Frank Zappa perform it…

Frank Zappa – City Of Tiny Lites (live 1980-10-25)
Buffalo (2007) live in Buffalo, NY, October 25th, 1980

Frank Zappa – Lead Guitar & Vocals
Steve Vai – Stunt Guitar & Background Vocals
Ray White – Vocals & Rythm Guitar
Ike Willis – Vocals & Rythm Guitar
Tommy Mars – Keyboards & Vocals
Bob Harris – Keyboards, Trumpet & High Vocals
Arthur Barrow – Bass & Vocals
Vinnie Colaiuta – Drums, Vocals

Of course, there are many other versions on YouTube. Feel free to listen to them all! :) – this gave me a taste of one of my favorite tongue-in-cheek Zappa tunes, so here it is…

Frank Zappa – The Illinois Enema Bandit

See you on the air! Hear you later? – Rex

Status – 12/18/2012

Status

Monday was a baaaaad day. The computer that runs the schedule blew up in Dr. Octopus’ face, causing minor burns to one of his tentacles.

In the ensuing chaos, we made changes. You’ll notice the high frequencies in the stream are no longer crushed by coming through an FM radio signal. The program is now direct-to-stream! We hope you enjoy that improvement which was an unplanned by-produce of recovery and salvage operations!

The computer had to be replaced and the new one configured: that took a while. During that time, the stream was on backup which meant the programming schedule was blown, and there was no Fourth Tower of Inverness.

Monday and Tuesday’s episodes of The Fourth Tower were combined, and ran on the normal schedule Tuesday.

Now that everything has changed, we’ll be changing some more. Look for some new alternate programming streams at different bit rates arriving just in time for Christmas!

Changing Times, and Beaches, in NYC

The Beaches dot the landscape. But then, they’ve always done that.

However, as I drove to the SpaceZepplin terminal, I was musing at how things have changed. For example, I was listening to Radio InfoWeb as I drove using the Tunein app on my iPhone. Such a scenario was unimaginable when the program I was listening to, recorded in 1997, was made. But at Radio InfoWeb, we’ve always imagined the unimaginable: making radio intended for interstellar space travellers. We’re almost there, kids.

Then came the promo for The Fourth Tower of Inverness, the upcoming daily radio serial (or is that cereal?) that is designed to strengthen your consciousness and brain for the difficult time ahead. The narrator of The Fourth Tower is Dave Herman. That took me back. Dave had been knocking around NYC area radio. He got his big break in 1970, about the time I was DJ’ing at a pirate radio station out on Long Island. He took ABC’s “Love Network” live on WABC-FM, which rapidly became the infamous WPLJ. The mission was to make FreeForm radio commercially successful. It even worked, for a short while. Here at Radio InfoWeb, we’re still carrying on that mission, and haven’t given up yet… no not at all.

Enter Dave, our new announcer. Dave is serious… in a kind of unhinged way. You hear him every day, every time you turn on the radio or TV. He’s a “golden throat”. Now his unhingedness is unleashed on your psychedlic brains. But I digress.

Until recently, we had only scraps of reel-to-reel tape with bits and pieces of the original Fourth Tower series. Although you can now purchase the “unabridged” version on CD,  it’s not in the daily serial format for radio. It kind of loses something in the process, because every episode is a cliffhanger. But now, you can hear Dave Herman narrate in all his glory from those days, fresh off his hot, if short, gig with the ABC malcreation that, sadly, did not live long… degenerating into “top hits rock” in the usual format.

The TuneIn app held up through the torturously varying communications landscape caused by the degrading cellular network; courtesty Hurricane Sandy. TuneIn transcodes the Radio InfoWeb stream into something more digestible by iPhones (as well as iPads and iTampons) than the 128K stream that works better over WiFi and hardwired connections. Thus, it’s better, so far as I know (I haven’t tried it yet) than the upcoming Radio InfoWeb app, a sneak preview of which is shown below…

– Rex Latchford

Radio InfoWeb iOS app

The Radio InfoWeb iOS App