Category: Radio

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Saturday Night Retro

On this 92ND edition of my ‘Saturday Night Retro’ I’m looking back at the Spring of 1985 – just a few months before I turned 18-years-old, graduated from high school, left home, and joined the Air Force – all within a single week !

At home I enjoyed hangin’ out with my 10-year-old brother Danny and our young Manx cat Fluffy. We watched Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and “Saturday Night Live” that I taped overnight on our Betamax videocassette recorder downstairs in our family room. I also enjoyed driving around Langley, McLean, and Tysons Corner Virginia in my beige 1980 Chevy Citation (my first car). It was equipped with a high-quality AM radio !

Back at home (where I actually had an FM stereo) I listened to the Washington D.C. area’s two big Top 40 radio stations – ‘All-Hit-105-WAVA’ and ‘Q-107’. One of the big smash hits during this memorable time of my life as I approached adulthood was this electronic dance smash. It was HUGE all around the world, and I think that they played it at my high school prom. I really don’t know for sure because I never attended my high school prom because I was such an outcast at the time. I was the original ‘All-American Reject’ !

Here’s Animotion – as I kick-off 6 fun-filled weeks of ‘The Awesome ’80s In August International Dance Party’. It’s my “Obsession”:

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Saturday Night Retro

Flashback with me – won’t you ? – 39 years ago to the Summer of 1971. Odds are most of you reading this weren’t even alive back then, but I was. That’s because I’m older than you !  😀

I remember it well – sort of. I was a young 4-year-old boy living in the new  Chelsea Wood apartment complex in Greenbelt Maryland (suburban Washington D.C.). I lived with my Mom and Dad, and I frequently visited my Grandparents that lived just a mile-and-a-half down the road. An Uncle, Aunt, and a whole bunch of Cousins also lived about the same distance away. I was surrounded by relatives, so there was plenty to do with all of them. On Sunday mornings we all attended the 11:30 AM service at nearby St. Matthias Catholic Church – all dressed up in our Sunday best. Good Times !

On the radio during the hot Summer of 1971 was this cool gem from Hamilton, Joe Frank, & Reynolds. It’s the trio’s TOP 5 gold smash “Don’t Pull Your Love”, and it’s one of the greatest songs ever made during my lifetime.

‘Saturday Night Retro’ is taking the week off next week, but on the 24TH of July I’m kicking-off a 6-week summer special – ‘The Awesome ’80s In August International Dance Party’. It’s a nod to a former annual tradition on my old massivesmash.com hit music web site. Join the fun. Relive the ’80s memories. It all starts in a fortnight.

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Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts

This week on the ‘Grab Bag’ I’ve got something old – something new – nothing borrowed – and something blue. It’s all for you – on this Tuesday night !

Old School – I’m currently experiencing a major 1970s hit music revival. I’m not really talking about the classic rock of the decade or even the disco revolution of the last few years of the decade. I’m talking about those cheesy pop nuggets – those moldie goldie oldies on 45 RPM vinyl. The songs that even sounded good amongst the AM radio static. I’m talking about great tracks from such forgotten artists as Hamilton, Joe Frank, & Reynolds, Albert Hammond, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Climax, Reunion, Andy Kim, Neil Sedaka, Electric Light Orchestra, Dr. Hook, Andrew Gold, Jay Ferguson, and countless others. One of my iPod Shuffles is currently being stocked with a bunch of these timeless classics from yesteryear when my life as a 2-year-old to a 12-year-old kid was so much more simpler. Long live the cheese from my youth !

New England – Next week at this time I’ll be in New England for the first time ever. In my 43 years of life I’ve never been further east than Pennsylvania and New York along the eastern seaboard although I’ve lived on the east coast for 39 out of my 43 years. Next Monday I can claim two new states that I’ll be setting foot in for the first time – Connecticut and Massachusetts. I was actually wondering if my destination next week would be the furthest north that I’ve ever been in North America. The answer is NO. I’ve been to Syracuse (43.1° north latitude), Milwaukee (43.1°), and Detroit (42.3°). All three of these cities are a little further north than Chicopee Massachusetts (42.2°). I’ve also been to Chicago (41.8°) and Cleveland (41.5°) – a little further south. Incidentally Syracuse was where I spent a few freezing cold and snowy days and nights before heading off to war in the Saudi Arabian desert at the start of 1991.

Blue Seas – I’m now just 89 days away from embarking on my next Carnival cruise – and my first as a Platinum V.I.P. cruiser. It’ll be my 10TH cruise with Carnival (since 1999), so I’ll get all of the perks that go along with such a status. It’s expected to be an extremely active hurricane season, and my cruise is scheduled for the absolute peak of the season – the week of Labor Day. Cruises rarely get cancelled because of hurricanes, but could my cruise be out on the high seas at the same exact time as a Hurricane Igor or a Hurricane Julia or a Hurricane Karl ?  Those are the ‘I’, ‘J’, and ‘K’ named storms that could be out there during that second week of September this year. Igor and Karl simply sound vicious. Julia – not so much. I’m hoping for a lull in the hurricane season while I’m out there during that week. I’m hoping for peaceful and quiet blue seas.

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Saturday Night Retro

Exactly 17 years ago yesterday morning on the 21ST of May of 1993 in the heart of Melbourne Florida ‘Captain Airwaves’ was officially born. He was my original pseudonym in cyberspace. Of course back in 1993 nobody knew what the World Wide Web was all about. After all Al Gore had just invented it, and he hadn’t yet explained it. Back then the most popular form of modern communications between personal computers across the free nation was via the telephone dial-up bulletin board system (BBS). Mine debuted real early on that morning 17 years ago, and it was named after my lovable childhood cat (still alive at the time) – Fluffy. She was a Manx, and the name of my first creation in cyberspace – ‘MANx CAT BBS’. That first bulletin board system lasted a little over four years, and it eventually spawned a spinoff site on the emerging web at the time – ‘MANx On The Net’. That web site eventually morphed into the ‘MASSIVESMASH.COM‘ hit music web site that survived and thrived for the better part of a decade during the late-1990s into the new millenium. It faded several years ago, but it inspired this personal blog that continues today.

‘Captain Airwaves’ was actually the pseudonym of the late great John Carmody – the famed daily television columnist of “The Washington Post” newspaper from 1977 to 1998. During my high school years in the early-1980s he inspired me to get in to the entertainment business somehow someway. The bulletin board, the web site, and the blog was as close as I got to that dream. I adopted the ‘Captain Airwaves’ pseudonym for the BBS, and then after a couple of years my followers at the time (known affectionately as ‘MANxsters’) promoted me to ‘Major’, so I became ‘Major Airwaves’. When the web site hit it big I took on the ‘Major Hitwaves’ name and persona to more accurately reflect my role at the time as a deejay on the web. Nowadays I’m still ‘Major Hitwaves’, but I’m more commonly known as simply ‘The Major’.

17 years ago this past week I was unemployed, living off of my savings, and having way too good of a time with all of my friends and neighbours in the Melbourne area. The 1400 block of South Oak Street rocked back then, and ‘Captain Airwaves’ was crankin’ out the hits from his second floor studio efficiency – and all up and down the U.S. 1 and the A1A.

Here’s one of those hits of the time – an obscure track that was a local smash on the radio and in the nightclubs of Melbourne. It’s His Boy Elroy – and a track about them “Chains”. As are most of the songs that I feature here on the ‘Saturday Night Retro’ it’s one of the greatest songs ever made according to me.