"Sounds from the Lost and Found"

[Mr Bill]

I saw a rerun of "Friends" the other day and E.G. Daily guest starred. So what's she doing now?

EG Daily is making the bulk of her living doing voice work for cartoons. Her biggest employer is Klassky/Csupo where she voices at least one of the Rugrats and countless character roles. In the eighties her high voice and good looks landed her roles in dozens of teen films of the era. She still appears on TV and films from time to time. I think she needs to do more records, though...

--Mr Bill
E.G. fan since the early 80s...

 

[daveK]

There seems to be a niche that some music falls into which is ultimately as bad (if not worse) than if it had no audience at all. The songs played on this station fall into this niche, and I think the music of the TJB falls into it as well. There's not enough consistent demand to justify a major record company keeping it in print but there's enough demand for it that people will pay greatly escalated prices for it in online auctions. We all know what TJB CDs go for on eBay and Amazon. I see the same thing happening with Barry Scott's "Lost 45s" CDs which are now out of print. These discs contain songs by artists like Balance, Diesel, George Baker, Chris Thompson & Night, etc. They're out of print now and fetching high dollars for used copies.

 

[jfiedler17]

Balance and Diesel were available on CD at one point? Somebody please re-issue these! "Breaking Away" and "Sausalito Summernight" are two of my all-time favorite songs! (And my copy of "Breaking Away" is really worn-out, too!)
Yeah, it's amazing what the out-of-print CDs go for! And so many of the most valuable ones I can remember seeing in the Camelot practically-giving-it-away bins fifteen years ago; had I known what they'd go for in 2004, I would've just sweeped the bin clean.
If it didn't violate a million copyright laws, I'd have made a compilation-CD of stuff from the show, 'cause a lot of the records that got the best listener reaction were records that haven't been in print for years! The labels are missing out!

Jeff F.
... eager to find out what kind of reaction the station gets tomorrow afternoon after listeners realize that my show is gone! ... the program director told me that she'd have any upset callers e-mail me, so here's hoping I get a nice "You've got mail!" tomorrow!

 

[daveK]

Renaissance Records put out a two-fer of Balance's first (only?) two albums but it's out of print now. Prices get kind of high on eBay. Another label called Snoop put the first album out also. I think it may be out of print too. I won a copy from a guy on eBay but he never sent it to me. He claimed he did and said it must have got lost in the mail. He's a "power seller" on eBay and has his own online business. I looked through his feedback and it seems like about 1 out of every 30 CDs he sells mysteriously gets lost in the mail. He also told me he sent me a refund check but it got lost in the mail too. Finally after several months, he gave me a refund through PayPal and I had to sign up with PayPal to get the money! The seller's name (and business) is Dave's Metal.
I think the band Diesel sells their CD through their website as a Dutch import.
Renaissance also put out a two-fer of Russ Ballard albums that was pretty good. They did a three volume compilation called "Heard It On The Radio" that features a lot of "lost and found" type songs by people like Tycoon, Gary Myrick, Steel Breeze, Jim Steinman, Grace Slick, Rick Fenn, Face To Face, Mahogany Rush, Pia Zadora, Orion The Hunter, Chilliwack, Silver Condor, Schon & Hammer, etc. A lot of songs on these comps I've never heard before but a lot of others are among my favorites. All three are out of print but you can usually find used copies of these on Amazon for under 10 bucks.

 

[jfiedler17]

Wish I had some great news to report but, unfortunately, I'm no further to getting the show back up and going - or salvaging any good from my time in college radio, for that matter - than I was at the end of June and I will very likely (but very reluctantly) pack "SLF" in, since I'm just not seeing any other options at this point. I still think you guys are right about satellite radio being the perfect fit for "SLF", but how in the heck I'd ever get it UP on satellite radio is beyond me. And getting the show back on TERRESTRIAL radio - even so much as a college station - has proven to be a near-impossible task, which leaves me little other option but to do the show Online via services like Live365 or on my own website, but my heart's not really in that; with as many countless people as there are already doing their own customized radio shows, I just think doing it on the Web would make the show come off looking a lot less professional and a lot less fresh or innovative than I'd like it to and would generate much less attention than it would on regular radio. (And the less people listening, the more it defeats the entire premise of the show, so ...)
What do you guys think?

Anyway, the real reason I thought I'd revive this thread, though, is that I thought this could be chat-provoking: I actually wrote into Fred Bronson at Billboard early last week and he posted my letter on his Billboard.com Chart Beat column. This is what I wrote him:

Dear Fred,
I felt compelled to write Chart Beat in response to the letter from Karen Patton you posted last week about the state of radio. I’m a 25-year-old aspiring deejay who – until this past June – had been doing a college radio show for two years called “Sounds from the Lost and Found,” that was devoted to playing all the Top 40 hits from the mid-‘70s through the ‘90s that you don’t hear regularly – if ever – on the radio anymore. It was a mix of lesser-heard or never-heard hits by familiar-name artists (i.e. McCartney, Elton, Billy Joel, etc.) and Top 40 hits by artists who’ve been all but forgotten (i.e. Diesel, Roger Voudouris, Balance, Jude Cole, etc.). (Incidentally, I never would have been inspired to create this show, which is my biggest joy in life, were it not for Billboard, so I am eternally grateful to your magazine for instilling such a love of chart history and chart music in me!) If it cracked the Top 40 and isn't being played to death on commercial radio, it’s fair game for the show; as you might guess from the state of radio today, this is a surprisingly gigantic archive of records to work from.
I had re-launched the show on a new (and widely-listened-to) college radio station back at the end of spring, and the reaction was beyond my wildest expectation; more requests poured in than I even had time to use, and I had a flood of listeners calling in offering to do everything from donating records to building a website for the show to asking for publicity jobs with the show; it was incredible! The reason I tell this story, though: the station pulled the plug on my show. After just three episodes. Not because it wasn’t successful - actually, it had just made the local paper days before – but because the station advisory board decided the show was “too commercial for college radio.” So, my listeners imploring me to get the show back up somewhere, I’ve spent the summer looking for a new home for the show, all to no avail. Every college station I’ve talked to has passed, because it’s – you guessed it – “too commercial for college radio” and have urged me to take the show straight to commercial stations. Every commercial station I’ve talked to – the ones that have bothered to get back to me, anyway – have all passed because, as they’ve all bluntly explained, no matter how commercially accessible a record is, no matter how huge a hit it was on the Billboard charts, no matter how many people request it, any record that is not ALREADY in continual - if not excessive - rotation on the radio at this very moment is “not commercial enough.” It doesn't matter if it cracked the Top Five. Radio's not still playing it regularly? It's "not commercial." The program directors I talked to the most extensively seemed to suggest that playing one single record – even just once – that they’re not already playing ad nauseum – is somehow financially equivalent to betting the radio station at the craps table in Vegas. So, for all the readers like Karen Patton who have been writing you and asking, “Where’s the selection?,” my story should give a real glimpse into that question!
So, what with college stations deeming my show “too commercial for college radio” and commercial stations deeming my show “not commercial enough” (in spite of its Top-40-music premise and the serious market potential I saw in the show from the audience reaction I got), I really don’t know that I will ever be able to get my show back up on the air anywhere, sadly. I haven’t given up entirely just yet, but finding a large college station that believes that forgotten Top 40 music can still follow their missions to play “music you can’t hear on regular radio” or commercial stations who genuinely believe in actual variety - in artists AND songs - is a frustratingly agonizing task! Hopefully, I can get back to preserving the lost Billboard Top 40 music of yesteryear for the older to re-discover and the younger to discover anew one of these days! I hate to see so many countless top-notch 45s go forgotten!

Jeff Fiedler
Washington Crossing, PA

I also post this because, to my surprise and delight, I went to Bronson's latest Chart Beat Chat column on Billboard.com just posted hours ago, and there's two letters from readers about my letter, and Bronson mentions in his response that my letter generated a lot of mail from readers! If anyone's interested, check out the page while it's up this week! (Could make for good forum fodder!) It may not mean anything towards saving the show, but it still made my day!

Jeff F.
NP: Swing Out Sister "Twilight World"

 

[Rudy]

Isn't Billboard's site available to subscribers only? Paste a link here if you get a second.

I'm really glad your letter got published! That "tunnel vision" mentality of the big "commercial" radio stations is going to do them in sooner or later--XM is just wiping away market share with each passing day. Sure, it's just a drop in the bucket right now, but with it making the news at CNN's site, and even veteran radio people creating such a buzz about for-pay radio, it's bound to go somewhere. I'm sure Comcast never thought DirecTV would ever have more than a niche market; look at it today.

I quit listening to FM months ago, and nothing they can do, short of pulling the plug on their canned formats, will ever make me tune in an FM station again. With that in mind, there are a couple of stations out there that ARE playing just about anything within a loosely defined format. Wish I could remember what they were called, and where they were located, but they were getting noticed.

It's just ironic that the XM stations I listen to do almost what you are doing with your own show--digging down deep, playing songs that may have just tickle the Top 40 for a week or two. Heck, the Rockabilly Road Trip I listen to plays stuff that may have never even dented the charts, some really old, obscure rockabilly from the 50s...and they play it!

 

[jfiedler17]

Isn't Billboard's site available to subscribers only? Paste a link here if you get a second.

http://www.billboard.com/bb/chartbeat/chat.jsp

 

[jfiedler17]

Exciting news for my Corner pals: I've resumed production on "SLF"!
I've just officially been hired back at WRRC (the campus radio station at Rider University), where I first created and started doing the show, and will once again do "SLF" there.
Rider's station has just a fraction of the broadcasting range that WPRB/Princeton had, but the whole reason I've been hired back is so we can record the show to broadcast later on a much bigger station! [Where-and-when to be posted later. (Don't you just hate it when people leave you in suspense? )]

I officially go back on the air at WRRC this Wed., though [and start recording the week after], and I am really charged up about getting started again! [Already working up a playlist! ]
[I'm also working with two of my most avid supporters on getting a website up for the show, so I'll keep you posted on that!]

Jeff F.
NP: China Crisis "Arizona Sky"

 

[Rudy]

"Arizona Sky"...great song! And congrats on getting the show back on the are. More power to ya!

 

[jfiedler17]

Exciting news to report!

I've been extremely busy this last month working at the Rider radio station [and having a heckuva lot of fun doing it! It's easily the greatest group of people I've worked with since I first got into deejaying!] and recording shows for later broadcast outside Rider, and I'm finally all set for the official premiere of my most exciting venture with "SLF" yet, so on behalf of Tony Currie and myself, I'm thrilled to announce (and shamelessly promote ) that:

Starting this Tuesday night (Nov. 2) at 8:10 PM EST, "SLF" is on Radio Six International! [www.radiosix.com] artyhat: artyhat:
[Just for a spoiler: I put two A&M "lost and found" cuts from '78 and '84, respectively, into the premiere episode! (12 songs in all).]
So, definitely check it out if you get the chance and spread the word! [I also set up an e-mail address for the show - [email protected] - in case anyone wants to send requests!]
I won't be able to listen in myself, but I'm still anxiously looking forward to Tuesday night just to see if I get any reaction to it.
Here's hoping the show's a hit!

Jeff F.

 

[Rudy]

Starting this Tuesday night (Nov. 2) at 8:10 PM EST, "SLF" is on Radio Six International [www.radiosix.com]!

I just "tuned in" to Radio Six International's internet stream using Winamp. Is this broadcast only going out on the shortwave, or will it be on the 'net also?

 

[TonyCurrie]

You will be able to hear "Sounds from the Lost & Found" on 5,105kHz AND on the web. Check out the Ogg-Vorbis stream, which
a) delivers much better audio quality than mp3 and
b) can support an unlimited number of listeners.

Jeff's show will air weekly, and the times will be (depending on your location):

Tuesday 8.05pm Eastern
Wednesday 1.05am GMT/UK Time
Wednesday 2.05am Central Europe

 

[Rudy]

Thanks TC! I should see if I can get a plugin for Ogg.

 

[jfiedler17]

Just a little programming update for anyone who's been listening in!
My show still airs tonight as usual, but starting this Sunday [Nov. 28], my show's moving to the same time (8:05 PM EST) on Sunday nights! [Mondays 1:05 AM UK time]

Jeff F.

 

[TonyCurrie]

Jeff is way too modest to add that we have moved his show because it's making waves and is deserving of a better slot!