No Roky Erickson freak-outs this Friday; no KNUS odds, sods or seeds and stems for you, dear Friends. Instead, George Gimarc offers something even more lost from the Dallas radio lost-and-found. As in? Well, let's let the rock and roll alternative explain:
Once upon a time there was a program called The Early Birds on WFAA. It was the No. 1 most popular morning show on radio in the DFW area, and it made its debut on the air in March of 1930. Here are some excerpts from one of their Sunday morning broadcasts. It's from April 19, 1953.And now ... to the Time Machine!
I gotta tell you, for a show that ran as long as this did, there are only a very few audio recordings in existence. And a friend of mine recently found a binder with eight consecutive shows -- each the whole 45 minutes long -- across 3 sides of a one-of-a-kind acetate. So out of the 7,237 shows.... eight of them have been found. That's only a grain of sand on the beach, but it's still a gem in my archive.
By the way, Bob Shelton is the guy from the Shelton Brothers, who was also a regular down at the Sportatorium shows and on the WFAA Shindig show. He was about 42 at the time of this broadcast. I gotta find a way to makes some of this stuff more available to the public. Back to the '70s in the next Unfair-cast, unless something else turns up.
