Musical ramblings from the manager
Things happened in rapid succession in the wake of the tragic Apollo 1 spacecraft fire that claimed the lives of astronauts Gus Grisson, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee on January 27, 1967. NASA administrator James Webb quickly conferred with his internal board of review to assess the best way to deal with the crisis. […]
Yikes! As I scanned USA Today writer Melissa Ruggieri’s list in her article Timeless albums, tunes are turning 50 in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (published 6-13-22), all I could say was, “Yikes!” How could fifty years have gone by since some of my favorite albums first began climbing the record sales charts? While some […]
Hey gang – The Summer Solstice has arrived and we are giving Lee ‘The Night-flier’ (above) and the rest of the our staff some much needed R&R time – plus yours truly time to swamp out the studios before start of the next broadcast year at WOAS-FM 88.5. The www.woas-fm.org website remains active even when […]
After a couple of months with no evening planets gracing our skies, both Mercury and Saturn will make their appearance late in the month. It will be a bit of a viewing challenge, but on July 29, Mercury will appear just below the very young Crescent Moon in the WNW 20 minutes after sunset. […]
Who doesn’t like stories about people being inspired to do great things? We all have moments in our lives when something adjusts our path in one direction or another. Not all are life changing moments like Jake and Elwood (The Blues Brothers) bathed in a ray of heavenly light watching Brother James Brown bring the […]
Perhaps there needs to be a qualifying statement tagged to the above title: A Brief History ‘of Modern Rocketry’. It is common knowledge that the Chinese were the first true rocketry pioneers (circa 13th Century). The Chinese used their newest invention, gunpowder, to launch celebratory fireworks and so called ‘fire-arrows’ used in battle. For our […]
In guitarist-speak, RR has become a shorthand reference for the late Randy Rhoads. Though Rhoads passed away when the small airplane he was a passenger in crashed (while on tour with Ozzy Osbourne in Florida) on March 19, 1982, his legacy remains strong today. Volume 43, No. 07 of Guitar World commemorated the 40th […]
We last visited Levon Helm in a two part FTV back in April of 2020 (FTV: Mark L. Helm – Part 1 (4-15-20) and Part 2 (4-22-20)). Based on his autobiography This Wheel’s on Fire – Levon Helm and the Story of the Band (Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, updated 2013 for A Cappella […]
The good news? Summer officially begins with the Summer Solstice on Tuesday June 21 at 5:14 a.m. EDT. The bad news? We won’t dwell on it because there will be weeks of long summer days to enjoy before we actually notice, but our daylight hours will begin to slowly decrease from the SS until […]
We left Part 1 with Jimmy Hendrix newly discharged from the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army. As soon as his bass playing buddy, Billy Cox, was turned loose, they changed the name of their band from the Kasuals to the King Kasuals. As Jimmy’s hair returned, he styled it into a ‘conk’ (see […]