Musical ramblings from the manager
Part 1 of this article covered the ups and downs experienced by WOAS-FM during the first two decades of its existence. The ‘next twenty years’ began in 1997 when the Ontonagon Board of Education, UPPCO, and our listeners ponied up $9000 to rehab the station and get us back in fighting condition. It was […]
From time to time it is kind of fun to go back and look at how we got here. For WOAS-FM, ‘here’ means ‘still here as we enter our 40th year on the air’. While yours truly has been in Ontonagon as long as the station has been on the air, I was more […]
I idly wrote the title of this FTV one day when thinking back about hauling my drum set around over the years. Like the kid who decides to play the tuba in the school band, one does not sling a drum set under one’s arm and walk home after school. Luckily for me, the school […]
“The Lake, it is said, never gives up her dead, when the skies of November turn gloomy”. If there is a more haunting lyric about Lake Superior than this, I have never heard it. This is the second line in the first verse of the song he wrote about the sinking of the Edmund […]
If there are tasks that breed procrastination more than cleaning closets, I can’t think of any. When one views this process as a form of exploration, however, there is a plus side. Our long neglected linen closet recently yielded a source of entertainment that had not seen the light of day for at least […]
The first time I remember telling my buddy Mitch about Uriah Heep he was either half listening or he was pulling my leg when he responded, “You’re a heap? A heap of what?” Heep’s hit Easy Living was playing on the radio and I had commented how much I would like to learn this song […]
It never ceases to amaze me that some people are shocked and horrified when the headlines blare out the fact that (gasp) many countries engage in spying, surveillance, and other covert operations. We like to think the fate of the world depends on world leaders exercising their diplomatic skills to sort things out, but […]
Would the Porcupine Mountain Music Festival’s 13th edition prove to be a convergence of bad luck? For people who suffer from triskaidekaphobia, it would seem that PMMF # 13 would have been the one to avoid. For those of us who harbor no such fears, we would have found that the unnatural fear of […]
During the two years I played in Knockdown, we only played for one frat party. We had our regular monthly three nighter at the NCO club (guitar player Ray was a Sergeant in accounting, so we had an inside track with the NCOs), numerous party dates at both the NCO and the Officer’s club, company […]
There are many categories of band gigs: teen dances, wedding receptions, private parties, and bar gigs make up the normal mix for most bands. To my personal list, I could add playing in a tent at the U.P. State Fair and gigs in churches (both in the basement and the sanctuary). Again, bands from just […]