We've got a conclusion, and I guess that's something

Bran Van 3000's Glee was actually released before I graduated and Drinking In LA was featured on one of those preview discs in the spring of 1998. I also recall the advertisements and posters sent from the record label promoting some sort of pinkish scene from the movie, Bambi. Hmmm – Glee: a rabbit sniffing a deer. There evidently was no glee in the song from my undergraduate peers, as I recall many of the hard-boiled rock jocks a little aloof to play the song.

It was a different story the following year, when I heard Drinking in LA more than I wanted as station manager at that other radio station. Does it sound like I didn't particularly care for the song? Well, there isn't any disdain, but I never really got the "sound" of the song - that whole "mixed bag of everything at once" approach to what sounded like someone trying to merge various styles of music and then pass it off as the latest musical fad.

I was in the minority of this opinion, which might please BV3 founder James Di Salvio, because the album, specifically this lead single, made quite an impact with a lot of station staff. Students with DJ names like Old English, Duke Nukem, Johnny's Nightshirt, and Lil Dope regularly featured the song somewhere in their two-hour shift, probably all wishing it was some sort of personal anthem.

And that's one thing I found interesting between the two stations: how certain music was accepted. My fellow undergrads ridiculed Korn and Limp Bizkit, yet the rock shift at my graduate station made frequent use of their tracks. Marilyn Manson was universally forbidden, while later-day Metallica was something everyone could have agreed on. Granted there is always going to be a difference of opinion between any two people, much less groups of people, but I guess I thought that kids the same age would like the same kind of music. Oh, well...I’ve been wrong before.

Di Salvio, and the Canadian crew he created to front Bran Van 3000, originated in Montreal in 1997, releasing their debut single that spring. Glee followed mere months later and shortly thereafter their brief star fizzled as the collective began work on other projects. Their second album, Discosis, hit the shelves in 2001 and was generally praised, but saw little promotion (I didn't know about it all these years later...).

Anyway, yeah, we got these lyrics to the song featured in the above article, happening right after this last paragraph. You can all go ahead and continue reading here or just jump ahead to the end and try to remember a few things about the song if you can. It’s difficult because you’re reading the words and may not have the pulsating and echoey sounds in your mind, which would help you remember. You can ask us questions to help you remember portions of the song, namely, who is Stereo Mike. We’ll pretend to get an answer....

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Drinking in L.A.
(Di Salvio/Larson/Vartzbedian)
Bran Van 3000
From the album Glee
1998

Hi, my name is Stereo Mike.

Yeah, we got three tickets to the Bran Van concert happening this Monday night at the Pacific Pallisades. You can all dial in if you want to answer a couple of questions, namely, what is Todd's favourite cheese. Jackie just called up and said it was a form of Roquefort. We'll see about that...

Give us a ring-ding-ding! It's a beautiful day.

Yeah Todd, this is Liquid ring-a-ding-a-dinging, want those three Bran Van tickets man. Waddya think? Todd, you there?

I woke up again this morning with the sun in my eyes,
When Mike came over with a script surprise.
A Mafioso story with a twist,
A "Too Wong Foo, Julie Newmar" hitch,
Get your ass out of bed, he said:
I'll explain it on the way.

But we did nothing, absolutely nothing that day, and I say:
What the hell am I doing drinking in L.A. at 26?
I got the fever for the flavour, the payback will be later, still I need a fix.

And the girls on the bus kept on laughing at us,
As we rode on the ten down to Venice again.
Flaring out the G-Funk,
Sipping on a juice and gin,
Just me and a friend.
Feeling kinda groovy,
Working on a movie. (Yeah right!)

But we did nothing, absolutely butkis that day, and I say:
What the hell am I doing drinking in L.A. at 26?

With my mind on my money and my money on my... Beer, beer!

I know that life is for the taking, so I better wise up, and take it quick.

Yeah, one more time at Trader Vic's.

Some men there wanted to hurt us,
And other men said we weren't worth the fuss.
We could see them all bitching by the bar,
About the fine line, between the rich and the poor.
Then Mike turned to me and said:
"What do you think we got done son?"

We've got a conclusion, and I guess that's something, so I ask you:
What the hell am I doing drinking in L.A. at 26?
I got the fever for the nectar, the payback will be later, still I need a fix.

We need to fix you up, call me Monday and maybe we'll fix it all up.

Hell-A-L.A., Hell hell-A-L.A.! ...

So I ask you:
What the hell am I doing drinking in L.A. at 26?

Hell-A-L.A., Hell hell-A-L.A.

Electronic Behavior Control System

This is a test. For the next thirty seconds, this station will conduct a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test.

I've made mention of the transmitter logs (see Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125), which the operator on duty had to sign and date before assuming responsibility for what was being broadcast. One of things everybody had to know who worked the control room was how to perform a weekly test of the Emergency Broadcast System, the EBS. Created in the mid-1960s and very much civil defense chic, the test was both a sense of honor (for DJs who were now the ones giddily interrupting someone else’s programming, much as the EBS has interrupted their television and radio programming growing up) and nuisance (as it took up precious time in their music shift).

At some point every week there was to be a test of the EBS equipment. In short, it simply meant you ran a recorded introduction, turned up one of the channels on the audio board that played the recognizable tones (at 853 Hz and 960 Hz), and then played the recorded concluding remarks. That was the test, in all its push-button simplicity.

This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. The broadcasters of your area in voluntary cooperation with the FCC and federal, state, and local authorities have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency.

It was beaten into our heads that we had to know this in the event someone from the FCC ever walked in and requested we run a test. Dr. Propel, on par with his usual goofiness, often would waltz by the studio window, wearing an old brown fedora with a tag in the brim that had the word "PRESS" scribbled out and replaced with the letters "FCC." While an obvious joke, it was to drive home the point that you had to know the test.

If this had been an actual emergency, the signal you just heard would have been followed by official news or information.

The Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN), on the other hand, was a group of performance artists and musicians from Rhode Island that helped introduce the concept of video scratching. Here's how EBN's Brian Kane, Josh Pearson, and Gardner Post worked: take a clip off television news of someone announcing, "Emergency;" then of someone else saying, "Broadcast;" followed by "Network" said by someone else. Create some funky backbeat rhythm to go with that and you've got what EBN did best. There were a few other similar artists out there around this time, mixing and mashing together sounds with the latest in digital audio equipment. In the past, to create something akin to this you’d probably have a live band performing to an audiotape spliced together of lost-and-found sounds. EBN, and others, could simply record a sound into their computer and then cut, copy, and paste to their heart’s content. Add some visuals – on the fledging CD- ROM medium – and you’ve got a video, albeit not on par with what MTV plays (or played, as was the trend).

This station serves the local area. This concludes this test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

Of course, back at the station, by the time everybody had mastered the art of the weekly test of the 30-year-old EBS, the powers-that-be finally updated the concept, resulting in the Emergency Alert System (EAS). There was a difference, as well as mass education of everyone to know how to operate the EAS. It just didn't gel with some people....

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Electronic Behavior Control System
(EBN)
Emergency Broadcast Network
From the album Telecommunication Breakdown
1995

Come check my sockets for eyes

At my undergraduate station we did not, surprisingly, have a lot of full-length albums for the rock shifts. Don’t laugh - we weren’t as clueless at that makes us sound. We had some full albums, usually due in part to a record label sending some promotional copies our way, or someone on staff donating their copy to the station for either a short-term or permanent loan. A majority of the music came in the form of weekly preview discs. Every Tuesday afternoon there was a dash to the mailroom – like kids racing toward a Christmas tree – to see what tracks were included on this week's blue disc. If there was a song on the disc that we didn't have yet, we could quickly enter it into rotation. Or, as it were many times, the song wasn't included and we would have to wait in hopes that the latest track from the "it" artist of the week was included on the next disc the following week.

Ripping open the package, the directors scanned the disc to see what was salvageable. Even though the discs had 10 to 20 tracks, the music ranged from what was considered adult alternative to loud rock. The music director would then decide which songs, if any, we would put into rotation. Sometimes we featured over half the songs on a disc, other times we played only two out of the twenty tracks, thereby wasting a lot of space in the control with a rather useless disc.

Still, we were on the mailing list of some prominent record labels and, from time to time, we did receive some prominent albums. Nothing was more "prominent" the week that we found an album from some English-sounding group called Subcircus. What was special enough with either that band or our station to warrant this album be sent our way out of a whole slew of other possibilities? The music director and I listened to a few of the tracks and decided to add the strongest sounding one into rotation. We really liked the second track, a somewhat catchy tune called 86'd.

Subcircus was indeed from England, a quartet of musicians that included Tommas Arnby, Nikolaj Bloch, Peter Bradley, Jr., and George Brown. The foursome came together in the mid-1990s, making a name for themselves on the club circuit before releasing their debut album, Carousel, in 1996; it hit the United States market the following year. And that’s about all we heard from them. The group became another random band, one nobody had heard of prior and I don't think anybody has heard much from them since. Well, I see they released their follow-up in 2000 but I don’t think it was enough noise to grab anyone’s attention this side of the pond.

While I liked the track and it got moderate airplay on the station, it never blossomed into the hit that I think the band or label hoped. However I did get a chuckle many months later when our Tuesday preview disk arrived and I noticed that 86’d was included on the disc. Wow – were we really that far ahead of the game for once? While I now see this might be due to album being released at different times in England and the United States, at the time, the music director and I found it a triumph for the station. We had gotten the full album what seemed like a year before the preview disc people thought the song was popular enough to include.

We were happy, we were boasting, but I just don’t think anyone cared at that point.

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86’d
(Subcircus)
Subcircus
From the album Carousel
1996

The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder

As undergraduates it was inevitable that we would be required to enroll in the advanced television course where our chief assignment was to create our own television program. The most time-consuming aspect wasn't writing or shooting but rather editing together our various clips of video. Because the video editing bays were always in use during the day - either by television station staff, lab practicum classes, or someone else enrolled in the advance television course – we had the option of signing up for "overnight editing," which I must confess could be as miserable as it sounds.

Once you requested this nighttime shift you were expected to be at your video bay that night at ten o'clock and working – be that until midnight or six the next morning. But cooped into the closet-sized space with noisy equipment and a just-as-annoying collaborator for more than thirty minutes easily took its toll. Breaks were frequent, as were the late-night delivered pizzas from the local joint a few blocks away (with Zero bars for desert from the machine upstairs). When it was time to get away, students stumbled in a daze toward the newsroom for fresh air, something to eat, a chance to chat with whoever else was still around, and catch some late night television. The program of choice?

Tom Snyder.

During the spring of 1997 and the following 1997-98 school year, those of us stuck in the communication building had regular visits with Tom and The Late Late Show. Usually a couple nights each week we were Tom's audience, lounging on bulky furniture or sprawled across the floor with our minds unwinding after hours of school and work. How we managed to frequently miss our bed times (and still make it to class later that day) still amazes me a decade later, and so I assume there must have been some magic in those pictures flying in the air. How we first found Tom is an answer lost to the ages but there was something about this erudite man that we all gravitated toward. Even students who seldom fraternized with others during the day, and who would be working overnight to complete a project, might meet by chance and soon find themselves sharing a laugh with Tom and the rest of us. One thing that made it special was the fact that there wasn't then – and isn’t now – anything else like the colorcast: the atmosphere of the studio, the long-form topics discussed, and the wide spectrum of guests whose discussions could evoke a difference of opinion or a giddy laugh from the host. We never called in – we often thought about it – and so we just listened. And if the guest wasn’t grabbing our attention for whatever reason, we just listened to Tom.

We in the audience laughed a lot, too – at stories about trains, dogs, the Companion, or whatever else; at his banter with the stage crew; at the quick-witted mockery when things went awry; and the jokes he shared from other viewers:

When did Pinocchio realize he was made of wood and not a real boy?
The day his hand caught on fire.

And then somewhere in the mix we remembered we were there for a reason and we had work to do. Out of courtesy we waited until a commercial to make our less-than-energetic exit.

The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder debuted on the CBS Network in January of 1995, and ran for over 800 episodes, coming to a close on a Friday night in 1999.

While we mourn his passing, we quaff a colortini to the man who helped get us through those late, late nights.

Good night, Tom.

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The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder
Theme Music Composed and Performed by
(David Sanborn)