The Beach Boys
Imus In The Morning
2006-07-06 [July 6, 2006]

[two days after the 4th of July, altho' this never gets mentioned anywhere herein]

(There's a listing on etree for this show, but it shows the date 7/5/06. The source for my above-listed date is merely what I wrote down on the post-it attached to the CD papersleeve; so I guess there's a slight discrepancy, but all thing being equal, I'm going with ME.)

originating station:
WFAN-AM, New York NY
national syndicator:
Westwood One (USA)
television simulcaster:
MSNBC(USA)

[Imus's show has hopscotched bases of operation (originating stations/studios, national syndicators, television simulcasters) a number of times over the years. While the MSNBC participation is confirmed by internal reference, the rest of the information shown here about its provenience at the time of this broadcast is gleaned from Wikipedia: salt to taste.]

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Old joke: when is a door NOT a door? When it's ajar [ouch!].
Corollary: when are The Beach Boys NOT The Beach Boys? When there's no-one with the name 'Wilson' in the band. Nevertheless, here we go:

PERSONNEL
Mike Love: lead vocals, ego
Bruce Johnston: lead vocals

plus:
Scott Totten: acoustic guitar, harmony vocals
Tim Bonhomme: keyboards
John Cowsill: keyboards, drums, harmony vocals

??? [possibly Brian Eichenberger] bass guitar, harmony vocals
??? [possibly Mike Kowalski] drums
???

NB: Sorry for the incomplete musician info, boys & girls - - - although I would much prefer to be The Compleat Archivist, and have ALL my ducks in a row before uploading anything, there are just some details beyond the reach of ordinary research. Recently when I uploaded a Southside Johnny session from Imus In The Morning, I had a devil of a time identifying all the personnel. In the final analysis, my most authoritative tool was the lone YouTube clip I found from that event: I got to sorta play C.S.I. Asbury, trying to match faces glimpsed in the video with pictures I could find online of the (un)Usual Suspects. But I can currently find no such resource for this session. The only applicable YouTube video I was able to conjure up is c. 8 seconds long (??!!), just shows ML and BJ plus one other guy - - - not much help*. The guitarplayer and the keyboardplayer are (faintly) introduced during the last song, and John Cowsill is alluded to when Imus asks ML why the band is changing drummers for one song. So those are the only people I can identify with any confidence. I'm not even sure exactly how many people were there: I hear bass parts (and something that sounds like "Tom on bass" can also muddily be heard during the band introductions), and I assume there's another drummer based on the 'switching drummers' exchange. The '???' names here are just ones gleaned from a Wikipedia timeline roster, so (of course) NaCl suggested.

As usual, anyone with any definitive information, please contribute . . .

* Although according to Wikipedia MSNBC cable didn't start simulcasting the 6:00- 9:00 AM portion of the radio show until September 1996, videoclips from this and earlier shows seem to exist. Ostensibly this full performance does therefore exist on video (perhaps even somewhere in my VHS collection)[see MIXING/EDITING NOTES below].

HOST/INTERVIEWER
Don Imus
SIDEKICK
Charles McCord

Imus's official bio describes him (besides radio host and author) as "philanthropist." The etymology of the word 'philanthropy' = love of mankind. Imus's love for his fellow man can be heard at the beginning of this episode, when he describes people whose homes are being foreclosed as "screwin' a bank." Oh, those poor Wall Street billionaires! - - - one can only pray that they found the strength to carry on afer being so mistreated by the [now-] homeless people whose houses they were repossessing. Maybe knowing they had the I-man's sympathy helped.

TRACKLISTING
01 - interview
02 - All Summer Long
03 - Make Love Not War
04 - Good Timin'
05 - Cool Head, Warm Heart
06 - Fun, Fun, Fun
07 - Surfin' U.S.A.

total duration: 29m:33s

PERFORMANCE NOTES
Imus and The Beach Boys are not actually in the same location: the band performs in MSNBC's Secaucus NJ studio, Imus kibbitzes via satellite from his ranch in New Mexico.

The second song performed may in fact be (at least up to now) an officially unreleased Mike Love composition.** Mike Love references an upcoming CD release (with Peter Max graphics), but (at least as far as I can google) said CD (and therefore said song) never actually saw the light of day.

The other 'new' Mike Love opus is from a boutique CD available only at Hallmark greeting card stores. I remember going like a dutiful lemming to my local Hallmark store to complete my BB collection. When I asked the (very nice) lady behind the counter whether I really needed to also buy 3 stupid birthday cards in order to earn the privilege of buying the CD, she (to paraphrase the immortal words of The Band) just grinned and shook her head, and 'No' was all she said - - - and she rang it up. Boo-yah!!

** Except Kenny Loggins wrote it 20 years earlier. Cf
https://youtu.be/XrqrpMFxMo8

RECORDING NOTES
source: FM

equipment:
Onkyo TX-8410 receiver > Sony RCD-W500C standalone CD burner

AUDIO NOTES
imaging: mono

In my first Imus In The Morning torrent offering, I erroneously assumed that Imus's NY flagship broadcasts originated from an FM station. But alert TTD member docinwestchester pointed out that WFAN (NY) was an AM station. This explained something I was having a hard time comprehending: why the segments seemed to be in mono. Evidently Westwood One saw no need to remix the mono WFAN feed into stereo for syndication. My dubs were made from a local [Boston] host station: the bumpers and commercials inserted locally were stereo (compounding my confusion), but the Imus content remained mono.

There were slight, almost imperceptible fluctuations between the L and R RMS level meters when I transcoded the recorded bitstream to wav in Sound Forge. I had initially ascribed these to evidence of some (slight) stereo separation, but I now attribute them to anomalies (inconsistencies) inherent in imprecise satellite transmission. Accordingly, I pasted the stronger (louder) signal from one channel into the other channel to achieve a 'true' mono mixdown.

sound quality: very good (9 out of 10?)
(mp3 samples in comments)

TECHNICAL NOTES
generation: transfer from 1st generation off-air recording

transfer lineage:
FM > CD-R >
Exact Audio Copy v. 1.0 [secure mode] (extract audio from CD, glitch detection & removal) > HD >
Sony Sound Forge v. 11.0 (stitch segments together, pan stronger channel to middle to create true mono mix)
Audacity v. 2.0.6 (track splits) >
Traders Little Helper v. 2.7.0 (check SBEs, create level 8 FLAC files) >
bitTorrent

format: 44.1 kHz / 16 bit [CD compliant]

file size: 119 MB

MIXING/EDITING NOTES
Capturing Imus In The Morning guest appearances all-inclusively was tricky. The bands didn't perform in one continuous segment: they would do a song, come back in a later section (maybe an hour later) and do another song or an interview, &c. Their various poppings-up were not meticulously billboarded: it would just sorta abruptly be 'Okay, and here they are again . . .' My recording strategy was to capture every relevant piece: certainly all music and conversation, but also any mentions of the band that might be interspersed with the news and Imus 'comedy' bits. This required a fairly close listen to the entire four and a half (!!) hours of the show, in case something relevant would suddenly start happening. You had to be (in the immortal words of Shane) "Fast... fast on the draw." To make sure nothing got missed, I had to start listening at 5:30 AM - - - not easy on occasions when I had been out rocking (i.e., mercilessly exploiting some OTHER band) the nite before, and didn't get in 'til 2:00 AM.*** (Plus I was supposed to be at work by 9:00!).

Needless to say, there were a lot of false starts (when it seemed that the band was just about to come back, but didn't); you could expunge separate unwanted sections from a CD-R on the fly before it was finalized (but not after). And sometimes things got missed as I sat, half-asleep, trying to keep track of what was going on and filter out all the unwanted content without missing anything desired. As a result of all this fogginess, and the inability to focus on one and only one segment of the programme, some of my Imus captures are incomplete (the very beginning of a song or interview M.I.A. f'rinstance); but I don't think there's anything missing from this session.

So what you have here is a bunch of separate segments stretched out over a few hours' time, but stitched together to sound (as much as possible) like one fluid presentation.

Also, to make things more complicated, for a time the middle portion (6:00 - 9:00 AM) of the Imus show was simulcast on cable TV. Simulcasting made recording things byzantine. The FM and the CATV versions were pretty far out of whack --- not just by seconds, but sometimes by minutes --- as the MSNBC telecast inserted news updates in completely different places. Parts of the appearances that were on the radio were not on TV and vice versa (at least not where I lived). Sometimes the bumpers (showing or talking to the band after a song was done) were much longer on TV: the FM would throw it back to the local host station, but TV would keep going from Secaucus. Thus you couldn't just tape one or the other (FM or TV) and come away feeling you had the whole kit & kaboodle. You had to snag both versions to be sure you had everything.**** According to Wikipedia, this particular broadcast does not fall within that purview. But I mention this aspect because if it were telecast in my area [Boston] --- and the fact that clips exist suggest maybe it was --- I would theoretically have that iteration somewhere also. Maybe somewhere down the road that will pop up.

*** I've always wondered whether the performers who do these live early-morning things (this or AM TV like the Today show or Good Morning America) manage to wake up early enough, or just stay up all nite. ML indicates they had to get up early for this.

**** The stop-and-start nature of these presentations, plus the early hour and the 2 different broadcast versions may help explain why these Imus appearances --- tho' widely syndicated --- don't seem to be in circulation. I mean, who else would've been desperate enough (that is to say, COMMENDABLY DEDICATED enough) to bother with all this??

MIKE LOVE NOT WAR DEPT.
Please don't upload this elsewhere. I'll do it myself (if there's anyplace else that'll have it!) if & when the spirit (of america) moves me. Thanks.

- Isotope Feeney
- March 2017