Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes
Imus In The Morning
2005-05-26 [May 26, 2006]

originating station:
WFAN-FM, New York NY
national syndicator:
Westwood One (USA)

[Imus's broadcasts changed bases (originating FM stations/studios, national syndicators, television simulcasters) repeatedly, due in no small part to his controversial (read: asshole) pronouncements about jews and blacks and others beneath [what he perceived to be] his stratum in the universe. These vagaries were more complicated than I cared to keep track of, so the above information about the show's provenance at this particular point in time comes from Wikipedia - - - take it with however much salt you deem appropriate.]

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PERSONNEL
Southside Johnny Lyon
Glenn Alexander: guitar, backing vocals
Bobby Lynch: keyboards, backing vocals
Steve 'Muddy Shews' Shewchuk: bass guitar, backing vocals
Joe Belia: drums
Richie 'La Bamba' Rosenberg: trombone, backing vocals
Mark 'Love Man' Pender: trumpet
Chris Anderson: trumpet
Joey Stann: saxophone
Eddie 'Kingfish' Manion: baritone saxophone

NB: I'm not 100% sure about the personnel list above. There were no band introductions, and the Jukes' lineup = sufficiently fluid (even on a nite-to-nite basis) to leave room for doubt. What I'm showing here is largely visual identification, based on the one YouTube clip from the session (see below). But if anyone has better information, please contribute . . .

HOST/INTERVIEWER
Don Imus
SIDEKICK
Charles McCord

TRACKLISTING
01 - introduction
.....I Don't Want To Go Home
02 - Cadillac Jack's Number One Son
03 - interview
.....Imus 'comedy' bit
04 - When Rita Leaves
.....When Rita Leaves (reprise)
05 - Happy
06 - Having A Party
.....Imus wrap-up

total duration: 31m:35s

PERFORMANCE NOTES
Ostensibly the band is making the rounds to promote their then-current CD Into The Harbour. It may have been their intention to do a few more [than 2] songs from it during this, but Imus quashes that strategy by whining for the more familiar chestnuts (I Don't Want To Go Home, Having A Party). Also, just in case anyone listening WAS inspired to go out and buy Southside's latest, Imus torpedoes that by informing listeners (during his wrap-up) that Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes are really more of a live band anyway. Gee, thanks Don!!

After finishing When Rita Leaves, SSJ says that Mark Pender wants another crack at his solo (as he supposedly made a mistake (but I can't hear one)), so they pick it up from his solo and do a short reprise.

There's a caesura towards the end of Having A Party before band goes into vamp . . . Imus evidently thinks the song is over and can be heard talking.

RECORDING NOTES
source: FM

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

AUDIO NOTES
imaging: stereo [barely]

When I first pulled this out of the mothballs and gave it a listen (undoubtedly for the first time since the day it was broadcast!) I thought it was in mono. I couldn't figure out why that would be: an error on my part (hit the mono button on receiver by mistake)? or [as I sometimes had to] chose mono reception over stereo to filter out overpowering FM static? In any event, I was a little deflated with (what I thought was) a second-rate capture. But when transcoding to wav, I noticed that there were slight, almost imperceptible differences between the levels of L and R channels; plus there was a sting (bumper) [briefly heard in this edit] from the local host station, and it was in ping-pong stereo. So I realized that this was in fact a stereo mix, just not VERY stereo. The local (Boston area) station that carried the syndicated programme was a [predictably right-of-Richelieu] FM talk station, and I guess talk radio in general doesn't have much need of stereo in its broadcasts [no necessity to separate left from right when it's ALL right (wing --- haha!!)]. Anyway, as 'mono-ized' as this recording seems, I'm pretty sure that's the way it was mixed and broadcast all over - - - like everything else in the universe, it is what it is.

[To satisfy my curiosity as to how much fuller things COULD have sounded if liberated from the constrictions of a 'talk-radio' mixdown, I remixed a tiny snippet of one song into wider stereo, which I include in the comments.]

sound quality: excellent
(mp3 samples in comments)

TECHNICAL NOTES
transfer lineage:
1st generation off-air CD >
Exact Audio Copy v. 1.0 [secure mode] (extract audio from CD) > HD >
DeGlitch (glitch detection & repair) >
Sony Sound Forge v. 11.0 (stitch segments together) (see MIXING/EDITING NOTES)
Audacity v. 2.0.6 (track splits) >
Traders Little Helper v. 2.7.0 (align SBEs, create level 8 FLAC files) >
bitTorrent

format: 44.1 kHz / 16 bit [CD compliant]

file size: 192 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) "Quick... quick 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!). And all of this was exacerbated by the fact that I was NOT a fan of the I-man's brand of humour, so found the non-music interludes pretty tedious.** But I did it all for YOU, my peeps (which is, of course, a lie -- - I did it all for ME. Yaaay!!)

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 yet still filter out all the unwanted content from my recordings and my consciousness. 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 believe this one has all the pertinent pieces. I opine this not based on any specific memory of this chapter of things, but because if something from a broadcast got missed I would make a note to that effect and put it in the envelope with the CD - - - and there is no such notation with this.

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. According to Wikipedia, this particular broadcast does not fall within that purview. I mention this aspect only because if it were telecast, I would theoretically have that iteration somewhere also. I suppose I should recall that too (along with whether or not I grabbed all the germane pieces of the radio version), but this was over a decade ago, folks, and I
just...
don't...
remember.
One of the reasons that the simulcasting made things so much more complicated = that 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.***

Despite the fact that (again according to Wikipedia) this segment doesn't fall within the timeframe of the CATV simulcasts, there exists on YouTube an MSNBC clip of one of the songs:

https://youtu.be/FNdtwrC4e7k
https://youtu.be/MybBd7asYSY

These are 2 different clips of the same performance. The second one is less complete, but seems to be of somewhat better picture quality. For a period where there supposedly was no simulcasting, why there exists a videoclip (especially with production values: not just one stationary camera but multiple cameras swooping around) of a radio gig I can't figure. Maybe the full performance WAS telecast, and if so I (like I said) should have it archived somewhere. Maybe down the road...

After the band had finished its last song, Imus and his sidekick did a wrap-up - - - the type of thing I would typically want to include in a finished edit, as a part of the whole opus. In this particular instance, my recording ran long (prob. for safety's sake - - - you can never be quite sure they're 100% finished talking about the band), and continued into a segment where they started talking about baseball instead. During all of this, you can hear the band in the background, tearing down equipment. I left all of that interlude, even the baseball conversation, in this edit. In at least a couple of spots one of the voices audible in the distance sounds like Southside's. I dunno if Southside Johnny commands the kind of obsessive collecting mania that certain other artistes do --- where some people would want every available femtosecond of audio possible --- but just in case he does to that one person, I figured the price of admission was the same (zilch) even with an extra coupla minutes of unrelated yak, captured by happenstance, at the end.

* 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.

** Of course there may be some reading this who consider Imus the re-embodiment of Mark Twain, Rabelais and Lenny Bruce combined. To them all I can say is: Sorry!

*** 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, WONDERFUL enough) to bother with all this??

I'M SO ANXIOUS DEPT.
Please don't upload this elsewhere. I'll do it myself if & when the spirit moves me. Thanks.

- Isotope Feeney
- March 2017