Sunday, June 8, 2008

Jean Shepherd: KNACK VICTIM!

Guys, stop what you are doing. Put down that soldering iron, or that cold Miller High Life ("the champagne of bottled beer") and click on the link below. You will be transported back to 1965, and will hear master story-teller Jean Shepherd (K2ORS) describing his teenage case of The Knack. He discusses his efforts to build a Heising modulated transmitter for 160 meters. He had trouble getting it working, and became obsessed with the problem, obsessed to the point that a girl he was dating concluded that there was "something wrong with him" and that his mother "should take him to a doctor."

This one is REALLY good. It takes him a few minutes to get to the radio stuff, but it is worth the wait. More to follow. EXCELSIOR! FLICK LIVES!

http://ia310115.us.archive.org/2/items/JeanShepherd1965Pt1/1965_01_29_Ham_Radio.mp3

4 comments:

  1. I listened to this Jean Shephard program a few months ago, and got so excited about it, I had my wife listen. Unfortunately, sometimes our spouses don't really understand the problems of being infected by the Knack. Jean, delivers what is going on inside of him very well, and I thought it would give some insight to my wife of what goes on inside us Knack victims. I still don't thing she gets it. :)

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  2. jean talked often of ham radio. there used to be a link you can go to to download most of jean's WOR stuff.

    and i believe it was very legal. link is dead now but i downloaded all i could from there. and am willing to share with anyone interested.

    in the mean time, hit up:

    http://www.flicklives.com/

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  3. I really enjoyed this. I had never heard of Jean before and went looking for other program MP3 files. After a lot of dead ends I found http://www.allpodcasts.com/Directory/Series.aspx?feed=http%3a%2f%2fwww.archive.org%2fdownload%2fbrassfiglageerss.xml_1%2fbrassfiglageerss.xml where there are more available. So far as I can see they are legal.

    I may not have learnt much in life but I did realise enough not to let my wife hear the playback.

    Just goes to show what is out there.

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  4. I sometimes burn the Shep stuff to audio CD and listen while driving someplace in the car. (I often do the same for solder-smoke)

    I managed to burn a CD of Shep where the original recording was done by someone experiencing an electrical storm. Lightning and such.

    I was driving on Oregon's hiway 26 between Seaside and Portland - which is a fairly isolated drive through the woods with wilderness on either side of you. It was around nightfall, in fact, just after sunset, and the weather was Oregon's typical rainy weather. My XYL was asleep as I was driving.

    As I'm listening to Shep on the CD, suddenly, I hear a huge static crash of lightning ---we've all heard this effect. I hear this come through the speakers of my car along with Shep's voice.

    In an instant, while driving, my eyes, in an automatic reation that I cannot control, move to the sky to see if I can determine which direction the lightning is occurring from.

    I then reminded myself that I was listening to a CD, and the static crash I heard on my speakers was from a lightning strike which occurred some 30+ years ago.

    73, and I always enjoy listening to Soldersmoke from here in Oregon. Mark, ki7n

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