Michiguide will be reborn as Michimedia. Mike Austerman's superb media website will transfer to Bob Simonson of Grand Rapids. Mike tells us that Bob will operate it as Michimedia.net beginning on or shortly after September 1st. Michiguide.com will cease operations on August 31st.

Gary Stevens' brand of energy was a key component of the WKNR sound. Although his year and half run in Detroit was relatively brief, he left an unforgettable impression. Whether it was his Wollyburger gobbling everything in sight or the hyperkinetic way he introduced the hits, Gary Stevens set a standard for afternoon drive that terrified and destroyed the competition. Here, from the Jim Donahue collection are the last two hours of Gary's last show on Keener in March of 1965. Gary pulls out all the stops, including a session with Sigmund Frog, promos for a weekend in London with the Dave Clark Five, and a top 13 countdown loaded with Motown and British pop. In one segment, he nearly destroys the station when the tape cartridge machines all fail at the same time. The air check concludes with Gary's goodbyes and Bob Green's take on how the Keener magic transcends time an space. We've left most of the commercials intact so you can hear the wide variety of clients that Keener attracted in it's prime.
The Last Gary Stevens Show - March, 1965 5.5MB

Michiguide shutting down? Say it ain't so! For nearly 7 years, Mike Austerman has maintained one of the web's most robust Michigan broadcasting sites. www.michiguide.com has been an unparalleled source for breaking news, links to coverage of the fifth estate and an ultra-accurate aggregation of Michigan broadcasting history. Like keener13.com, Michiguide has been a non-profit labor of love. Lately, with increasing personal and professional responsibilities, Mike has found it to be more labor than love. So he is ceasing operations on August 31. His site notes that a tentative deal has been struck to preserve much of the content, but whoever may decide to take the project on will have some big shoes to fill. So, if you haven't yet visited this terrific website, do so soon before Michiguide fades into history.

So long, Honey. WHNE, who began her career as a Birmingham automated FM oldies station ends her final incarnation on the 1290 AM frequency that was once Ann Arbor's WOIA. As The Ann Arbor News reports, WHNE becomes WLBY, the metro Detroit outlet for Air America, the liberal radio network. Del Shannon replaced by Al Franken?

Susan Whitall's piece on Wilson Pickett reminds me of how glad I am that Barry Gordy didn't get him. Atlantic gave WP the opportunity to showcase that raw talent in a way that the Motown formula might have toned down. And even though we love the Funk Brothers, there was something about that Stax / Muscle Shoals sound that electrified everyone who grabbed the microphone.

As anyone who ever witnessed Scott Regen's Motown Monday's at the Roostertail knows, there's nothing like a live performance when all the parts come together. One of my favorite recordings is the Monterey Pop LP with Otis Redding. It was Booker T and the MGs backing him up on Try a Little Tenderness, but the Stax influence is unmistakable. That show is on my top 10 "Wish I'd Been There" concert list. He was the last act of the evening and from the moment he rocketed on stage singing Shake, the crowd was in the palm of his hand. It's a testament to the producers that they left that final cut on the collection even though somebody bumped the reel-to-reel half way through the recording causing an instant of David Seville imperfection that nobody dared touch with a razor blade.

I can imagine Wilson working the same magic in a hundred different dives during his ride up and down the roller coaster of fame. The smoke, the beer, the sweat, all mixing with that intimate, claustrophobic ambiance of small barrooms packed well beyond the fire code. Thundering, primal energy vibrating out from the too-small stages crammed with keyboards, drums, amplifiers and the other tools of the trade. The fusion of blues and soul, giving a caesarian birth to funk, right before our ears.

When I moved to Jacksonville, I complained, as usual, about the lousy radio stations in town. My wife has heard this at every stop since we moved out of Michigan in the 80s and she finally said, “You’ve got a million CDs, make your own radio station.” That was a challenge I couldn’t resist and a month or so later, I was blasting our favorite tunes through the house with a simple set up using a computer with Winamp, a cross fade plug-in and some cheap Juke Box rotation software that seemed to mimic Selector. That box runs a tighter board than I ever did and I hear exactly what I want all the time.

Now I learn that more and more of you are doing the same thing, either with a PC or with an IPod. Keenerfans, if you were programming your own radio station, what would your music mix be? Are you stuck in the 60s or would you include some Boz Scaggs and some Dave Matthews?

Hope on over to the Keener Bulletin Board and give us your list of your current Top 50 faves (or your Top 10, if 50 is too much work). Don’t limit yourself to the Keener era and don't worry about picking a "number one song", but think of stuff that gets your heart pounding and makes you want to turn up that car radio when the song comes on.

We’ll compile em all and make a new Keenerfans Hot 100.

At some point, we should make a list of the top 100 Detroit personalities of the WKNR era. When we do, Joe Falls will be near the top. He was one of the first bylines we looked for whenever we opened the sports section. His knowledge was encyclopedic, his opinions were often hotly debated and his love for the games people play was palpable. He witnessed every major sporting event that made history in Detroit. He shared our joys and heartbreaks and helped make sense of it all in prose that sprang from his keyboard with the intensity of a lightning bolt. At news conferences, he seemed to always ask the one question everybody else missed.. The question that often defined the story. I crossed paths with him only once, the day Judd Heathcote announced that Ervin Johnson was turning pro. He sat in the back of the room but everybody knew he was there. To some of us it seemed as if he had divined the details weeks earlier, and was just waiting for the prophecy he had so elegantly documented in his column to be fulfilled. His death, of heart failure on August 11th, leaves a gaping hole in the Detroit News masthead, but he lives on in the generation of sports writers who were fundamentally and irrevocably influenced by his professionalism and his class.

In the shadow of Motown, Ann Arbor radio is evolving. WAAM's makeover continues with a new website. Not much local content remains outside of the morning show and Ted Heusel's Saturday program. Meanwhile, the old WPAG studios are again the home of a broadcasting facility where it's all about local. I stopped in to see what remained of my old haunts a while back. Gone is the second floor beauty salon and it's smelly chemicals that used to permeate the entire building. Most of the executive area of the former Washtenaw Broadcasting Company is now a yoga center. All that's radio is the large production room and the original control room area. It's Ann Arbor Alive, Jim Griffin's vision of the future, where we're all on line and the tunes come to our PCs and PDAs. Current magazine's profile tells the story of how music returned to the Hutzel Building.

Many of the Keener13.com faithful have written asking if we will be bringing Keener back for this years Woodward Dream Cruise. Last year's show was an adventure. It was scheduled for both Friday night and all day Saturday. Bob Berry, Orlando's favorite afternoon drive personality and long time Keenerfan produced a great series of interviews with the likes of Scott Morgan (The Rationals), Peter Noone (Herman's Hermits), Bob Green and Scott Regen for the Friday program. It turned out to be the greatest story never told as the historic blackout of 2003 silenced the famed WKNR transmitter facility all Friday night. The station returned to the air just 13 minutes prior to our Saturday Noon start time and the program came off without incident, event though WXDX was not broadcasting at full power for much of the day. Since then several things have happened. Steve returned to Detroit from AOL to lead the Infinity radio cluster, including Official Dream Cruise Station WOMC, and Scott rejoined corporate life as a Vice President in the Mediacom Communications organization. So as a result of our new affiliations and the lack of free time to put together a program worthy of the WKNR legacy, we decided it was better to leave our two years as Keener Dream Cruise producers to the history books. Sure, we'll miss it big time. There is no bigger thrill than driving the big W and hearing those great WKNR sounds. But we encourage those of you who recorded those broadcasts to load em up in your cassette players and turn it up loud and proud all weekend long. Will Keener resurface in 2005? Only time will tell.

One of the most prolific talents of the last 50 years was Jackson Beck. From radio's golden age through the Saturday Night Live era, Beck's perfect baritone could be heard on everything from the Superman radio series to Aqua Fresh toothpaste commercials. It's unlikely you would recognize the unfamiliar face at left, but Keener kids will instantly connect with him as the voice of Bluto in over 100 Popeye cartoons. If you're still rusty on the trademarked Jackson Beck delivery, rent Woody Allen's "Take The Money And Run", which Beck narrates, or "Radio Days" in which he portrays an unseen newscaster describing the rescue of a trapped child. Beck worked well into his 80s and when he died on July 28th at the age of 92, another chapter in broadcasting history concluded.