Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald In Quad??

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mtgc

600 Club - QQ All-Star
Joined
Mar 3, 2004
Messages
669
Location
Cedartown, Georgia
Was this song ever in quad in any format?

If this isn't the proper place for this question, please place it in the right place.

Thanks,

MTGC (Michael)
 
No, only "Sundown" and "Cold on the Shoulder" made it to quad from Gordon Lightfoot. I think "Edmund" was on "Endless Wire", which missed the quad era by a year or so.
 
No, only "Sundown" and "Cold on the Shoulder" made it to quad from Gordon Lightfoot. I think "Edmund" was on "Endless Wire", which missed the quad era by a year or so.

Actually it was on the previous album, SUMMERTIME DREAM. Decent album, but "Edmund" I've never liked much at all, hard to figure how it became a hit while so many other Lightfoot gems did not. Ah, well....

ED :)
 
I thought my Japanese CD-4 of the Gordon Lightfoot GH had Fitzgerald on there, or maybe I saw it on a Japanese-only compilation album. Any ideas? Was it on like a demo Q-8? I can't remember, and all my vinyl is packed up, but one thing I know for absolute certainty is we had it at WQSK radio station on a discrete 4-track 10-inch quad reel like syndication houses used to make for direct radio station use only.
 
Gordon Lightfoot GH Japanese cd-4? Does such a thing exist? If you still have it, can I borrow it?
 
There isn't any quad Lightfoot beyond SUNDOWN and COLD, nor any sampler with "Edmund" on it, that I know of.

ED :)

So, like I said, maybe the only copy is the one on the syndication house radio programming reels. We had `em for years when quadracasting, both matrix and discrete, was supposed to take off and didn't, and made our own Q8's out of em.

Lots and I mean lots of supposedly never-heard-of Quad titles were only on syndication house reels that nobody ever saw anyplace else.

I'll email my old chief-of-programming and see if he remembers, being he kept all the reels and sent back poorly-wound blanks on the original reels and in the original boxes to the syndication house once they were expired. If he still has `em, his basement is full with `em.
 
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I would love to get into said basement, assuming all these tapes are there, with a good playback unit and an Akai CR80D-SS 8 track recorder. Talk about seventh heaven!!

MTGC
 
I emailed my old program director at the now-defunct WQSK and he wrote back:

Endi:

It's a good thing you dropped me a line. My wife wants me to throw everything out in the basement that I haven't used in years. I don't have the time to transfer all the tapes to CD, repair all the players, or put them on the Net to sell. So next time you are at your grandmother's house, bring a trailer and a couple big strong big bellied trainee audio engineers and it's all yours for the taking. I still have the old Scully 4 track reel to reels we used to record commercials onto in order to mix down to mono for air, all the leader and splicing tape you could ever want not even out of the wrapper yet, and shelf after shelf after shelf of all the old 10-inch programming reels we used to make trainees record onto carts at 3 in the morning so we could play them on-air. After we empty out the basement, Dolores can fix us guys a feast just like at the station and we can spend the weekend pigging out once we're done. Looking forward to seeing you next time you are home.

Yours,

Mick

So the next time I'll be going home is Christmas.

P.S. Mick is a big old bear of a man in his early 60's about 450 on 5-10
 
OK, is this basement anywhere near Washington, DC? 'Cause man, I can be on call in case the wife can't wait until Christmas!

J. D.
 
Sorry, fellas.

Mick is a recluse that lives in the Northwoods in Western Michigan since he retired early. Traverse City (my original hometown) was too big and too busy, nevermind Detroit where he could've gone into radio engineering easily instead of just being a PD.

But whoever wants to, can go research all the programming houses that were around in the 70's who made quarter inch 4-track discrete and 2-track matrix programming tapes for the few quadracasters there ended up to be.

These same people or close approximations thereof also did exclusive stereo-for-radio from 1957 onwards. Plenty of those tapes are around too, and are often the sources for stereo remasterings of previously-thought-to-be-mono-only titles.

With all of that data, sooner or later somebody can put together the equivalent of a programming-house Harrison book and that should keep everybody busy til I go home for Christmas.

And, sorry again, the feast his wife is fixing us is taken up too.
My two engineering assistants and my two trainees are going home for Christmas with me and will be enjoying Delores' pigout after a hard weekend working in the cold and snow, we'll be snuggled up in my gramma's basement all Norman Rockwell-y.
(ndiamone pukes from all the syrupy sweetness).
 
Would Mick accept someone arriving sooner and surveying the inventory?

OK, let's take a little inventory right here.

We have here a recluse that retired from radio 10 years early because of the plethora of ignorameae and moronic individuals working in radio these days,

who lives in the Northwoods of Western Michigan by choice

that don't even see his kids and grandkids unless its absolutely necessary, and then only for as short of a timespan as he can get away with,

letting a total stranger from a bulletin board who he's never met go trolling in his basement thru his stuff.

You figure it out.

We've known each other since I was 13 attending Broadcasting Charter Academy where his (now late) older brother taught television engineering. My engineering assistants and audio trainees I'm bringing along to help shlep don't even get to come in the house or the basement. They only get to stand outside in the Michigan snow and cold for hours on end loading up the trailer. It's going to be he and I by ourselves in the basement probably for a good three days just trying to organize stuff so we don't have a huge pile of unrelated everything once we get back to California.

What percentage of this is rare and unique?

Dunno. Like I said, it's all special-mixes-for-quad-radio-only. Although if memory serves, many of the mixes are simply a stereo M&E-L (music and effects minus lead) or MMO (music-minus-one, the one being the vocal) with some left to right panning and some ambience and reverb.

I remember in those days us taping just the rear channels off the reel-to-reels onto other reels or cassettes and using that for karaoke true stereo tracks when everybody's Thomson Vocaliminators (a 2-channel front-center and everything-but matrix which only read the vertical modulations of a record monaurally) only gave a mono backing track from whatever record was run through it. So real true stereo karaoke tracks of the real band vs. the karaoke soundalike albums were a big deal in those days.

If he'd've had the time to go doing tracklists of all these hundreds of reels, then he'd have time to tape them into the computer. As he says neither is the case, I tend to take a 60-plus year old man at his word.

And for those of you who say `DA-YAMN' well that's crotchety-ass old raggedy radio engineers for ya.

``Insulate your brainiacs and insulate your maniacs both from each other and from the rest of corporate society unless you want both of them to leave for competing companies who will, leaving you with a plethora of mediocrity.'' Dale Carnegie, 1949

And they are only NOW getting around to teaching that as part of Corporate Management or MBA degrees.
 
Wow, interesting thread. Let's see if i've got this straight: A quad version of "Edmund Fitzgerald", although never released, does acutally exist and is presently sitting among untold treasures in the basement of a 450 pound recluse living in the backwoods of Western Michigan.

I'm not sure what know what i want to know more - What else is in the basement, or what kind of feast Dolores is planning to whip up for Christmas? :) Either way, at the very least this is on track to becoming one of the all-time great QQ threads. Can't wait for the next installment.
 
...A quad version of "Edmund Fitzgerald", although never released, does acutally exist...

MAY exist. As I said up above, I'm sure somebody has the time and interest to compile a radio programming house version of the Harrison Guide. So yinz can quit chompin' at the bit and get to working together on that.Then we'd all know what was what. That should take everybody's mind off til I get back with `em all in January and get to transferring to digital. And I still think that title, among hundreds of others, was one we recorded the rear channels off the reel to reel to use as karaoke.



What else is in the basement?

(See above in previous post.)

What kind of feast Dolores is planning to whip up for Christmas?

The usual homemade Michigan version of a holiday dinner: spiral-cut glazed ham and all the fixings, i.e. praline and walnut sweet potatoes with butter pecan topping, spiced cornbread stuffing, green bean salad with crunchy onion and potato chip topping, and egg chiffon custard pie for dessert.

Now you know how Mick (along with countless other Great Lakes men) got to be 450 pounds in the first place and also how I got to be 320 before I left for California in 1992. Like out here there's Fat Pride and Be Who You Are and don't be introverted about it etc. At home you don't need that, because so is everybody else, and nobody cares about it. Everytime I go home, I blend into the Michigan social fabric so well, nobody there even notices that I'm still a 320 pound Fat Guy.

So eat hardy and have a good weekend fellas. Watch on Monday for the next installment of Barlowe.
 
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