Archive for September, 2009

By Joe Klein

Okay, I admit it. We haven’t blogged in quite some time, taking a few months off to work on lots of other projects. Plus there was a lot of travelling (and a bit of vacationing) since our last writing!

Interspersed between completing jobs and coordinating projects, I, personally, managed to visit some cool places and catch some great shows, including a few great oldies acts in my current home base of Laughlin, NV. Since early spring, some great artists appeared, including Eric Burdon (of the Animals), former Righteous Brother Bill Medley, Tommy James, Felix Cavalerie (from The Rascals), former Monkee Davey Jones, Gary Puckett (lead singer of the Union Gap) and “Bad To The Bone Man” George Thorogood. I caught most of the shows, and they were great. Here’s a couple of shots of me with Tommy James and Bill Medley taken a few months back when they appeared in Laughlin.

At the end of August, I ventured to Chicago for a big family event over the Labor Day Weekend. (I was born in Chicago and still have family there.) New Media Creative’s “voice of god,” Bill Fortune, is a lifetime resident of Chicago (except for a few short periods when he worked in other cities as a disc jockey). Bill has a very nice pad in the suburb of Palatine and I stayed with Bill for a couple days before checking into a Skokie hotel for the family events on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday.

Sunday night Bill and I met up in Schaumburg (not too far from Bill’s home) for the second night of the 2009 SeptemberFest. The SeptemberFest is a huge festival that happens every year over the Labor Day Weekend. The event is staged in a very large park in the heart of Schaumburg, and features lots of big carnival rides, carny style game booths, a huge bingo game to support charities, dozens of food booths with faire from many of Chicago’s most popular restaurants and nightly free concerts staged on a huge lawn in the park. Saturdays and Sundays are the biggest days, of course, and the concerts on those nights usually feature pretty big name bands, or, more accurately, bands that were big names several years back. Saturday night Randy Bachman performed (and we couldn’t attend due to my big day of family stuff) and Sunday night’s concert featured Starship with Mickey Thomas, joined by Bobby Kimball, the former lead singer of the hot seventies and eighties band, Toto.

As it happens, I hired Bobby Kimball to sing lead on some very cool radio station jingles I produced over thirty years ago (way back in 1976) and, about two years later, Toto was formed and really took off, with hits like “Hold The Line,” “Rosanna” and “Africa.” I had also hired a couple of other members of the band (Jeff Porcaro and Steve Lukather) to play on recording sessions for other projects (not related to the radio jingles) in the seventies. So when Toto took off, it was really exciting, and I partied with the hot, new band on a couple of occasions in the late seventies.

The concert at SeptemberFest was really great. Each year they build a large and very respectable outdoor concert stage and, with at least 50,000 people assembled on the massive lawn in front of the stage, the concert resembles a mini-Woodstock event. The show lasted a little over an hour and a half, and was then followed by an awesome fireworks show that lasted over twenty minutes and was, admittedly, one of the best fireworks displays I’ve ever seen! The SeptemberFest is really a HUGE event that attracts over a quarter million people every year, and this year marked the 39th year of the annual festival. Kudos to the city of Schaumburg for staging a truly memorable event, for me at least.

Another cool thing about attending was having a chance to meet, for the first time, a fellow blogger named Kent Kotal, who maintains a cool blog at his website, ForgottenHits.com. The blog, which grew out of a twice weekly newsletter that Kent has been sending out for many years, is centered around fifties, sixties and seventies oldies music, radio, the Chicago music scene and, during the summer, baseball, of course! Kent is, admittedly a real “die-hard” fan of sixties and seventies oldies. Kent loves stories about oldies radio, radio in general from the sixties and seventies and other subjects related to oldies music, sports and Chicago itself. He still sends out the newsletter twice a week via email to a mailing list of a few thousand friends and fellow fans, and updates the blog several times a week. The blog contains many of the stories contained in the newsletter. This past summer, Kent featured scores of blog entries, stories and shared memories from the “summer of Woodstock,” forty years ago in 1969.

Kent is a really great, dedicated and hard working guy and his blog and newsletter have built up a loyal following of music artists, songwriters, record producers and deejays, who contribute their own stories and comments by emailing them to Kent on a regular basis. So the blog and newsletter has, in its own small way, become an invaluable source for news about oldies, radio and the Chicago music scene. It’s now a great place where many people involved in the radio in music business a few decades ago (myself included) can write—and read—stories about the music and radio business that can’t be found anywhere else! The blog and newsletter also, sadly, serve the purpose of a kind of “oldies obit page” and are often the first source for the sad news of the passing of a forgotten, but notable, music or radio legend from bygone days. The blog is really worth checking out if your in to oldies or radio from the era, and, at the blog, you can click on an email link and sign up for the email newsletter as well. The Forgotten Hits blog can be found here.

It was great meeting Kent and attending the concert with him and his wife and my old pal and partner Bill. With all the people amassed on the lawn, we chose not to try and sit too close to the stage. The have a huge, thirty foot wide projection screen and display a very nice four camera shoot of the concert. So we sat back a bit and off to the side and enjoyed the show as a TV broadcast on a huge big screen with the most awesome sound system around!

Here are a few shots from  the 2009 Septemberfest. There are shots of Mickey Thomas and Bobby Kimball (taken from the big screen) a shot of Bobby Kimball and myself backstage after the show (where Bobby appears like “The Ghost Of Toto’s Past” because I think the camera was at the wrong setting) and a picture Kent Kotal, Bill Fortune and myself at the festival.

Chicago was a blast, and, having to travel there from Laughlin, I was forced to make an overnight stop-over in Las Vegas going and coming home. It was a burden, but thanks to the Hard Rock Hotel for lightening the load! Stayed in their brand new tower on the top floor. Check out a few shots of the cool new rooms and the awesome view of the infamous Rehab pool and the Vegas Strip from the south facing rooms in the Paradise Tower…..

Now that I am back at home base (at least for a few weeks before my next trip, which will be to Los Angeles at the end of the month) it’s time to settle down and move into the next projects that are up on the board. Look for a cool story soon about my close friend, Russ Terrana (who was the chief engineer of Motown Records from 1966 until 1988 and mixed a large percentage of the label’s biggest hits). More stories and updates in the weeks to come and, hopefully, on a more regular basis now until the end of the year!