The Live shows broadcast from Electric Lady studios had no commercial
interruptions and used the Sansui QS Quad matrix system for encoding
(including the MC's live lead-in commercial for, what else, quad audio gear at
Willoughby Peerless Audio, followed by the MC's live introduction, etc.).
The Guess Who performance is musically very good, but it is actually quite
'jazzy' and focuses much more on their later 'blusey & jazzy' AOR-type
material than on their earlier Top 40-type hits.
By some strange quirk of fate, the Kinky Friedman tape turned out to be
Kinky's (and his band's) absolutely tightest & best-ever performance. It
was also sufficiently 'politically incorrect' (to apply a term that didn't
exist at the time) that it is still fun to remember that it went out over
the air live, long before we've become jaded in the era of 'shock radio'.
(Frankly, I always thought this live broadcast had more than just a little
to do with the demise of WQIV, serving as ammunition for the WNCN Listener's
Guild in their 'back to classical' format war against WQIV.)
As an aside, in the mid 80's, when Kinky first became a mystery writer of
some note and was in Seattle (where I now live) on a book-signing tour, I
gave him a copy of the tape. He said he sort of remembered the performance
- and that it had been one of, if not the absolute, all-time best - and then
he had the store manager put it on the store's PA (to the store manager's
great consternation, as this tape of his 'much-too-raucous-for-polite
company' performance played on...). Several years later, at another book
signing in Seattle, Kinky remembered that I had given him the tape, saying,
'It's one of my prize possessions - I keep it in my hope chest...'. In
1995, when Kinky eventually released his second career retrospective CD,
'From One Good American To Another', he included several cuts from this live
'Electric Lady' performance on it, minus any of the between-song banter (and
with the year of recording mis-identified on the liner notes). Frankly, the
cuts sound better on my tape than on his CD. I later had the opportunity to
ask Kinky if the live 'Electric Lady' cuts on the CD had come from the tape
I had given him, or if he had gotten them from some other source. His
response, with a wink, was, 'Ask my lawyer, Sonny Corleone...'.
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