Alice Cooper and The Group Image on WKBS-TV Channel 48

 

Hello, and welcome back!

Today is the 40th anniversary of the sign-off of Philadelphia's beloved UHF TV station WKBS Channel 48. One of my most popular articles is a love letter to this station, so I won't repeat myself here. Suffice it to say, it was the TV home of my childhood.

In looking up some footage related to the station today, I came across two musical performances that were recorded at the station during the late '60s to be featured on a local dance show hosted by late radio host Hy Lit. They are nothing I would have expected to see on Channel 48 in general or Lit's show in particular, but here they are in their psychedelic glory.

The first performance is by a band called The Group Image. I hadn't heard of them until today, and considering they only released one album in 1968, it's doubtful many others have heard of them either. But they seem to be having a great time in this fun performance, shown here in raw footage meant to be edited into the final cut of the show at a later time. Here are The Group Image performing their song "Hiya."

Also from 1968 is a particularly interesting performance, as it has to be one of the earliest TV appearances of Alice Cooper. Here they are performing "Reflected," a song off their first album that they would later rework into the song "Elected," which appeared on their legendary album Billion Dollar Babies.

If the song is unable to stream via embedding, you can watch the performance directly on YouTube here.

Have a great Labor Day Weekend! I hope you had a great summer, and here's hoping we all have a fantastic fall ahead!

Bye Bye, Desktop Computer!

 

After many years of lying dormant, I finally put our 20-year-old tower-style desktop computer out to pasture. It hasn’t worked correctly for years (I don’t even know how many), and even if it did work, it’s far too obsolete to be valuable today.

I took it to a local computer repair guy because my wife and I wanted to save any personal files we had on there (family photos, old teacher files of my wife's, music files, etc.), if they could be saved at all (the computer didn’t even start up correctly, so I was skeptical to say the least).

Fortunately, he was in fact able to get the files off of the hard drive. He saved them to a separate drive as well as giving us the old hard drive. I looked through the files saved and couldn’t believe what was on there. There was stuff I didn’t remember we had. Some of it personal, some of it inconsequential, all of it no more recent than 2014. It was like time travel!

So anyway, above is the shell of the desktop, keyboard, speakers, and monitor. We bought this in the early 2000s; definitely before 2006. It ran on Windows XP operating system, and it only had 256K of RAM when we bought it! Soon it will be picked up by an e-recycler or just put in the trash. I can’t imagine any use this equipment would have today.

I can’t say I feel nostalgic about this computer—it really wasn’t very good—but just the fact that it sat in our basement for so, so long—over 15 years at our current home, and at our previous house for a few years before that—and now it won’t, feels weird.

End of old computer rant.