The Roots Of THIS IS ROCK 'N' ROLL RADIO: We're Your Friends For Now

Well, this may not be an archeological discovery on a par with, say, The Ark of the Covenant, or the slow version of "Please Please Me" by The Beatles, but it was still a pleasant surprise. Yesterday, while searching for something else in our garage, my lovely wife Brenda found a large bin full of cassette tapes. And among those tapes was the complete run of We're Your Friends For Now, the original, short-lived 1992 precursor to This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl.

We discussed We're Your Friends For Now briefly in a previous blog post, and I've been looking for these tapes for years. The shows weren't lost--Dana says he still has his copies--but I'd been unable to locate my copies since, I think, a tenth-anniversary Dana & Carl special we did back in 2002. Reunited, and it feels so good! And now I want to document them as part of the ongoing This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio archive.

Understand: we kept no playlists of these shows as we were doing them; songs were back-announced during the shows, and then the track listings were discarded. So I don't have any record of what we played. I can tell you that the first song we ever played was "Why Do You Treat Me Like A Tramp?" by Gashead; it's all fuzzy (and often fuzz-drenched) thereafter.

And I also know that we usually did theme shows most weeks. This is a format we largely abandoned by the time we started TIRnRR at the end of 1998, because it was both more fun and easier to just wing it awready. TIRnRR has done a number of theme shows over the years, from our two All-Kinks shows and our recent 50 Years Of The Monkees blowout through theme shows devoted to B-Sides, Syracuse Music, Forgotten Originals, Tribute Albums, and decade-specific shows of the '50s, '60s,'70s, '80s, '90s, and '00s, among other occasional (if infrequent) obsessions.

But We're Your Friends For Now was mostly about theme shows. For the first time ever, this is a complete list of all WYFFN episodes. Eventually, I hope to listen to all of the shows, and generate complete playlists for each of them. I may even try to digitize them and figure out a way to share them with the contemporary TIRnRR and Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) audience.  This January will mark the 25th anniversary of The Dana & Carl Show, and that whole concept of The Best Three Hours Of Radio On The Whole Friggin' Planet started right here on We're Your Friends For Now.

Gentlemen! Start your engines...!

                                       
                           This was our old theme song on We're Your Friends For Now.
                                   
                         
We're Your Friends For Now: The Dana & Carl Show

1/15/92: The Demo Show [90-minute pilot episode]
1/19/92: The Psychedelic Show
1/27/92: Themeless
2/3/92:   The Pure Pop Show
2/10/92: The Soul/Jazz/R & B Show
2/17/92: The Instrumental Show
2/24/92: The Covers Show
3/2/92:   The 45s Only Show
3/9/92:   The Punk/New Wave Show
3/16/92: The Live In-Concert Show
3/23/92: The Rock 'n' Roll Soundtrack Show
3/30/92: The Beatles Rarities Show
4/6/92:   Themeless
4/13/92: The British Invasion Show
4/20/92: The 1987-1992 Show
4/27/92: The Girls Groups And Female Singers Show
5/4/92:   The 1970s Show
5/11/92:  The Comedy/Novelty Rock Show
5/18/92:  The Monkees Show
5/25/92:  The Apple Records Show
6/1/92:    The Sounds Of Summer Show
6/8/92:    Themeless
6/15/92:  Still Themeless
6/22/92:  Themeless Again
6/29/92:  The Sayonara Show