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As we lead up to “Floydian Slip” Show #1,000 the week of June 8, we’re digging into the archives to share relics from the show’s past.

Over the years producing “Floydian Slip,” I’ve occasionally made contact with people who hold two or three degrees of separation from the band.

Patrick Martin, bassist with Unicorn, was one such guy.

Unicorn is the country-rock band Floyd’s David Gilmour “discovered” and produced in the 1970s. (“There’s No Way Out of Here” on David’s 1978 solo album was originally a Unicorn song, written by the band’s Ken Baker.)

I don’t remember how I “met” Patrick, but I think his email address had been published in a story in Mojo magazine, and I dropped him a note to introduce myself.

We started corresponding and he helped me get some Unicorn CDs for the occasional Floydian Slip-Up on the show.

He also mailed along a 4″ x 6″ piece of paper he thought I might get a kick out of. It was a sheet of stationery from Astoria, David’s houseboat recording studio that Patrick had recently visited.

I’ve never tried calling the phone number listed at the bottom. And I’ve obscured it here, so you won’t be tempted either. 😉

As we lead up to “Floydian Slip” Show #1,000 the week of June 8, we’re digging into the archives to share relics from the show’s past.

We brought “Floydian Slip” to Champ 101.3 FM (WCPV) in Burlington, Vt., in October 1995. We’d end up running on Champ for nearly 14 years — the longest, by far, of any single station before we syndicated.

When we joined Champ, the station was only about a year old, with studios in a small office building just a couple minutes’ walk from my apartment on Shelburne Road, Burlington. I’d pack the CDs I needed for that week’s show into a small carrying case and take the quick walk over to the studio Wednesday nights.

Despite the end product of what I do being very public, the process of producing “Floydian Slip” was (and is) a very solitary activity. There was almost never anyone in the Champ building when I stopped by: The station was running on automation during the weekends. Occasionally I’d bump into another jock laying down some voicetracks into automation for playback later.

But, short of that, I’d often arrive at the station to the greeting of the security alarm, telling me no one was around.

The show I did high

A rare exception was an evening I dropped by accidentally high on muscle relaxants following a back injury. My doctor had warned me they might make me a little dopey, but I felt fine sitting home on my sofa. It wasn’t until I walked over to the station when I realized I was somewhat impaired.

And, as luck would have it, there was some sort of staff meeting taking place that night.

You have to remember very few Champ staffers had ever seen my face. I never stopped in during business hours. I was a faceless voice that some staff members didn’t even realize belonged to a local personality.

In their minds, I was the “Pink Floyd guy,” who, if pressed for details, they’d probably guess was a slightly whacked out stoner — the same sort of person they all turned to see walk through the door that evening.

Making matters worse, I felt compelled to try and explain my condition using lips and tongue that didn’t want to cooperate: the back injury, the muscle relaxants, I’m not usually like this, you probably think all Floyd fans are stoners, anyway, I didn’t drive here, I just walked a few blocks … I probably made my case worse by trying to explain it.

Sadly, the audio from that show is long gone. I wonder if I sounded in control of all of my faculties.

The photo

In this photo of the Shelburne Road studio, you can see the automation software keeping the station on the air on the right monitor. The display on the left was the machine I was using to record my show.

Champ moved from its Shelburne Road location within a few years, and took up residence in Colchester’s historic Fort Ethan Allen.

As we lead up to “Floydian Slip” Show #1,000 the week of June 8, we’re digging into the archives to share relics from the show’s past.

The “Floydian Slip” website was one of the first Pink Floyd resources on the web. We went online in 1995 as a subpage of my personal home page “The Poor House,” and then moved to floydianslip.com in Autumn ’96.

Over the years, we’ve re-built the site four times for a total of five fundamental designs.

This one here is probably the site’s most short-lived: It was only online from October 2000 to April 2001.

As we lead up to “Floydian Slip” Show #1,000 the week of June 8, we’re digging into the archives to share relics from the show’s past.

In 1996 or ’97, shortly after we moved “Floydian Slip” to Champ 101.3 in Burlington, Vt., we made available the first official “Floydian Slip” T-shirt.

The shirts were the poster-child for do-it-yourself. If memory serves, we started with a hammer logo found somewhere online, and mocked up the type using MS Publisher and a freeware font that recalled those ubiquitous Dymo labellers from the ’70s. We might have even printed the component parts out on paper and pasted them up full-size.

A local screenprinter pumped out several dozen of them in canary red ink on white shirts, and we started selling them at floydianslip.com — we registered the domain Sept. 11, 1996 — for $15.95.

Web commerce was still pretty new, and taking orders through our website with credit card payments was considerably above our heads. So we required people print the order form and snail mail it along with a check to our post office box.

A surprising number of people from all over the globe mailed in their orders, and we ended up selling a couple hundreds shirts before demand seemed to begin to peter out several years later.