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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.

WEXP 105.1 FM, an Adult Album Alternative (Triple-A) station in Burlington, Vt., was the first commercial radio station to carry “Floydian Slip.”

I started the show there Friday, Dec. 2, 1994. It aired at 11 p.m. once a month, during the new moon, while I served full-time as the station’s evening jock.

The “Experience 105.1” studios were located on College Street in Burlington, on the second floor across from what was The Burlington Free Press space. At the time, I was living about a two-minute walk from the station, across from City Hall Park.

Aside from the occasional rumble of traffic that sometimes permeated the studio walls, it was a great space — warm, friendly, high-tech and very downtown chic. At least by Vermont standards.

Unfortunately, the station was a brand new, stand-alone start-up, and within just a year ownership had exhausted its capital and sold to another local broadcasting company. Hall Communications took over WEXP in spring ’95, moved it to its existing facility on Joy Drive in South Burlington, and WEXP became WKOL.

“Kool 105” remains on the air today, playing classic hits, though none of the full-time WEXP staffers continued after the sale.

Hall Communications is also the owner of WIZN 106.7 FM in Burlington. “The Wizard” is a rock institution in Burlington, and the station I aspired to be a part of when I was studying broadcasting in the ’80s. WIZN has been a “Floydian Slip” affiliate since autumn 2009.

… we came in? Isn’t this where …

WEXP air studio: XTC, the Allman Bros. and Robert Plant all on-deck in the lower-left of this photo. Jocks had complete creative control. Play whatever you wish, talk whenever you want to, and say whatever you feel like saying. Rare for the mid-’90s. Even more rare today.

 

WEXP air studio. The station’s music library was composed mostly of CDs donated by the station’s seven owners. That might be Pink Floyd’s Shine On boxset on the bottom shelf.

 

Visitors to the front office were greeted by a large mural of the WEXP logo.

 

The WEXP front office, viewed from the entrance

 

WEXP production studio — all-digital and state-of-the-art for its time WEXP production studio

 

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 launched in 1995, first as a sub-page of my “personal home page,” before it moved to its own domain in ’96.

This screengrab shows the site’s second incarnation from ’98.

It was early in the life of the Internet. Between the website; my posts on Echoes, the Pink Floyd listserv; and on a handful of Floyd newsgroups on Usenet, there were many (many) more people in the world who knew about “Floydian Slip” than could actually listen.

You can see from this screengrab, the show was still on a single stand-alone station: WCPV 101.3 FM in Burlington, Vt.

 

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 December 1987, I was home from college for winter break, when my friend Greg Perez passed me a cassette copy he’d made from “The Dark Side of the Moon.” My knowledge of Pink Floyd was limited, but he assured me I needed to give it a listen.

If my memory’s correct, we were about to enter a bar in Winooski, Vt., just outside Burlington. And though I later labeled the J-card with a source of “CD,” I think Greg had duped it from an LP.

I usually cite that cassette — the “genesis cassette” — as what sparked my interest in the band, which led to my starting “Floydian Slip” a little more than a year later, January ’89.

So much for the dangers of illegal taping. I imagine the “cost” of that illegal bootleg has been paid back to the Floyd and their associates many (many) times over as a result of the show.

 

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.

Here’re some photos of Ithaca College’s 106-VIC air studio. These were likely shot in 1985/86, but the studio was pretty much the same when “Floydian Slip” debuted in January ’89.

Notice there’s no CD player. All music at the station was played off LP, 45 single, or cartridge tape.

By the time “Floydian Slip” started up, we had a single CD player in the studio, on the rack to the left of the sound board. It was novel enough that we occasionally mentioned it on-air when something was played off CD.

106-VIC was (and is) one of two student-run radio stations at Ithaca College, in Ithaca, N.Y. When “Floydian Slip” was there, the station was heard campus-wide on the AM band, carried through the campus electrical wiring. But we focused more on getting people to listen at 105.9 FM on the community’s cable TV system.

Today the station goes by “VIC Radio” and seems to be focused on Internet streaming.

 

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.

Here’s a snap of the first “Floydian Slip” website, 1996.

If memory serves, when the site launched, it was a single page at my “personal  home page,” which I called The Poor House. Shortly after we got the floydianslip.com domain and started building out the site.

This screengrab is probably shortly after the site moved to its own domain.

 

We’re 15 weeks away from “Floydian Slip” Show #1,000.

As we lead up to that milestone coming June 8, we’re digging into the “Floydian Slip” archives to share all sorts of relics from the show’s past.

Browse the growing collection