Westwood One News Offers Summer Of Love 50th Anniversary Special

Groovy, Man

WESTWOOD ONE NEWS is offering a special for the weekend of AUGUST 18-20 looking back on 1967's SUMMER of Love.  "SUMMER OF LOVE: FALL OF INNOCENCE 50TH ANNIVERSARY" is a half-hour special hosted by WESTWOOD ONE NEWS' JIM ROOPE and STEVE KASTENBAUM and available to WESTWOOD ONE NEWS affiliates, WESTWOOD ONE music format stations, and CUMULS stations, and will also be airing in place of "THE WEEK IN REVIEW" that weekend.

The special will include interviews and material, including talks with ABBIE HOFFMAN, TIMOTHY LEARY, BILL GRAHAM, SCOTT MCKENZIE, and more, found in a 1987 SUMMER of Love special discovered when WESTWOOD ONE NEWS recently moved to a new facility in WASHINGTON.  Producer GEORGE ACHAVES tracked down the original master tape, and VP News KEVIN DELANY went through extreme measures to restore the tape after it would not play on a salvaged reel-to-reel machine, using a food dehydrator to cure the AMPEX 406 tape.  “After letting it cool for another 18 hours," DELANY said, "I rewound the tape, letting it pass through two cotton balls, one on each side of the tape, to remove any remaining loose oxide particles. Finally, I attached cotton balls to the tape guides to reduce tape friction as much as possible, leaving the tape to touch only the heads of the machine. After hooking two separate digital recorders to the outputs of the machine, we were ready for playback.  And it worked! The tape played successfully and history was saved.”

ACHAVES added, “We captured the moment in time and it sounds as good to me today as it did then. This was done before digital editing, on reel-to-reel tape and news carts, edited with razor blades and splicing tape.”

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