Memories of John Garabedian and V-66...

[Bob Nelson]

When in Burlington VT, I taped some WXXX 95.5 for a tape trader. Turns out they were doing a syndie
show that also runs on stations like Kiss 108: the Open House Party with John Garabedian (hmm! I'd
heard that name before...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Garabedian

I'd known of WVJV-TV, "V-66", our own version of MTV (a project with Woo Woo Ginsburg) and WGTR...
Anyway, the show I taped featured CHR music by request and a brief interview with Avril Lavigne. The
Open House Party site has more info on John (as well as a portrait of the late Sunny Joe White). You
may know of this guy...

"At the age of 17, John joined Worcester station WORC-AM as a disc jockey. Several years after joining, he became a co-host of the original Open House Party radio program...In 1969, John and partners founded WGTR-AM (now WBIX) as a top-40 station serving MetroWest from Natick...Two years after MTV's 1981 debut, John and fellow WMEX alumnus Arnie Ginsburg started a Boston-area 24-hour music video station, WVJV-TV"

(Open House Party started in 1987 on Kiss 108...he does it from
any of his 3 homes: suburban Boston; Vermont, and the Cape)

http://www.openhouseparty.com/history.html

V-66 (remember those bumper
stickers?) played music videos a la MTV...they played some by local artists as part of that
(and another indie UHF station in town, WQTV-TV 68, used to have a show--Friday nights at 6, I think?--
that would play videos or taped performances by local bands. This was a station which used to scramble
its signal and play movies (pay TV) but at times the signal was unscrambled.

As for V-66...
http://www.worcestermass.com/dynamix/v66.shtml

"The VJs were some of the best and the brightest in Boston -- John Garabedian (now doing "Open House Party" on Saturday night radio) and David O'Leary (now at WBOS 92.9) among them. Also, I remember a bizarre commercial that Garabedian and Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsberg did when the Patriots were playing the Bears in the Super Bowl -- they had a teddy bear bound and gagged and tortured it between videos."

The comments bring back memories...

David O'Leary was a VJ. Artists played (local) included New Man, The Stompers, and Robert Ellis Orrall.
The logo, as seen on the page linked above, had a purple "V", slightly off kilter, with yellow lightning
bolts that form a "66" in the middle

Other comments on that page show that V-66 viewers fondly remember them playing local artists such as
The Fools, Digney Fignus, New Man, Rods & Cones, The Lyres, Rubber Rodeo, Ball & Pivot, Til Tuesday & The November Group.