With an all volunteer student staff, it was fairly common for a conflict to come up which prevented the assigned DJ from doing their shift.  Whenever possible, the DJ was supposed to arrange for a substitute to cover the shift.  This process frequently failed, and if no live announcer was available, it was time to reach for one of the canned EMERGENCY SHOW TAPES, thread it up on TEAC #2 which had auto reverse, and put the station on auto pilot.   For short term coverage, there was also a 30 minute emergency show cart in the air studio which had no stop tone and would play as a continuous loop.  Originally, these shows were primarily music with a  few IDs. These worked fine for the late night slots but sounded very odd when running  during the daytime and evening hours when things were generally livelier. So tapes of different musical and announcing styles were required.  Jazz was great for the Midnight to 3AM coverage, but album cuts and oldies were the norm for daytime hours.  Production of the shows was tricky as nothing timely could be included in the DJ commentary.  All of the the typical DJ mainstays of time, temperature, weather forecasts or PSAs, or even the request line telephone number were all off limits, yet the program was supposed to sound live.  This required an announcer of the most blabber-prone variety who could ramble over intros and outros in a glib live-sounding manner about inane subjects and never venture into the forbidden timely subjects.  In the 1970s this somewhat unflattering description fit several announcers rather well, most notably the all-time most prolific of Emergency Show hosts, Casey the K, frequently joined by co-hosts Andy Arns or Nivek. In an effort to make the tapes useful over a longer time, music selection avoided any concentration of new releases and instead was more along the lines of what we refer to today as "Classic Rock," plus some scattering of jazz and oddball oldies. (Ragg Mopp by the Mills Brothers, or Loving You Has Made Me Bannanas by Guy Marks for example.)   

Another challenge was that producing a three hour show was nearly always a very late-night effort, as this was the only time when the production room could be free of other requirements. Sleep deprivation and excessive consumption of donuts from the Donut Factory sometimes amplified the silliness factor to hightened levels.   An excellent example of this is presented here when Nivek took his mike and climbed into the metal production tape cabinet and did his portion of the program in hiding, while Casey posed a ridiculous riddle to the audience, "What is bigger than a bread box and smaller than a twenty dollar bill?"  

After more than three decades, you might expect, or even hope, that all of these worn out tapes would have turned to rusty dust long ago.  Sadly, that is not the case.  In spite of the ravages of time, hard use, and abuse, they all seem to have survived in ready-to-play condition, complete with foil reversing tapes at both ends.  And so, in defiance of common standards of decency and good taste, we offer a few of them here. Warning - in telescoped form there is not much music content to soften the blow and therefore the cringe factor on some of these shows is elevated to the danger level.  However, if you really have nothing else to do, turn the volume down and click the start button.  It is guaranteed to make you feel better about the quality of your own shows.

Andy and Casey do a New Wave Oldies show (whatever the heck that is) for Emergency Show Tape use.

Nivek and Casey Emergency Show Tape from 1976.

Casey and Andy were still making emergency show tapes in 1978.

Andy Arns Jazz Oasis tape for use covering the Midnight to 3AM shift.  Note that with all of the spacey jazz playing, Andy could not help himself from sliding into a bit of Capt. Jack cosmic commentary towards the end of the program.

Very early (1973?) Emergency Show Tape by Casey and Nivek.  Truly a classic example of the problems of recording these shows overnight.  The program starts out OK and progressively gets more silly and bizzare as extreme exhaustion makes the hosts increasingly punchy.  No drugs or alcohol were involved, but you would never know it listening to the efforts to pronounce the WHO album title "Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy" late into the recording.  This cringe inducing show includes the "Bigger than a Breadbox, smaller than a $20 Bill" bogus scavenger hunt contest, Bread jokes, Anatnas, two spontaneously ad-libbed Stupid Stereo Steve spots and Nivek hiding inside the production cabinet for part of the broadcast.  The very end of the tape displays the tendency of worn out old TEAC #2 to run at slow or random speeds as it approached the end of the reel.   All in all, this is an amazing show simply to have survived the bulk eraser all of these years.  Yes it actually aired this way, entirely too many times.