Early 80s Tin Lizzie Garage Commercial

The Tin Lizzie Garage was a local bar (later strip club) in Kingston, New Jersey that advertised with WPRB for a spell during the 1980s. Here’s an ad from that era, voiced by Bill Rosenblatt ’83, John Bailo ’82, and Mike Webber ’81.

Bill Rosenblatt recalls:

[WPRB] didn’t have that much to do with the Tin Lizzie Garage – it was a fairly divey bar in a strip mall in Kingston that usually had cover bands, Bruce Springsteen wannabes, that kind of thing. They ran some ads; we hardly ever promoted any of the music.  There was one exception, though: the Dixie Dregs. 

The Dixie Dregs were a band from Georgia that played jazzy instrumental rock in a style that sounded sort of like Kansas without the vocals, or Lynyrd Skynyrd meets Mahavishnu Orchestra. Their music wasn’t mainstream on PRB in the early 1980s, but they had a fairly sizeable following, and a few of us were into them. Their leader was guitar virtuoso Steve Morse, who would later join Kansas and Deep Purple when those bands reached their “playing the zoo” stages. As a bad amateur guitarist who was into prog rock and fusion, Morse was one of my heroes.

I don’t really understand why the Dregs came to play the Tin Lizzie Garage, but they did, in August 1981. We promoted the show on PRB, and I got to introduce the band onstage. This was a very, very big deal for me. Jordan Becker ’82 and I went there that night. I “talked guitar” with Steve Morse before they went on – what a thrill! Then we all went onstage. The way we worked it out, the band would play the intro to “Divided We Stand” from their then-new album Unsung Heroes. They would pause, then I would intone, “Ladies and gentlemen… The Dregs!”, then they would launch into the tune. The band started to play, they paused, and I started intoning. But the mike wasn’t switched on, and no one heard me. Rod Morgenstein padded out the intro on drums. I tried again; still nothing. Finally I gave up, signaled to Morgenstein, and walked offstage; and the Dregs began their tremendous set.

Apart from a couple of times introducing local acts at City Gardens, that was it for my career introducing bands onstage.