Although it’s been a few years since we’ve put together our Radio Survivor Holiday gift guides, listing off radio gifts that we love, I’m always thinking about these lists. Whenever I run across an intriguing radio gift idea, I make a mental note and sometimes I race out to pick something up for myself. In light of the holiday shopping season, here are a few unusual suggestions for the radio fan that has seemingly everything:

Toilet Paper Holder Radio

Many of us remember shower radios, which were so amazing for those of us who enjoy listening to the radio while bathing. Well, here’s another bathroom radio option: a radio that’s incorporated into a toilet paper roll holder. I’m particularly partial to the salmon pink version that is pictured on A Life Less Ordinary and here’s a demo of a bright yellow version of a Windsor AM radio. I’ve also seen some similar toilet paper holder radios that include FM radio and even a telephone. Get your toilet paper holder radio if you spot one, as I can’t find too many that are currently up for sale.

Haunted Radio

Thanks to the haunted radio, every day is Halloween in my house. Ostensibly a seasonal item, the plastic “radio” plays a number of spooky messages with the turn of a dial or though a motion sensor. I love the vintage radio look and the old-time sounds that emanate through its speaker.

Novelty Vintage Radio with Secret Hiding Space

You’ve probably seen faux books with hollow centers that can be used as secret hiding places, well, here’s a radio version of that. This working radio has a hidden compartment where you can store your valuables. Oddly enough, this version also comes with a mustache nail file and key chain.

Antique Radio Mouse Pad

For my entire life I’ve enjoyed the juxtaposition of modern technology with antiques and this mouusepad perfectly exemplifies that aesthetic, with its image of an antique radio.

Darth Vader Alarm Clock

Star Wars fan can wake up every morning to this Darth Vader Clock Radio that utters messages from the villainous character and plays both AM and FM radio.

The post 5 Funky Last Minute Gifts for Radio Fanatics appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This year I’m pleased once again to share the top podcasts of the year as chosen by my esteemed colleagues, friends and podcast fanatics, Jenny Benevento and Kyle Riismandel.

Jenny is an information architect who lectures on branding, social media, musicians and pop culture. She is a taxonomy consultant to Etsy and also hosts a podcast with me. Kyle is a university lecturer in history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and he’s also my brother. Kyle has written several podcast reviews for us, and Jenny recently shared her recommendations for listeners going into Serial withdrawal.

Last year there was no overlap between their lists–and they didn’t even coordinate. This year there is only one show in common, but at opposite ends of their lists. If you’ve read any news about podcasting this year, I bet you can guess what it is.

But, enough spoilers. Here are the top five podcasts of 2015.

#5 – Jenny: Baby Geniuses from Maximum Fun

Baby Geniuses is not another formless comedy podcast where some comedian friends chitchat aimlessly. The hosts, comedian Emily Heller and cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt (BoJack Horseman), run a very structured comedy podcast. My favorite segment is “Wiki of the Week” where the hosts discuss a listener submitted Wikipedia entry that is unexpectedly weird or funny. In the main segment of the show, a guest expert answers questions on their areas of expertise. In the final segment a comedian pretends to be an expert on something they clearly know nothing about. It all wraps up with each person telling us one thing they learned. While the show is more comedy than informational, the format requires the hosts and guests to keep moving, as opposed to getting bogged down in a quagmire of in-jokes and tangents, which is the plight of many comedy two-handers. It’s nice to see a comedic podcast hosted by women that’s not focused on “women’s issues” or aimed at a mostly female audience (like Maximum Fun labelmates Throwing Shade, Lady to Lady, and One Bad Mother).

#5 – Kyle: Serial

Serial returned to the roots of radio storytelling by weaving a tale week by week. However, it was a true crime story and not The Shadow or The Goldbergs. The telling of a real story in all of its messiness managed the feat of creating an audience waiting each Thursday for the next edition. Despite the lack of closure, Serial managed to shine a light on so many of the issues (reliability of eyewitness testimony, prosecutorial discretion, profiling and the war on drugs) with the criminal justice system while reminding the audience of the stakes of that problematic system—the fates of multiple people in their late teens.

#4 – Jenny: You Are Not So Smart from Boing Boing

This is a podcast based the host David McRaney’s books You Are Not So Smart and You Are Now Less Dumb. It’s a psychology podcast that describes itself as “a celebration of self delusion that explores…cognitive biases and logical fallacies.” This may sound brainy (literally and figuratively!) and niche, but the host makes it really fun. There’s a cookie contest every episode in which he eats the winning recipe while discussing a scientific paper of the week in plain language. Though the show is mainly meant to be entertaining, it can also explain why we do dumb things because of our physiology and how to stop doing them. It also has the best theme song in the business.

#4 – Kyle: Never Not Funny from Earwolf

Podcast pioneers Jimmy Pardo and Matt Belknap had another great year. They sometimes get overlooked on these lists because they have been doing it so long and so well. Even I left them off last year. After 8 years, I still listen (or watch) every episode. They do three people shooting the shit better than anyone. Though that format is tired and lends itself to hacky premises, the NNF crew make it funny and fresh, in part because the humor comes out of the relationships between the hosts, crew, and guests. They genuinely like each other, making it possible for guests to feel comfortable and part of the team, instead of the asshole made to participate in some misogynistic “bit” just to promote their show.
Highlight Episode: #1512 Gary Gulman

#3 – Jenny: 99% Invisible (and its siblings at Radiotopia)

99% Invisible is a radio show, but its listeners asked for it to be longer and more frequent. It tells quirky little fascinating stories about the world around us—stories that will change how you see the world. I’ll never see the Chicago flag the same way, despite being a Chicago native. If you need good tidbits for cocktail parties or are addicted to that “aha” epiphany moment when you learn something fascinating about a thing you use every day, you will love this show. Essentially, 99% Invisible uncovers the recent history about buildings, landscapes, design, and the ways we construct our daily lives that have been lost to the annals of history. This is especially something Radiolab listeners would love. 99% Invisible has been around for a while, but, due to audience demand they’ve had a banner year. Their newly crowdsourced wealth began a likeminded podcasting network–Radiotopia–and, as stretch goals on their Kickstarter, added three more shows all with similar themes.

#3 – Kyle: Superego

An improvised sketch comedy podcast featuring lavish postproduction, Superego nearly defies description. I came to it late thinking it too cute by half. However, it is hysterically funny. The production adds to the humor creating a sense of place grounding the sometimes silly premises and even adding a few extra jokes. This year they continued expanding the worlds of beloved recurring characters H.R. Giger (creator of the Alien in the movie Alien), Reverend Parsimony (stammering hammer of God), and Shunt McGuppin (outlaw country legend singing about the darker side of life) while adding new, ridiculous, and exceptionally funny characters to their repertoire. Beyond being funny, the four doctors of the Superego Institute demonstrate pure joy in creating their comedy that makes it the most fun 30 minute listen in podcasting.
Highlight Episodes: season 4 #1 and season 4 #3

#2 – Jenny: Worst Idea of All Time

This is the podcast I have suggested most this year. It’s a simple idea: two new friends and comedians from New Zealand decide to watch the same terrible movie every week for a year. Unfortunately they chose Grownups 2. The hosts insist you should not watch Grownups 2 but instead listen to dozens of hours of their reactions to it and the deep depression and madness it leads to. This sounds like just dumb fun, but an odd side effect of the wacky premise is the hosts’ commentary on American culture as portrayed by Adam Sandler films, for example: a lengthy argument about whether Connecticut is a city in New York. It’s a celebration of the failure of rich comedians phoning it in, but in the greatest possible way.

#2 – Kyle: Comedy Bang Bang / U Talking U2 to Me? from Earwolf

The Scott Aukerman comedy empire is vast and expanding and we are lucky for it. There are so many hilarious characters (J.W. Stillwater, fanboat vigilante) and great musical guests (Tears for Fears!) on CBB that it is easy to overlook Aukerman. He manages to keep shows moving forward while still peering into the nooks and crannies of characters whose dark and twisted tales only Aukerman can tease out. Similarly, UTU2M succeeds because of his insistently silly and explorative tone that co-host Adam Scott ably aids and abets. Frankly, I don’t care one bit about U2 but I listened to every episode. Is there better endorsement than that? Together, these shows provide hours of consistently hilarious entertainment not to be missed.
Highlight Episode: #313 Gumbo Challenge

#1 – Jenny: Serial

This is the obvious number one this year. Even if you’re not a fan, you’ve heard of it. Suddenly your friends who hear the Charlie Brown teacher voice when you talk about podcasts are asking you what podcast app you use and it’s because they want to download Serial. It spawned several podcasts to discuss what was happening on it, and is the first “addictive” and “binge” podcast. At this point I am recommending it because it’s become part of the popular culture and if you haven’t heard it you’re missing what everyone else is discussing. If you told me last year a podcast would be parodied on SNL, I would have laughed. So love it, hate it, or have moral issues with it, Serial was the break in podcasting that podcast nerds have been expecting.

#1 – Kyle: How Did This Get Made? from Earwolf

This show follows in the great legacy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in not just mocking, but celebrating and dissecting the most baffling movies made. Where it can be easy for the hosts, Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas, to snark on bad movies and belittle their creators, they try to answer the titular question. Beyond that, they look for great performances in the worst of movies (Dolly Parton in Rhinestone) and ask questions about logic and ethics about a movie as odd as George Romero’s Monkey Shines. Their love and interest in figuring the motivations of the filmmakers yields some of the funniest riffing and banter on the internet as questions no on thought to ask while making these movies get answered in hilarious fashion by the hosts and their guests.
Highlight Episode: Monkey Shines

The post Radio Survivor’s Top Podcasts of 2014 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Every week in our Radio Survivor Bulletin email newsletter we count down the top 5 stories of the week, along with alerting readers to other important radio stories. Now, here are our top 10 stories for February, as ranked by unique hits:

1. My Chromecast Is an Internet Radio
2. Remembering Philip Seymour Hoffman in Pirate Radio
3. Veteran Shock Jock Tom Leykis Bets on Internet Radio for a Third Year
4. Soundcloud’s Progress: Explore, Messaging and Visual
5. What Is Pandora? A Narrow Majority Call It Radio
6. Welcome to Night Vale: The 8Tracks Playlists
7. LPFM Watch: The First LPFM
8. Has the Jazz Blogger Supplanted the Old School Jazz DeeJay?
9. Radio Shack’s Super Bowl Ad Tickles and Teases Radio Nerds
10. FCC Upholds Fine for Pirate Cat Founder as Station Re-emerges in Berlin

The post Chromecast as Radio, PSH & Pirate Cat – Our Top 10 Most Popular Stories in February appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It’s always fascinating to review our stats to see what stories are most popular. Every year one of our most read posts is Jennifer’s review of stations playing the Thanksgiving classic “Alice’s Restaurant” on turkey day. In 2012 it was our 2nd most popular story of the year, and in 2013 it was number 1.

This story is just one example of how much widespread love and affection there is for radio, and how this century-old medium still touches people’s lives. That’s why we continue to publish Radio Survivor. As we approach our fifth anniversary we still have so much work to do, covering this most intimate medium and how it affects our lives, civically, artistically, politically and personally.

We list the rest of our top stories of 2013 in this week’s edition of the Radio Survivor Bulletin, our weekly email newsletter. You can read this issue on the web, too, where you’ll also find some important stories from the last year that you might have missed.

Most week’s Radio Survivor Bulletin is only available to subscribers. It’s free, and we’ll never share or sell your e-mail address. Sign up below.

The post How radio touched lives in 2013: Our top stories of 2013 (plus ones you might have missed) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I’ve only lived in Chicago for two years, but I’ve been listening to WXRT in brief spurts for the last sixteen years when visiting the city. Living in the Central Illinois college towns of Champaign-Urbana, I’d often heard about WXRT from friends and acquaintances from the Chicago area. Inevitably it was the one station that ex-Chicagoans most commonly said they missed. While Chicago has a lot of great noncommercial college stations, all of them only cover a portion of the city and metro area. By comparison WXRT has great signal strength, covering the better part of Chicagoland.

Like a lot of FM rock stations, WXRT’s roots lie in that brief heyday of freeform radio in the late 60s and early 70s. The station’s rock programming began in 1972 as the nighttime portion of a programming schedule that primarily consisted of ethnic and foreign language programs during the day. It went all-rock in 1976 at the same time as most progressive rock stations started to be come more formatted and less freeform, birthing what would become known as the Album Oriented Rock (AOR) format.

XRT remained locally owned until 1995– a year before the Telecom Act triggered the onslaught of consolidation–when it was sold to Westinghouse, which would become Infinity broadcasting, now known as CBS Radio. Yet, somehow WXRT has managed to survive the era of consolidation and avoid becoming a homogenized, voice-tracked, syndication-saturated station. Instead, it remains a Chicago fixture and example of the Chicago approach to rock.

Let me give you an example of how WXRT earns my precious listening time. On the last Sunday of last month I turned on WXRT while cooking dinner. I heard the DJ announce that they would be replaying a concert the station sponsored and recorded at one of my favorite Chicago venues, the Hideout. Non-Chicagoans have to understand that this is not your typical big theater venue, or suburban sports bar that so many stations use for concerts. The Hideout is a small true music-lover’s place, tucked away in a warehouse district, across the street from the Chicago Sanitary Department. Already I was impressed to hear WXRT working with this mainstay of the Chicago independent music scene.

The Swell Season

Not only was the concert a great, intimate performance, but WXRT ran the entire hour-long show without a single commercial interruption. I wasn’t expecting it to be commercial-free; there were none of the typical “commercial-free marathon” sweepers or other hype. Instead, they just played the show, without hype, and without a break.

This is the kind of thing I remember New York and Philadephia radio stations doing during my youth in the 1980s, but had largely considered a lost art in the post-consolidation era. Like WDHA, nobody is going to mistake WXRT for an indie rock or college station. The playlist is still pretty heavy on classic rock, but is also spiced with both older and contemporary alternative and indie rock artists. It still produces specialty programs that focus on the blues and local music, in addition to syndicated fare like Little Steven’s Underground Garage.

Although I still have to wade through obnoxious commercial sets, I find that my patience is still rewarded by WXRT, which is something I can’t say for any other commercial music station in the Chicago area. It may be one of the last of a dying breed, but I’m glad that WXRT has managed to be one of the rare radio survivors on the commercial FM dial.

The post Radio Survivor’s Top 5 Commercial Radio Stations: #2 Chicago's WXRT appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Long gone, but not forgotten station "The Quake"

I am a college and community radio loyalist and these days I never listen to commercial radio unless someone else has put it on and I have no way to control the radio (during cab rides, in doctor’s office waiting rooms, and perhaps via cheesy hold button music, etc.).

Since coming up with a list of my favorite commercial radio stations is VERY difficult for me, I’ve had to turn to the last commercial radio station that I can proudly declare myself to have been a fan of: KQAK-FM out of San Francisco in the 1980s.

I’ve heard that people are most passionate about the music of their youth and that many never get past that period musically, becoming permanently stuck in the sounds of their teen years. Well, for me, I was a teenager smack dab in the 1980s and my favorite commercial station helped me transition from the heavier rock sounds that I listened to in the late 1970s (on KSJO and KOME) to the emerging new wave sounds of the 1980s.

“The Quake” was on the air from 1982 to 1985 and is most known for its “Rock of the ’80s” format (which they launched in April 1983 after an initial stint as an album rock station). The station went off the air in June 1985, just a few months before I headed off to college. Many of us were saddened about its demise and tearfully sat by our stereos tape recording its final hours of programming. Somewhere in a shoebox is my tape of the last hours of The Quake and tidbits from recordings by others can be found online.

The station played a mix of new wave, punk, rock, reggae, ska, pop and goth sounds. On “The Quake” I heard bands like Depeche Mode, Book of Love, Strawberry Switchblade, X, The Cure, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, and Siouxsie and the Banshees for the first time.

I also enjoyed Alex Bennett’s morning show (take a listen to his first show on The Quake here) and found him to be much more entertaining and intelligent than his counterparts on other stations. He also introduced me to the Bay Area comedy scene, with his multitude of guests.

Quake DJs in general were a lot of fun, from the comedic Tim Bedore (with his segments like “The Bible According to Tim”) to the approachable, music-loving Big Rick Stuart. On his website, Rick Stuart shares some memories about The Quake, including the program director’s philosophy about adding music to the station. Rick writes, “I would sit in with Oz sometimes at music meetings and he would add weekly current songs with a nice theory. One for the boys, one for the girls, one for the older rock fans, and sometimes a weird song.”

For me, one of the lasting influences of the Quake was that it brought me to college radio. It opened my ears to a wider range of sounds and when it ceased broadcasting in June 1985 I switched my listening to the left side of the dial, becoming a college radio fan. I discovered all of the amazing stations at colleges south of San Francisco and started listening to KFJC, KZSU, KSJS, and KSCU. A few months later I was off to college near Philadelphia and became a fan of the student stations at University of Pennsylvania (WXPN) and Drexel (WKDU) and started DJing at my campus station WHRC.

Another “modern rock” station, Live 105, appeared on the commercial radio scene in San Francisco in 1986. Attempting to replicate some of The Quake’s adventurous programming, Live 105 caught my attention periodically from about 1989 to 1995 (when I couldn’t get college radio reception in my San Francisco apartment). But, my heart still belonged to the long-departed Quake and increasingly to college radio.

The post Radio Survivor's Top 5 Commercial Radio Stations: #3 San Francisco's KQAK-FM appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Each month the Radio Survivors will count down our most (or least) favorite radio things. Last month we covered our favorite radio programs. This month we’re sharing our favorite commercial radio stations. As regular readers might expect, coming up with this list proved to be more of a challenge. All three of us tend to be big listeners to community, college and public radio…. commercial radio, not so much. Beyond the quality and variety offered by noncommercial radio these days, I think we’ve all been turned off by the homogenization and delocalization of commercial radio brought on by consolidation. Nevertheless, we put our heads together and came up with five stations we can safely call favorites, even if some of them are no longer around.

I’m starting off the rundown with a station that was my favorite as a high school and college student in Northern New Jersey in the late 80s and early 90s. Dover’s WDHA-FM bills itself as “The Rock of New Jersey,” and continues to stand out by refusing to give in to the trends that have ruined so many other rock stations. In an area dominated by New York City stations serving the nation’s largest radio market, WDHA survives by remaining steadfastly local in its outlook.

Where other stations would have brought in voice tracking and more syndicated programming, WDHA is staffed with live local DJs and produces its own specialty programs, like Friday night’s Metal Mania. The metal show has been in that time slot since I was in high school, only then it was hosted by Eddie Trunk who is now the host of VH1 Classic’s That Metal Show and has a show on Sirius/XM. Looking at WDHA’s current air staff I see names I still remember like Terrie Carr, who apparently left to do stints on Sirius and VH1 Classic before returning to DHA. You don’t see that too often in commercial radio anymore.

Nobody is going to confuse WDHA’s playlist with one from a cutting edge college station, but it’s also decidedly more varied and interesting than your typical Clear Channel rocker. WDHA delivers a mix of classic rock tracks–with an emphasis on “deeper cuts”–new hard rock, some “classic alternative” from the 90s along with local favorites like the Smithereens. Again, nothing cutting edge, but as a former Jersey-boy I can say that WDHA’s playlist still looks like a good representation of what I imagine the average North Jersey rock kid is into.

The WDHA I remember from the early 90s was still a station where I could hear new artists who hadn’t yet made it onto the playlists of bigger stations, or who were crossing over from college radio. I recall hearing the likes of Soundgarden, Nirvana and even Lenny Kravitz on WDHA before they became fixtures on the Billboard charts. I’m not certain if WDHA is still ahead of the mainstream curve in breaking new artists. But I have to admit that I’m also more out of touch with what’s mainstream and near-mainstream rock than I was in 1991.

I also remember being able to make requests and having a good chance that they would get played on air. Sure, you probably wouldn’t hear your Dead Kennedys request, but something a little more mainstream–but far from a hit–still had a shot of making it on air. I don’t know if this is still the case nearly 20 years later, but on its website WDHA does say that if you email or text them, “we will do our best to get that on for you!”

Twenty years ago I’m not sure I would have considered WDHA so unique, although even then I think it stood out from the “big city” stations in New York and Philadelphia that I listened to otherwise. But that was before the Telecom Act of 1996 and the ruination of commercial radio brought on by Clear Channel and their brethren. Nowadays, simply remaining locally owned as part of a cluster of just six stations (!) sets WDHA way apart. Compared to most stations, WDHA has changed relatively little in the last twenty years, and in this case that’s a good thing.

The post RadioSurvivor's Top 5 Commercial Radio Stations: #5 WDHA, Dover, NJ appeared first on Radio Survivor.

KUSF Offices

For me, the main reason that I’m so addicted to doing a radio show week after week is the music. I’m interested in new, independent, underground, and underexposed sounds and artists and the easiest way for me to get access to this music is by volunteering at a college radio station.

I’m lucky that at my station, KFJC, we add as many as 40 items to our library every week. The music that KFJC adds isn’t necessarily new, often the Music Director is adding things that are decades old that may not have gotten much exposure when they were initially released.

Even though I’m at a station with a  massive record library and am exposed to new sounds every week; I still get the chills when I hear an amazing artist on the radio who I have never heard before.

For my #1 Top Radio Show I have to give credit to a college radio DJ at University of San Francisco station KUSF: DJ Schmeejay, the host of Radiodrome every Tuesday morning from 9am to noon. On several occasions while listening to his show, I’ve had to pick up the phone and call to find out more information about the incredible music that I was hearing. A few of the artists that he’s helped me to discover are Vashti Bunyan and Virginia Astley, two women producing ethereal sounds with folk and psychedelic influences.

KUSF

I remember calling to find out about Virginia Astley and he told me that it was a hard-to-find release that he’d picked up at a KUSF Record Swap. Probably that very night I headed up to KFJC and found numerous Virginia Astley LPs in the library and learned that may of them hadn’t been played in over a decade. So I played her music on my show as well, exposing more listeners to the treat that I’d heard on a fellow college station.

What I like about DJ Schmeejay’s show is that he crafts interesting sets of music, with a mix of new and old across a range of genres that make sense sonically. You might hear lovely folky sounds from the 1960s, beautiful atmospherics from the 1980s, or a seriously old school Jimmy Durante piece.

I talked to DJ Schmeejay over email about his nearly 7-year-run hosting Radiodrome and he shared with me some of his thought process behind the program and also how his role as one of the Music Directors at KUSF leads to some interesting finds. Here’s a bit of our conversation:

Jennifer: What’s the basic format/flow of your show and how do you prepare each week?

DJ Schmeejay: “Visceral, cinematic radio” is what I like to call it – psychedelic music, that is, if you consider flapper-jazz and contemporary minimalism psychedelic – which you should!

I love pop, acid rock, barbershop music, polka, noise, grime and Jimmy Durante. I like to celebrate birthdays that might otherwise fall through the cracks each week on my program and I do quite a bit of research for that. Last week we celebrated Alice Babs, Paul Pena and Eartha Kitt.

My “The Joyful Noise” and “The Best Album in the World, Ever” segments are always fun. I want my show to introduce and induce at the same time – but first and foremost, it’s gotta be fun. And it often is, you can hear me laughing a lot on the air – I’m having a blast.

Jennifer: How does being one of the Music Directors at KUSF influence your show?

DJ Schmeejay: Being an MD means I’m exposed to a lot more music than the average DJ each week. This can often be a good thing, but it can also be really exhausting. I’m very lucky to be able to grab an unmarked CDR some unknown has sent us with some crazy free-jazz sax and drums and bird sounds and put it into rotation as I did last week (Zach Kouns).

Jennifer: Did you do radio before KUSF? Where?

DJ Schmeejay: I did a little radio in the 80s at a small college station in Wisconsin.

Jennifer: What do you love about doing radio?

DJ Schmeejay: I love doing my show every week. I love that the show has reached people of all ages and geographies. The internet has made the radio dial so huge, it’s just amazing. Hearing from listeners in New Zealand or Italy or Holland or St Louis each week is a gas – it never ceases to thrill me.

I’ve been an avid record collector for over 30 years now, and having a chance to get some of these recordings out of the house and let them breathe a little is one of the things that I love about being at KUSF.

When someone calls and says they had to pull the car over because they haven’t heard some particular song for years and are having a memory-moment, I know I’m doing my job.

Jennifer: Anything else?

DJ Schmeejay:  I’m also a co-producer of “The Classical Salon” our 3 hour Saturday night classical show, where I play only early music and contemporary composers, with nothing in between. KUSF offers such varied programming, I’m trying to get involved in as much as I have energy for while I’m here.

**************************************

KUSF now offers online archives of recent radio shows, so you can catch DJ Schmeejay’s show from this week, in which he threw Eartha Kitt, Felt, and Aztec Camera into the mix.

Even though I’m giving this #1 slot to Schmeejay, there are lots of other college and community radio shows with skillful DJs who have talented ears for music. Don’t be afraid to seek out the stations in your town or take a listen to some of the following:

The Brian Turner Show: Airs on community radio station WFMU-FM in New Jersey on Tuesdays from 3-6pm Eastern time. Archives also available on their website. A wide range of sounds from heavy stuff to pop, live performances and interviews (including Yoko Ono in a few weeks!).

DJ Pop Tart “The Pop Tart Show”: We were actually both DJs in the 1990s at WBGU in Bowling Green, Ohio and I always dug Pop Tart’s infusion of girl energy into her playlists. Now she’s in New Orleans at the Tulane University radio station WTUL with a show on Friday mornings from 8 to 10am Central Time. On her show you’ll hear a range of ladies, from the Japanese band OOIOO to Ellie Fitzgerald to hipster folkies like Julie Doiron. You might also hear some dudes, ranging from Tom Waits to Robyn Hitchcock to the Beastie Boys.

DJ Hallogallo’s “Infinite Eargasm“: His show airs on the online-only community radio station East Village Radio on Thursday afternoons from 2-4pm Eastern time. You’ll hear Neu, maybe Negativland, retro sounds by perhaps Elvis Presley or Dusty Springfield, and newer artists like Julianna Barwick and !!!.

The post Radio Survivor's Top Radio Shows – Jennifer's #1: Radiodrome appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Bonnie Simmons and Tom Donahue from the KSAN days (source: jive95.com)

Every Thursday night I drive home from Santa Cruz, where I teach at the University of California campus situated in that fair city. Soon as 8 pm comes around, I tune into KPFA to listen to the Bonnie Simmons / Derk Richardson music show, which I absolutely love.

To be accurate, they’re actually two separate shows, but I experience them as one. Folk rock, hard rock, classic rock, R&B, lesbo-womyn’s-punk-crossover-wuddever rock, just folk, ethnic,  plus wuddever by itself—they play it all. Or, to be more accurate, they play the good stuff. And it is so good. Trust me on this. I don’t even listen to rock and roll and I listen to them religiously, because they’ve got that mysterious, unexplainable thing called great taste in music.

First comes Bonnie Simmons. Here’s the first five songs of a recent Bonnie playlist:

I mean, who can argue with this? For two hours it’s like an alternate universe where nothing ever sucks. How does Simmons do it? Years of experience in the music biz, going back to the free form radio days: music director at KSAN, promoter for Prince and Dire Straights, deejay at KFOG, LIVE 105, and KOFY. Plus she managed Cake for eight years and currently hustles for Noe Venable and Etienne de Rocher.

Plus, I just love listening to her. She’s got this charmingly officious way of talking. “Oh so Beattle-y, and yet not . . . ” she crooned as she back announced the Phillips tune. Plus she’s endlessly meditating on the second half of the evening, Derk Richardson. “I believe that Derk Richardson will be in tonight ” she proclaims, as if she was warming up for the Prime Minister of some place. “I haven’t discussed this with him in depth, but I believe that he’s headed in.” She’s got this way of tartly saying Derk—drives me nuts.

Derk Richardson, as per his Facebook page photo

And rest assured, Derk is worth staying up until 10 pm for. A prolific writer, reviewer and Bay Area music-o-phile since the 1970s, the most amazing stuff gets broadcast live on Derk’s Hear-and-Now show. Thursday last week I could not believe I was actually listening as the Quartet San Francisco broadcast live, so beautiful was the evening—they doing spectacular selections from their arrangements of Dave Brubeck songs,  The lyrics of Elvis Costello floated through my head—”with every one of those late night stations playing songs bringing tears to me eyes.”

Bonnie and Derk—goddamnit, somebody give those two their own radio station. And take along the fabulous Betty Beasley, who often deejays during those hours  (and just had on the Real Vocal String Quartet live last night; amazing) and the Tony Ferro/Joel Sachs live music engineering team.

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I’m a media geek, hence my nom de internet. And I pretty much have always been, ever since I recognized that there were people, organizations and companies behind the shows I saw on TV and listened to on the radio. I remember reading Billboard and Radio and Electronics in the library while still in elementary school. I always read the paper’s TV supplement and radio listings (yeah, papers once had those) so I would know channels had what shows and what stations played what music — even stuff I had no interest in (as a result, for years I thought Get Smart was an educational program until I actually watched it).

I always wanted to understand how all this mass media got made, who was making it and what machinations affected what we could watch and listen to. That’s what fueled my interest in radio, why I got into college radio, and why I learned video production. I spent some time in graduate school studying the political economy of the media, only to realize being a professor wasn’t so much for me. I produced a weekly radio show exploring both the policy and grassroots angles of media for seven years, and now I blog here about radio.

And, really, until I got out of college I always felt a little bit alone in my interest in the behind-the-scenes of broadcast media, rather than being interested in the shows and programs themselves, like normal people. Graduate school and the rebirth of academic consciousness about media ownership and control in the 1990s showed me that I wasn’t so strange, at least in this interest. At the same time, aside from the short-lived Brill’s Content, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of a mass media publication or program that consistently looked at media that wasn’t intended for a strictly academic or industry audience.

Then I heard NPR’s On the Media. I’m not sure when that first happened–the program went national in 2001, but I think it was a few years before my local affiliate picked it up. Anyway, I recall initially being skeptical of the premise, expecting the program to sound like a radio version of a local media column, covering the coming and going of various executives and on-air talent, reviewing new program line-ups, ratings and the like.

In a manifesto for the program, co-host Brooke Gladstone explains that one of the reasons why she abandoned the typical media beat was that,

I would be asked to do a three-and-a-half minute piece every time Tina Brown passed wind (or so it seemed to me.) I wasn’t interested in that, and I lived in one of the half-dozen zip codes where people genuinely cared about Tina Brown [former New Yorker editor-in-chief].

Instead, she writes that,

I wanted to show how the media sausage is made.

That explains why when I actually heard it, I was pleasantly surprised.

As someone who produced a weekly program that attempted to be critical of the media establishment, I can say that On the Media is more establishment than not, but still critical. At the same time, OTM stands out from a lot of other public radio programming in that Gladstone and co-host Bob Garfield clearly have a point of view, and aren’t afraid to call “bullshit” when they see it.

As employees of NPR and WNYC, the nation’s largest public station, the staff of OTM are themselves part of the media mainstream, yet I think they manage to make the most of their insider status to nevertheless raise serious questions of ethics, truth, and even sometimes, justice. To me, they are credible when they do this because the staff of OTM is also willing to cop to their own oversights, mistakes and prejudices. One of my favorite episodes is from 2003, which they called “Pulling Back the Curtain,” in which they explain and demonstrate how editing, and editing decisions, result in the show you hear each week.

For my taste they focus too much on fine points of journalistic practice and propriety, whereas I would prefer a more systemic analysis of the media system, ownership and the effects of the profit motive. I recognize there’s a need to stay topical, but their frequent analyses of how the print and electronic press covered a particular news story, again, seems more like inside baseball than a more trenchant investigation into why the press chooses to report the way it does.

Still, those are actually minor quibbles with a program that provides more consistent reportage, analysis and criticism of our media system than anything else in broadcast. Sure, FAIR’s Counterpsin does a good job of picking apart mainstream news coverage every week from a progressive perspective, and programs like Democracy Now do frequent analysis of the mainstream media from a social justice point of view. Nevertheless OTM is on the case every week, and through its more conventional public radio approach to reporting often provides a few opinions that I might not otherwise have considered. For instance, I found their show on the music industry last year to be truly informative and penetrating, despite the fact I consider myself pretty deeply into the topic.

OTM’s approach is definitely one of tough love. The staff doesn’t want the mainstream media to collapse and die out. I believe they just want it to be better, and provide greater service to an informed public

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KZYX- Home of "Trading Time"

One of terrestrial radio’s many benefits is that is has the capacity to be a resource for the local listening community. Since in recent years there has been less and less local content on commercial stations, there’s a great opportunity for college and community radio stations to put even more emphasis on the needs of the listening audience in one’s backyard.

My all-time favorite local radio show is on the community radio station KZYX in Philo, California. “Trading Time” is call-in swap show (airing every Saturday morning from 11am to noon) that allows people in Mendocino County to advertise goods for sale, rides needed, or items that they are looking for. It’s like a community bulletin board on the radio (or a live version of Craigslist).

The folksy hosts of “Trading Time” introduce callers, repeat details about the various items for sale, and read off emails and snail mail-delivered listings that have come in from other neighbors. Although on the surface listening to a bunch of people calling in with items to sell or trade might sound mundane, there’s something about the show that is riveting. It provides a real slice of life for the local community and you get to hear a cross-section of folks sharing news of what their current list of cast-offs might be.

Scenery near Philo

Someone might call in offering an old truck. Another caller could be seeking a ride to San Francisco. And yet another might be looking for a couch. In addition to calling in live during the show, members of the community can also submit their listings of items they’d like to buy, sell, trade or barter to the station by snail mail or by using an online submission form.

If you don’t live near Philo, similar shows air all over the country, including the following:

KSCJ 1360 AM in Sioux City, Iowa:  KSCJ Swap Shop is on the air Saturdays and Sundays

WJXR 92.1 FM in Jacksonville, Florida : Swap Shop airs Monday through Saturday mornings

Mid Kansas Radio in McPherson, Kansas: Swap Shop airs daily. You can also check out some of the daily listings on their website. Today they’ve got free puppies and someone is looking for a lava lamp.

WGNS Talk Radio in Murfreesboro, Tennessee : Swap ‘n Shop has been on the air since 1947! Some of the latest listings include hay, pit bull puppies, and a “wheel barrel” for sale and someone who is looking for help fixing their “fridge.”

KGAS in Carthage, Texas: KGAS Radio Swap Shop is on the air weekday mornings. Callers can list up to 4 items in 30 seconds. No firearms allowed and only clean and sanitized mattresses.

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I am totally addicted to listening to BBC World Have Your Say. To a degree this is a guilty pleasure, since some of the episodes definitely ask reality show questions. Right now I’m auditing a discussion titled “Should Fat People Pay More?” when they buy airline tickets and other items—with a weight sensitivity activist saying no and a hard nosed New York kind of guy saying yes.

But what I totally love about the show is that it really is the English speaking world having its say. The debate between the New Yorker and the weight activist is over. And WHYS Ros Atkins is announcing who is on the lines. “I can see Barbara’s phone from South Africa, Cathy in Sweden, and also John in the [United] States,” Atkins says. Plus e-mails are coming in from Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere. Most are in favor of the extra charges, as is Cathy.

“Discrimination usually applies in cases where the person has no control . . . ” she says, “therefore gender, ethnicity, your age, for example. In my opinion obesity is for the most part a choice.” Next comes an economist who says higher prices for unhealthy foods might encourage people to lose weight. After he’s finished Ros puts on Barbara from Johannesburg, but surprises her with a question about whether a “fat tax” would get people to slim down.

Barbara stumbles. She wants to talk about people in airplanes feeling “squashed” by bigger folks. “But Barbara, you’re describing what other people think. I want to know what you think . . . ” Ros insists, and the global conversation goes on.

Do me a favor

Not all the shows ask Oprah style questions. “Should Google pull out of China?” “Would you adopt a child from Haiti?” or “Have the French done Muslim women a favour?” by proposing a ban on Islamic face veils? Is the Burka a symbol of oppression and empowerment?

In response to this question a Muslim woman from London named Saramina says it should be a woman’s choice what to wear. She’s obviously upset and angry. WHYS host Nuala McGovern is attentive to her and takes pains to ensure that she says everything that’s on her mind. The French banning the Burka is “just a form of extremism,” she insists, no different from the Taliban making women wear it.

Next comes some vox pop the BBC collected from Paris on the question. Parisian women struggle with the English, but they make their positions clear. “In her country,” one insists, “but not in France!”

Another British woman who says she wears the hijab  opines that in some instances Muslim women in France may be forced to wear the niquaab, a head/veil that leaves only the eyes revealed for vision. “Yes, I’m sure that it does occur,” responds Saramina. “Like men force women to do all kinds of things. And of course she should have some legal recourse from that.”

A woman from Saudi Arabia calls in. “Strange for the government of France, which claims to have invented liberty, they do something like this. It’s kind of upsetting.”

I love it.

How it works

As I was writing this post, I got a press release from Stitcher billboarding the Alan Colmes radio show, or “the most interactive radio show on the planet,” as he calls it. I’d be surprised if that was true. Broadcasting since 2005, WHYS is a beneficiary of the revolution in electronic interaction of the last decade: texting, e-mailing, cheap VoIP calls, and social media. Here’s how people get on the show, according to WHYS.

1. They phone the show while we’re on air.

2. They text or email the show while we’re on air, and we reply asking if they’d like to speak to us.

3. They text or email the show while we’re on air and give their phone number and we ring them back.

4. They post on a debate on bbcnews.com and leave their phone number. One of the WHYS team gives them a ring and invites them on to the show.

5. The same as No.4, but they get in touch through our blog.

6. Subscribers to the WHYS Daily Email often reply saying they want to take part and give their phone number.

Of course, WHYS staff also call people up and invite them to be on, but the show wouldn’t be possible without the amazing global interaction that is its hallmark. The program’s FAQ asks, “Why are the phone lines so bad?”

“We’d like to think they aren’t most of the time, but we do sometimes have problems especially when speaking to those of you in Africa,” comes the explanation. “So if we get a call from Afghanistan we’re more likely to tolerate a poor quality phone line than we would if it was a call from the States.”

Could a program of WHYS’ quality come from the “the States”? It’s not surprising that Britain, an island nation that once controlled a big chunk of the world, excels at this sort of thing. While we in the U.S. certainly have our fingers deeply ensconced in the global pie, we are as a people far less curious about the world than the British. That’s something to work on. Listening to WHYS could help.

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Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez’s radio/TV program Democracy Now! is, without question, the most successful media vehicle in the history of the United States Left. Launched at Pacifica station WBAI-FM in New York City in the mid-1990s, it is now an independent venture, subscribed to by over 800 radio, TV, and Internet stations around the world. From the perspective of this media historian, Democracy Now! exceeds all previous attempts to spread an explicitly social justice oriented message via broadcast and/or print. No prior effort, starting with the The Masses at the beginning of the  20th century,  has ever come so far in terms of influence and reach.

I listen to Democracy Now!‘s one hour broadcast on a regular basis because it is fast paced and timely, racing to wherever the action is—Haiti, Copenhagen, Washington, D.C, or Honduras. I don’t always agree with the program’s perspective, but I appreciate the effort DN makes to host debates and discussions within the Left about how to move forward, such as its recent debate about how to respond to the Obama adminstration’s health care initiative. The vast majority of community radio style public affairs programs, within and beyond Pacifica, simply ignore these disagreements and tout one line or another, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. DN has far outpaced those efforts in part because of its willingness to embrace a broader perspective.

Here is some of what I wrote about Democracy Now! in my second book on Pacifica, Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War.

When she chanced upon WBAI in New York, Amy Goodman had just graduated from Harvard College and returned to the city. She had been raised in Bay Shore, Long Island, by a family of activists; her mother had spent much of the 1980s working for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze. Her father, an ophthalmologist, had been a civil rights advocate in the 1960s, taking a stand for school integration in a predominantly white suburb.

“I would go to the night meetings,” Goodman later recalled. “A thousand people would be screaming, and I would watch him stand his ground. There were death threats, but he just went on. I think that very much shaped my feeling about what was just in the world.” Now out of school and on her own, she had just finished a series of articles for Ralph Nader and Alan Nairn’s Multinational Monitor on Depo-Provera, the controversial birth-control shot. Goodman was about to enroll in Hunter College for graduate classes in biochemistry when a course on radio production caught her eye. WBAI’s Andrew Phillips taught the class. At the time Phillips hosted a show called “Investigations,” a program dedicated to what radio producers call “actuality” – the sounds of people talking and doing things on tape, speeches, demonstrations, street interviews. Goodman sat in on the first lecture, then talked with Phillips afterwards. The latter knew a true believer when he saw one. He asked her if she wanted to apprentice for him at WBAI. She protested that she had no radio experience. “That’s fine,” Phillips replied. That evening the two walked the mile from Hunter on the East Side to WBAI’s West Side headquarters. Phillips put his new student to work editing tapes for an upcoming program on the fortieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. “And I never left,” Goodman later explained.

[I]n the late 1980s, WBAI experienced a significant ethnographic shift. Many of its older white programmers moved on, some lured away by jobs at National Public Radio or WNYC, the city’s then municipally owned station. Into the gap stepped producers determined to reach beyond the frequency’s predominantly white air sound. Prominent among them was Samori Marksman. Born in St. Vincent in 1948, Marksman studied political science and cinematography at New York University before coming to WBAI. In 1977 he began producing interview shows for the station while working for the government of Grenada as a researcher and publicist. His friend and admirer Louis Proyect remembered him “as belonging to the grand tradition of Afro-Caribbean Marxism” exemplified by C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, and Eric Williams. Radical intellectuals of all backgrounds throughout New York cherished his daily interview show Behind the News, on which one could hear Marksman grapple with figures as diverse as the British Labor Party’s Tony Benn or former CIA director William Colby. Long before Marksman became program director at WBAI he exemplified a postcolonial cosmopolitanism that became characteristic of the station’s news and public affairs focus.

Marksman’s tenure also signaled the emergence of a new audience for Pacifica’s second frequency: Caribbean immigrants. By the 1980s New York City had become “the Caribbean cross-roads of the world,” in the words of anthropologist Constance Sutton. Over 324,000 women and men hailing from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Haiti, and a dozen other Caribbean countries lived in the city, according to government census data. WBAI’s latest generation of programmers took note of and inspiration from their presence. African-American producer Valerie Van Isler traveled through the Caribbean for WBAI, producing features on Grenada’s ill-fated New Jewel movement and democratic struggles in Haiti. Robert Knight and the public affairs show Undercurrents won a Polk award for his coverage of the U.S. invasion of Panama.

Goodman thrived in WBAI’s atmosphere of diversity and political commitment, switching off with Robert Knight and Marksman as news director for the station. In 1991 she and Alan Nairn traveled to East Timor, barely escaped with their lives, and won awards for an eyewitness account of a massacre on the island. Then in 1992 Goodman teamed up with Bernard White, a droll, witty producer who excelled at live talk, to co-host the station’s morning program, Wakeup Call. The show both reported the news and championed causes, among them the case of Moreese Bickham, incarcerated in Louisiana’s Angola prison since 1958. Tipped to Bickham’s plight by independent producer David Isay, Wakeup Call told his story, that of a man who defended himself against armed Klansmen, only to be convicted of murder and placed on Louisiana’s death row. Heart attacks induced by terror just hours before his two scheduled execution dates had saved Bickham from state-sanctioned extermination. White and Goodman publicized his plight and urged WBAI listeners to call authorities for a reconsideration of his sentence. Upon his release, Bickham came to WBAI and thanked the staff over the airwaves.

For years, Pacifica had been shopping around for some kind of national daily public-affairs show to prove the viability of the concept. In 1995 the network briefly distributed an interview program hosted by economist and syndicated columnist Julianne Malveaux. Publicist Tony Regusters produced the show out of WPFW. Malveaux brought fire and erudition to her work, but she had little patience with the poor studio conditions Pacifica had given her. The experiment lasted three months. At the same time a former governor of California accepted KPFA’s invitation to host a news and talk show at 4 p.m. Jerry Brown titled his offering We the People. Although the program invariably featured a guest or two, most of the hour focused on the rambling meditations of the host. One Pacifica staffer privately referred to the segment as “I the People.” WBAI and KPFK picked up the program. The show lasted for some time, ending when Brown ran for mayor of Oakland.

In the midst of all these fits and starts, Pacifica asked Goodman to produce a national show on congressional politics. It was early 1995. The Republican Party had just swept Capitol Hill, enabling Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich to become Speaker of the House of Representatives. Right-wing talk show hosts hailed his “Contract with America,” for the most part a glorified array of privatizations and budget cuts. Goodman moved to Washington, D.C., and accustomed herself to the daily routine of a national reporter. By the end of the series she was seething with anger. She covered House committees where Representatives spent most of their time discussing ways to fiscally penalize states where women on welfare had “too many” abortions. “They wanted to go after women on welfare,” Goodman later recalled, “keep down the number of children that they have, but at the same time they didn’t want to encourage abortion. And so they started to discuss why women have sex.” Ways to cut social services, especially for poor women, were always high on the agenda. Meanwhile Gingrich had figured in a minor scandal. In January of 1995 television reporter Connie Chung had just interviewed his mother. When Chung asked mom what her son thought of then First Lady Hillary Clinton, she got hesitation at first. “Why don’t you just whisper it to me,” Chung pressed, “just between you and me.” A “bitch,” came the smug reply.

On Goodman’s final day in Washington, March 3 of that year, she had not intended to go to Gingrich’s daily press briefing. But the crescendo of anti-woman legislation coming out of D.C. had become too much for her, as had the silence of most of the press on the subject, especially at Gingrich-related events. “It seemed like there was a kind of agreement, a protocol, between the press and the Speaker,” she explained. At the last minute she rushed over to his media appearance. Dressed in sneakers and jeans, she positioned herself next to the television camera so that she would be heard but not seen; the focus would be entirely on Gingrich. Goodman raised her hand and charged that Congress had over the past two years essentially declared “war on women.” Then she got down to specifics.

“You fired the first salvo when you called the First Lady a bitch,” Goodman continued. “So why don’t you apologize?”

Gingrich became furious. The two snarled back at forth at each other. “To the best of my knowledge, I never said what you said I said,” he responded.

“Are you calling your mother a liar, then?” Goodman asked.

The broadcast hit the Pacifica network like a fireball. I was visiting KPFA when the piece aired. People stood around the halls and talked about the exchange. Some thought that Goodman had come off as a bit juvenile, a criticism that would follow her over the years, even from colleagues who admired her. “She is earnest to a fault, with little patience for folks who may have a more nuanced stance on certain issues than she does,” commented journalist Danny Schechter. “She has only fastballs, and she throws at the head,” observed Time magazine’s Steve Lopez.

But most Pacifica listeners quickly came to identify with Goodman’s intense, insistent tone. They could see themselves standing in Goodman’s place, asking the same angry, obvious questions that most journalists never ask. The Gingrich confrontation did not just report the news, it made news, and not just at Pacifica either. “Gingrich Can’t Ditch Bitch Remark,” ran one headline after the fight. Soon right-wing talk show hosts were talking about Goodman, demanding that she apologize for upsetting the Speaker of the House.

What Amy Goodman’s critics and supporters both missed, however, was that her style represented a decisive break with earlier Pacifica public affairs broadcasting. Since the late 1960s, most Pacifica programmers had shunned any kind of on-air contact with the Right, arguing that the network’s resources were better used airing rarely heard voices from the Left. Indeed, KPFA listeners sometimes complained when the station broadcast a presidential State of the Union address. Goodman emphatically rejected that stance. She constantly pushed to get government officials, right wing ideologues, and corporate flaks on the air so that she and her favorite progressive activists could pelt them with critical questions. Nothing better characterized her approach than her telephone dogfight with Bill Clinton. In November 2000 the President thought he would pleasantly surprise New York radio stations by calling in urging listeners to vote. Chances are that if he had called WBAI in 1977, staff would have hung up on him. But when Clinton phoned in to give what he thought would be a routine thirty-second “get out and vote” pitch, Goodman rushed to the receiver, turned on the tape recorder, and challenged him for thirty minutes on everything from welfare reform to the embargo against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

“You are calling radio stations telling people to vote,” she began. “What do you say to people who feel the two parties are bought by corporations and that at this point their vote doesn’t make a difference?” Whatever problems anyone had with Goodman’s tone, no one could dismiss her work as the Left talking to itself.

Shortly after the Gingrich fight, Pacifica development staffer Julie Drizen asked Goodman to continue the program indefinitely. In early 1996 the two came up with a title, Democracy Now!, and an on air slogan that reflected the show’s sassy spirit: “The Exception to the Rulers.” Larry Bensky signed on as a political commentator. Columnist Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News joined as co-host twice a week. Almost immediately the show began making waves across the community radio system. In early 1997 WRTI in Philadelphia unceremoniously dumped Democracy Now! just as it prepared to air commentaries by controversial Pennsylvania deathrow inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of killing a police officer.

But most community stations enthusiastically stayed with Democracy Now! – once they joined. The trick was getting them to join, which meant getting them to apportion an hour every day for the show, which meant getting at least three or four volunteer hosts at each station to move aside. “We all feel very strongly about how good a program [Democracy Now!] is,” a manager for radio station WORT in Madison, Wisconsin, told a reporter for Current magazine. “But our commitment by mission statement is to provide as much local access as we can, to provide our community with a window to the airwaves.”

Within Pacifica, then executive director Pat Scott pushed hard to make sure that all five network stations ran the program. Then in December of 1997 the foundation launched its own satellite service, a less expensive alternative to NPR’s Public Radio Satellite System. Pacifica’s new service distributed Democracy Now! and 17 other programs, including a half-hour Pacifica Network News. Soon dozens of community radio stations began affiliating. In 1998 Pacifica listed 56 community station members. By 2000 one audience research analyst estimated that Pacifica radio alone reached approximately 800,000 people a week – with affiliates, the total came to about one million a week. Some Pacifica stations played Democracy Now! twice a day. KPFK ran it twice every morning. Amy Goodman and Pacifica quickly became synonymous.

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Edlee B'n Hadd & Incoming Wounded

While most college and community stations have their own local variety of late night brilliance, my favorite example of the species is on community radio WEFT in the college towns of Champaign-Urbana, IL, home of the University of Illinois. Broadcasting from storefront studios in Downtown Champaign, I spent fourteen years volunteer at WEFT and avoiding earning degrees in graduate school. In those years it was my distinct honor and privilege to listen to, and often participate in WEFT’s longest running program, Incoming Wounded.

Hosted by Edlee B’n Hadd (a/k/a Ed Hadley) since sometime in the 1980s, Incoming Wounded takes over the airwaves every Saturday night at midnight to bring a continuous wash of sounds to the night owls of East-Central Illinois. Ostensibly Incoming Wounded is a show that features ambient, electronic and experimental music. But that’s like saying Monty Python’s and the Holy Grail is a movie about some guys searching for a cup.

Edlee's Favorite Keyboard: Casio VA-10

In the last decade or so the use of toy keyboards, cheap effects units and found sounds has become more common and popular on the fringes of indie rock, so to many this might not seem so unique. But I contend that Edlee B’n Hadd is an OG in this business, bringing it to air before many of the newest indie rock Casio-slingers were out of diapers. Like so many artists, Edlee’s employment of cheap keyboards and homemade instruments was born out of necessity, since so-called “real” synthesizers were much more expensive two decades ago.

Edlee B'n Hadd on the mic

These ad hoc sessions eventually led to somewhat more planned live on-air performances of what became known as the Noiz Assembly. Inspired in equal measures by Negativland, John Cage, Aphex Twin, the Church of the Subgenius, King Crimson and Napalm Death, over the course of the last decade the Assembly turned into a near-quarterly affair, with an annual pre-midnight date for Halloween on WEFT’s live music program, WEFT Sessions.

Unfortunately there is no podcast of Incoming Wounded, although those outside of the Champaign, IL area can tune in online. I’m pretty sure that Edlee has recorded nearly every show he’s ever done. What we need is an archivist intern ready to make a significant contribution to the history of late night radio to dive in and digitize it all for the sake of posterior…er, posterity. Yet, part of the magic that is Incoming Wounded is the fact that it is ephemeral, constructed in the moment, for the moment, in a burst of nocturnal inspiration. That is the best way to experience it.

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Skulltime for Kids Pirate Shirt

Debuting back in 1987, way before pirates were ever deemed cool and a full 8 years before “Talk Like a Pirate Day” was ever conceptualized, Skulltime for Kids hit the airwaves of Foothill College radio station KFJC 89.7 FM in Los Altos Hills, California.

Captain Jack, the creator of the show, told me that the original idea for the program was born during a graveyard shift that he did with a fellow DJ in which they pretended to be pirates. He said that those initial late night shows were hilarious and that other station staff members encouraged him to base a show around that concept.

So, in 1987 Skulltime for Kids began as a Wednesday afternoon “children’s show,” hosted by the pirate Captain Jack.

The early years were a solo operation, with Captain Jack playing children’s records and spinning tales about his pirate life. He always alluded to a character called Skully, who was the “phantom bartender on Skull Island,” but it wasn’t until 1992 that another DJ offered to join the show in order to bring Skully to life. By 1996 or 1997 Skully was a regular fixture on Skulltime for Kids and around that time I started listening to the show (and joined the staff of KFJC).

There are a lot of things to love about Skulltime for Kids. There’s always plenty of banter about pop culture and music trivia and over the years I’ve found the show to be the “go to” place for news about dead celebrities, as they do rousing tributes to recently departed pop culture fixtures. Both Captain Jack and Skully are also thrift store junkies, so they often play amazing vintage children’s records with songs and stories from the past.

Various other station members (and even visiting musician Will Oldham) have come on the show playing a number of characters, from Bubba (voiced by former Music Director Ken “Spiderman” Hamilton), to the Sea Hag, to Crow’s Next Willy (Will Oldham’s alter ego).

When I talked to Captain Jack and Skully about some of their favorite moments from the show, they both shared with me the fun they had in crafting a 9-week-long “Skull Island Saga,” in which they revealed an elaborate backstory about how Skully used to own Skull Island. Skully told me, “we were trying to get Skull Island back…and then Bubba came in…He’s a Budweiser truck driver…and he ends up saving the world.” Apparently the ongoing drama included cliffhangers and a helium balloon sent up to save people.

Captain Jack told me that one of the other central characters on Skull Island was the Blood Ape, “a fabled experimental musician.” He said that they actually made a Blood Ape demo that was made available to lucky listeners.

Surprisingly, the majority of what happens on Skulltime for Kids is not scripted and just occurs in the moment as improvisation. Since it’s an afternoon show, there are some children who do listen to the show, although Captain Jack and Skully point out that some of the content is a bit “over the line” for kids. The talk can get saucy, but it’s all veiled under clean language and tempered by pirate voices. Like crotchety old punk rockers, they talk about the good old days, music, heroes from the past, and their dreams for the future. Throw an old Disney record or two into the mix, and it’s pure genius.

You can listen to Skulltime for Kids on Wednesday afternoons from 5 to 6pm Pacific on KFJC 89.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or online from anywhere in the world.

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Dr. Demento (image from www.drdemento.com)

Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the Dr. Demento show began in 1970 on Los Angeles freeform station KPPC as a “rarities” show.

By 1974 the popular radio program, which specializes in a mix of music and comedy, moved into syndication all over the country.

Hosted by former college radio DJ (at the Reed College station), music historian, and record executive Barret Hansen (aka Dr. Demento); the show has celebrated not only novelty recordings, but also rare musical and comedic gems.

When I was a kid my sister and I used to spend hours and hours listening to the Dr. Demento show, cracking up over the silly comedic songs that were aimed at just our level of maturity.

The program’s bread and butter is both novelty songs like “Fish Heads” and full-on parodies of popular hits by Weird Al Yankovic. To this day, I am always reminded of “Another One Rides the Bus” when I hear “Another One Bites the Dust” and I smile when thinking of Weird Al’s “Eat It” (and its accompanying video) which pokes fun of the Michael Jackson hit “Beat it.”

But, probably more important for me, is that the Dr. Demento show was the first show that inspired me to “play DJ.” My sister and I would not only listen to the show together, but we would also pretend to do radio shows modelled after Dr. Demento using my portable tape recorder.

Somehow the personality of Dr. Demento invited us into that radio world and gave us the idea that radio might be fun. Although my actual radio shows bear zero resemblance to the antics of Dr. Demento, his program still holds a place in my heart for showing me the joyful aspects of radio. And, clearly, Dr. Demento is still having a ball with the show. A scan of some of his recent playlists reveals that he’s been keeping things interesting by doing theme-based shows, including a whole set of vegetable songs last week and a bunch of “I Want” songs on his January 10th program.

You can listen to archives of the Dr. Demento show online, catch it on a handful of terrestrial stations, or purchase any number of Dr. Demento collections or oddities on his website.

P.S. Another Dr. Demento-esque show worth checking out is the Uncle Al Show on Sundays from noon to 3pm Pacific time on KFJC 89.7 FM (yes, the station where I DJ too). Like Dr. Demento, he plays a selection of comedy, novelty songs, and retro music from the “Hippy’s Graveyard.”

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As a proud thirty-eight year-old member of Generation X, I have become just a little disturbed by a trend I’ve noticed in the last few years. One might call this trend the “indie-rockification” of public radio. As my fellow grunge-survivors and I, raised on the so-called “first wave” of alternative rock and derided by boomers as slackers, creep closer to middle age we have become a more valuable target demographic for public stations. And, with commercial radio hemorrhaging jobs as we graduated college, those Gen Xers who went into careers in radio pretty much only had public radio as a viable option. So not only are more Gen Xers listening to public radio, increasingly they’re in charge.

One of the best products of this trend is the program Sound Opinions, produced by Chicago Public Radio and syndicated by American Public Media. Billing itself as the world’s only Rock N Roll talk show, Sound Opinions is hosted by Gen X popular music critic Jim DeRogatis, who writes for the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune’s rock and roll writer Greg Kot (born in 1957, so just scant older than the typical 1961 cut-off to be considered Gen X… but who’s counting?).

The hour-long program is custom made for the true music geek of the sort who a decade ago used to haunt record stores and college radio stations, but who is now forced to spend more time at the corner coffee shop consuming music blogs on a laptop. Instead of dwelling in rock-star gossip, each program features music news that actually gets into the real issues affecting popular music, such as the RIAA’s anti-piracy lawsuits and the proposed merger of concert giants Live Nation and Ticketmaster (they tend to oppose both).

Some weeks they will have in an artist for an in-studio performance or interview. Their guests tend to have a lot of what one might call “indie cred,” whether they’re up-and-coming indie artists like The Dodos, or alt rock stalwarts The Flaming Lips. I have to admit that listening to Sound Opinions has turned me on to some great and unusual musicians like Saul Williams Tim Fite after getting to hear them play live in such an intimate and immediate setting.

What makes the program compelling and keeps me tuning in every week are the personalities of the hosts, where the Jersey-born and more excitable DeRogatis plays Ebert to Kot’s more unflappable Siskel. In fact, the two tend to agree more than they disagree, but it’s always fun when they needle each other for something like giving a “buy it” rating to Jonas Brothers CD. Whether they’re reviewing albums or discussing the state of the music industry, it always sounds like they’re telling the truth as they see it, not made pretty for public radio. Where AAA public radio stalwarts like World Cafe can come off as precious and self-satisfied, DeRogatis and Kot are never afraid to express real excitement or disappointment with an artist or album, regardless of what the indie rock consensus is.

Interestingly enough, Sound Opinions didn’t start on public radio, but rather begin with a successful seven year run on Chicago’s WXRT, one of the last surviving commercial rock stations that still has a vestigial claim to the “progressive rock radio” title. In 2005 Kot and DeRogatis were lured over to public staiton WBEZ with the promise of better facilities, a bigger budget, podcasting and a shot at syndication.

If you had told me when I was eighteen (in 1989) that when I reached my thirties I would be hearing new indie bands–or even grizzled underground rock veterans–every week on public radio, I’d have thought you were tripping hard. But now that it’s reality, I’m glad to get my weekly dose of Sound Opinions.

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I need a good laugh about once every twenty minutes, especially these days. So I listen to Onion Radio News.

“A giant 6-year old devastates a local ant community!” announces ORN’s hard nosed reporter, Doyle Redland. “Ant-hill scouts reported today that a mammalian destructo-beast some ten thousand ant-links in height smashed a nearby ant-hill and left thousands scurrying to rebuild.”

The kid was caught on tape, Redland continues, “using a Stone Cold Steve Austin action figure to pummel the colony flat.” Though reports from the scene are sketchy, “all stress that The Queen is unharmed,” Redland emphasizes. “Repeat. THE QUEEN IS UNHARMED.”

At a time when so much on line humor is about being snarky or trashing people, ORN somehow finds a way to be laughing-out-loud funny without being mean. The service succeeds in this by making whimsical fun of nobody in particular, just mythological figures , crash test dummies , “area” women and men, and recently deceased animals, often with salutation names. Redland’s but-seriously-folks voice is provided by the actor and cartoonist Pete S. Mueller.

“If there’s a Ferret Heaven, an area woman’s dead Ferret is in it!” Redland disclosed in an April 15, 2008 exclusive. The breaking story (and one of my favorites) boils down to an interview with former ferret owner Kelly Isgold, who says that if a ferret heaven exists, “her recently deceased pet Mr. Slinky has been given a gold halo” and a full pass.

“I just imagine that he’s up there spraying musk on Saint Peter’s robe and getting into trouble,” Isgold says.

But no, interrupts Doyle. “This just in. Mr. Slinky’s soul has been sent to giant prairie dog heaven by mistake, where he will be tormented for all eternity!”

Pass the coleslaw

To be fair, science, the economy, and international politics all get their share of coverage on ORN. There’s a feature on the prospect that North Korea may drop a nuclear bomb on itself, and a new report released by the Department of Sides and Garnishes indicating that 85 percent of all U.S. coleslaw goes uneaten.

But I like the animal stories best.

“Wall Street analysts are giving credit to today’s surge in trading volume to an especially loud opening bell rung by an escaped chimpanzee wielding a large hammer,” begins a July news item . While brokers appreciated the stock boost, some were “privately alarmed” that an escaped zoo animal could get access to the New York Stock Exchange. “We all remember what happened when a pigeon got in here,” trader Ben Morganthal is quoted as saying. “We got lucky this time.”

We’re ruined

Every now and then, of course, the critters offer a social message, usually of the libertarian variety. “Abstinence only education ruined by trip to the zoo,” was the headline of the day for July 11. The parents of 14 year old Lily Dirksen have always dutifully kept the girl out of sex education classes, it seems. But all that virtue was undone by the sight of humping giraffes. “Though Mr. Dirksen has consulted the Bible about the problem,” Doyle concludes, “he says that there is absolutely nothing in it about accidentally letting your kids see a couple of masturbating wolverines.”

According to its About page, the Onion Radio News “has been the most highly regarded broadcast news source in the world since visionary Onion publisher T. Herman Zweibel made the bold move in 1922 to shut down the popular Onion Telegraph News and focus on the then embryonic medium of radio.” What a visionary—then, and now.

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I forget when I first started listening to Joe Frank. The other problem is that his half-hour to hour long programs are so weird that one can’t trust one’s memory about them. I mean, I think I remember an episode about a hysterical waiter who, after a long tirade, vomits on his patrons, a furious ex-girlfriend who leaves a long message for some guy alternately begging to get back together then fantasizing about murdering him, and a radio evangelist who claims that the actual physical process of dialing in to give him money will bring salvation.

“I’m sitting at a dinner party attended by Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao,” begins one episode. “Seated at another smaller table are Sadaam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Pinochet, and some others that I don’t recognize.” What’s not to love about this stuff?

Like so many great radio personalities, Joe got his start at WBAI-FM in New York City, then he did Weekend Edition for National Public Radio, followed many productive years at KCRW producing his “Joe Frank: Work in Progress” series. He’s won all kinds of neat awards, especially for his “Rent-A-Family” shows.

As already suggested, Frank is particularly reverential to religion [not]. In another episode he’s got somebody who just had a stroke calling in to another Pentecostal type.

“Repeat after me,” the preacher healingly declares.

“Oh Lord.” “Oh Lord. . . .”
“Roll me.” “Roll me.”
“Knead me.” “Knead me.”
“Slap me.” “Slap me.”
“Let me be like a mouse.” “Let me be like a mouse.”
“Inside a mouse trap.” “Inside a mouse trap.”
“Feed me.” “Feed me.”
“Bread.” “Bread.”
“Wine.” “Wine.”
“Hamsters.” “Hamsters.”
“Rats.” “Rats.”
“Bullfrogs.” “Bullfrogs.”
“African-Eurasian tiger pussycats . . . . ”

At some point the prayer asks The Lord to “take me to heaven on a muskrat.” From there it’s pretty much LOL to the end of the program.

It’s easy to lapse into B Movie prose when writing about Frank, about how he transports you “into the dark/absurd/existential/[insert your mediocre adjective here] regions of the soul,” etcetera. But what really makes him so engaging is that he’s just willing to follow wherever that brain of his goes, then write it down, script it, give it over to a small acting team, and put it up on the radio.

What Joe Frank does, in the end, is really listen to and acknowledge what’s happening in his head. That’s something most of us, including me, often fear to do.

From Joe’s FAQ page it doesn’t look like he’s produced any new programs for about four years. You can support his work by going to his site, signing up as a premium member, and/or buying his shows in CD format.

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For as much as I love radio I have to admit that there’s very few programs that I might consider appointment listening. Sure, I tune in to NPR daily to catch up on the news with Morning Edition and All Things Considered, but they’re pretty interchangeable to me. If, for some reason, the BBC News Hour were on instead I’d notice the difference, but I wouldn’t turn off the radio.

My #5 is not appointment listening. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t like it. I do know when it’s on, and if I happen to be in a radio listening mood at that time, I will be sure to tune it in. In fact, when it comes to commercial radio–especially syndicated commercial radio–it’s my favorite program currently on the air.

Little Steven’s Underground Garage stands out from most commercial music radio because it still shows the idosyncratic touch of its namesake host. Focused on the somewhat ill-defined subgenre of garage rock, the program plays rough-edged rock and roll that finds its roots with 1960s bands like the Troggs who went on to inspire early punks like the Ramones and later rockers such as the White Stripes. While this sort of rock is a mainstay of the Underground Garage, Little Steven takes a kind of “I know it when I see it” approach to the show, including a healthy does of Motown and other early rock nuggets alongside the more catholic selections. But his approach is not a hodge podge, like any real music DJ he draws connections between the songs he plays, often explaining why he deems an unorthodox choice worthy of inclusion.

Host Little Steven Van Zandt is otherwise known as a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, but in his off time has dedicated himself to the promotion and preservation of garage rock. While I certainly like most of the music labeled garage rock, I would never have considered myself a particular fan, as such. I first became aware of Little Steven’s campaign for the subgenre when a band local to Champaign-Urbana, IL, where I used to live, The Blackouts (now The Living Blue) won his first Underground Garage Battle of the Bands. That’s when I first tuned in to the program Sunday nights on the local classic rock station.

I keep tuning in to the program because Little Steven doesn’t keep trotting out the same lineup of so-called classics each week, just changing up the order. Sure, you’ll hear some of his favorites like the Dictators way more often than you would on any other commercial program, but that’s a good thing. It really sounds like he digs into the archives to pull out lesser-known gems. He also features newer bands, such as the Raveonettes, who receive little if any commercial radio play.

As a host, Little Steven is definitely unique, bringing a sometimes cheesy sense of humor to bare, backed up with sound clips from 50s and 60s horror and science fiction b-movies. At times his attempts at relevant commentary and humor are a little awkward and hackneyed, but they’re also sincere, and mercyfully short. The music is still front and center.

This being syndicated commercial radio there’s a fair share of bad national commercials to sit through, in addition to local spots. But the fact that the Underground Garage is on the air in the first place is bit of triumph. Little Steven started the program in 2002 without the help of the usual national radio syndicators like Westwood One, enlisting the sponsorship of the Hard Rock Cafe to get started.

There’s an Underground Garage channel on satellite radio, too, managing to survive the merger of XM and Sirius. When I had Sirius as part of my Dish Network package I’d occasionally listen to the UG channel. It features a range of guest hosts, like Joan Jett and Handsome Dick Manitoba (of the aforementioned Dictators), in addition to slots hosted by Little Steven. As I recall the playlist was looser than many other Sirius channels, but still had a definite rotation.

I’ve most appreciated the Underground Garage those times when I’m driving across the middle of the country on a weekend night and in between the same uninspired pop country and adult contemporary fare I stumble upon Little Steven’s mushmouthed Jersey accent. Thanks to Mr. Van Zandt for keeping rock n roll radio alive for at least a couple of hours a week.

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The Shadow Radio Drama

In sharing my list of my 5 favorite radio programs, I’m going to be mixing it up a bit by offering up some selections from both my past and present. So, I thought I’d begin with some of the earliest radio that I remember listening to. I’m pretty much a non-commercial radio loyalist these days, but like most people my early years of radio listening tended to happen on the commercial slice of the dial.

I have vivid early childhood memories in which I’m in my bedroom late at night, with the lights off listening to the radio drama “The Shadow.” I can’t remember the station that aired this, but chances are that it was a San Francisco-based AM radio station (most likely KSFO).

Listening to these suspense-filled shows as I nodded off to sleep as a small child not only was one of my first introductions to the concept of radio as a companion; but was also the first step in my eventual embrace of horror fiction. Listening to “The Shadow” probably paved the way for me reading creepy Stephen King stories by the age of 11.

These days radio dramas are few and far between, but you can catch archives of “The Shadow” and various other vintage dramas online and over some terrestrial stations. Here are a few suggestions of both classic and contemporary radio dramas:

The Shadow (classic episodes): Here’s a collection on PirateTV Theater. Episodes can also be purchased on CD and heard on various syndicated shows featuring old time radio.

Radio Drama Revivial: Airing on community radio station WMPG-FM in Portland, Maine (and via podcast), this show highlights contemporary radio drama, some vintage material (dating back to the 1980s), as well as reworkings of old-time shows.

Twilight Zone Radio Dramas: These contemporary radio dramas came to the airwaves and satellite radio in 2002. Check this list to see if your local stations may be airing these. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, KNEW broadcasts Twilight Zone radio from midnight to 2am on Sunday mornings.

Old Time Radio Drama: Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) airs old time radio drama from the 1930s to 1950s every Saturday and Sunday night from 8 to 11pm Central time.

Unshackled!: Apparently the longest running radio drama, the religious-themed “Unshackled!” has been produced by Chicago’s Pacific Garden Mission since 1950. It can be heard on more than 1800 terrestrial stations all over the world and has even been translated into Arabic, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Romanian, and Korean.

Northwestern University Radio Drama (N.U.R.D): Airing on college radio station WNUR, N.U.R.D. produces radio drama every week using both new and vintage scripts from Northwestern University students. The show airs on Sunday afternoons at 5:30pm Central time on WNUR in Chicago (and via podcast) and you can catch a selection of archived shows here.

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