Westhaver’s Cartunes marks 30 years of no Beatles
CKCU’s Friday Morning Cartunes celebrates 30 years outside the mainstream
Even when I would go away for a week, I’d time it so I left after a show one week, and I would be back to do the show the next week. It’s not like I was obsessed by it. I love doing that radio show. — John Westhaver
How long, I say to my lunch mate, do you think John Westhaver was in Ottawa before he knocked on the door at CKCU?
“Hmm,” he hums, and munches his lunch, “a couple of weeks?”
More likely a couple of days, I reply, knowing Westhaver’s commitment to music — to making it with his bands, to selling it in his record store and to sharing it as a DJ on CKCU, the campus radio station at Carleton University where he marks 30 years on air this week.
As it turns out, both guesses were wrong. Westhaver says he had contacted CKCU and arranged to be on air in Ottawa even before he arrived in the capital city. Well, of course.
“It was all in the planning stage while I was still living in New Brunswick,” says Westhaver, who’s from Fredericton and spent five years there on campus radio. The Ottawa deal was done through his cousin, Roch Parisien, who had a show on CKCU called No Future Now (punk, as the title alludes). Westhaver took over the show. It was August, 1985.
He felt at home in the nation’s foremost government town. “It’s very much like Fredericton,” he says, during an interview at his Glebe record store, Birdman Sound. “It’s government, universities, art college, lots of trees, a river runs through it. Laid-back and comfortable, safe.”
He was studying broadcast journalism at Algonquin College. In 1985 and 1986 he was on air at both CKCU and at the Algonquin station, CKDJ, where he was program director. For a while he had three shows per week.
In 1987, after graduating from Algonquin (“straight A’s”), he was hired as musical director at CKCU, and was soon bumped up to program director, a role he held until 1989. It was, he recalls, a lot of work.
“Community radio is a total burnout factor, because you’re working a lot of hours and it’s stressful ... There’s a freak factor at community radio. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a good thing. Community radio is highly creative. Most people are seriously committed to the art form, whether it’s music or tech or writing or whatever.”
Westhaver took over his current CKCU slot — 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Fridays — in 1988. He figures he’s done about 2,000 broadcasts, and he rarely missed a show.
“Even when I would go away for a week, I’d time it so I left after a show one week, and I would be back to do the show the next week,” he says, in the past tense, as if never missing another show is a certainty. “It’s not like I was obsessed by it. I love doing that radio show.”
He is wholly committed to music. If you took the music out of John Westhaver there’d be nothing left but an empty, dusty shell, with the wind playing a hollow tune as it blew through his dry bones.
He runs his record store in an age of digital music, and stocks it purposefully, even obstinately, with the same non-commercial, underground, obscure and sometimes demanding music he plays on the radio — bands like Can, Acid Mothers Temple, Faust, or Radio Birdman, the Australian punk band for which he named his shop.
He pays no heed to populism and has no patience with mainstream music.
“The most popular stuff is absolute shit, for the most part,” he says, typically unabashed. “I don’t feel bad saying ‘No Beatles here.’ It’s not what I do in the store; it’s not what I play on the radio. I don’t hate the Beatles, I just don’t feel the need to perpetuate that, and the thousand other things like that.”
It’s unconventional radio, and fans seek it out. “You can’t name a country I haven’t had an email from,” he says. CKCU station manager Matthew Crosier says Friday Morning Cartunes “is always within the top five at the station for support during (the annual) funding drive, even though (it airs) during the day, during the week.”
I’ve encountered many new bands through Westhaver, including Endless Boogie, the vastly under-rated, stoner-riff band from New York City.
His show is popular enough that in 2003 and 2004 Ottawa Bluesfest invited Westhaver to program a stage. For two years the Birdman stage featured acts such as the Greenhornes, Five Horse Johnson, and the Dirtbombs, and every year since, when the new Bluesfest schedule is announced, I’ve heard people lament that the Birdman stage is gone. (For the record, Westhaver says he couldn’t abide Bluesfest’s need for corporate sponsorship on his stage, so he left “with no hard feelings.”)
He’s often been onstage with his own bands, including The Exploding Meet, Resin Scraper, Four ‘N’ Giv’r, and then The Band Whose Name Is A Symbol — which this fall will release its ninth album in seven years. “That has got to be some kind of record,” he says.
It’s another kind of record — the vinyl kind — that he plays on Friday Morning Cartunes. This week’s 30th anniversary show will broadcast live from Birdman Sound, that shrine to vinyl, on Friday morning. Check out the sample playlist, at right. Don’t expect the Beatles.