Readers wax nostalgic, give online radio tips
It’s time to dip into the old e-mailbag. Actually, it’s been time for months, but I’m no Mick LaSalle, who’s able to produce a marvelous column every Sunday based solely on letters.
This column draws a good number of letters, too, and many of them are about movies. Crazy, huh? But I’ll focus on the ones about radio. My readers offer tips for items; dis me for ignoring their favorite DJs, talk show hosts or stations; and take me on trips down loss-of-memory lane. Let’s begin with one of those, from “Steve G” in Berkeley. He segues from old-fogey nostalgia to online tips:
“Ben: I’ve been a fan for a long time, from the KSAN days. I remember coming home from a Fantasy Records picnic in Tilden Park listening to your show. You had been at the picnic and left early to do your Sunday radio show and played ‘Stone Soul Picnic’ for those coming home from it. A great memory. I loved your Grace Slick interview in Marin years later when she was promoting her book. She belted a few notes, too, illustrating how she might have sung a nursery rhyme to her kid — maybe the last time she did sing in public.
“I enjoy your column and wonder if you’ve had a chance to check out BBC London. It’s different, but some of that radio is right up there with KSAN back when I came here in 1968. Danny Baker and Robert Elms are current BBC London faves.
“I listen on TuneIn.com on my iPod Touch. TuneIn is a way to find stations worldwide and save them as presets. I’ve found some interesting stuff: a good Jamaican station, lots of decent oldies, a Hawaiian reggae station, a Hong Kong pop and news station, Irish, Australian, New Zealand stations, English-language Chinese stations. I got into this because I’ve always liked listening to radio in the middle of the night, starting with “Lucky Lager Dance Time” when I was in the seventh grade (1955).
“I noticed that someone else mentioned TuneIn.com in a letter to the Pink section. I wonder how this will ultimately affect local broadcast radio?”
Thanks, Steve. TuneIn (the website and the app) and other services like DAR.fm, Slacker, Stitcher and iHeartRadio (a Clear Channel product not limited to CC stations) are giving radio fans more options than ever to hear pretty much whatever they want, when they want. But local stations are well covered in TuneIn, iHeartRadio and Radio.com and offer “listen live” options on their sites. If they get their online streams encoded for Arbitron, those get counted — but separately, and they are not combined in the ratings.
Steve G. invoked my days on KSAN (actually, Sundays for about 10 years, with weekdays occupied by some magazine called Rolling Stone). There were some nights, too, when I’d get a call from all-night DJ Edward Bear, saying he was in no shape to be on the air, and could I fill in? Often, I couldn’t, but did anyway. Hey, it was radio! So it was a delight to get this note from the Bear, who roams around Santa Barbara:
“Hi, Ben: I ran across your article about the Airplay Channel on PBS. I see that Raechel Donahue is still at it and I’m glad to know that Carolyn Travis is still passionate about another time in radio. The life we breathed into our medium and the death that followed when it became a commodity of big business has been amazing and instructive to watch over the decades. I’m worried that the life-and-death cycle of radio expressed from that era to today may parallel a lifeand-death cycle for our entire culture and democracy. And ecosystem.
“If we are all about to be living in a muzzled police state, or bubbling down into an overheated, acidified sea … let me thank you for your excellent work as a backup for me in those sweet bygone KSAN days, for your love of music and radio as a medium of contact between souls, (and) for your writing and encouragement of the better ends of both music and radio. … I don’t anticipate dying in the near future, but it’s also a distinct possibility, and I wanted to thank you properly before leaving.”
Dear Bear: You’re most welcome, you fatalist, you. Subbing for you gave me a chance, on the all-night shift, to do as you did: vault far beyond the commercial parameters of pop music; to segue from, say, Gil ScottHeron into Cheech & Chong; to air the Last Poets (the first rappers) and Richard Pryor, leading into Timi Yuro or a Motown sound; in short, to do the kind of radio that our leader, Tom Donahue, called “freak freely.” We did, and if we’re very lucky, others will do it again. You may have to go to the Internet or satellite to find them, but they’ll be there. Some already are.
Next, we have Jeff Kanagaki, who asked about the disappearance of “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” from KSAN (“The Bone” at 107.7) Sunday nights.
Yes, Jeff, the show is gone, replaced by “Local Licks,” hosted by Leif Jaeger, 10 to 11 p.m. Steven Van Zandt’s “Garage” is on KOZT (“The Coast” at 95.3), the eclectic station out of Mendocino, Sundays, 9 to 11 p.m. And, of course, online and on Sirius/ XM. KOZT also airs Joel Selvin’s “Selvin in the City” Thursdays, 10 to 11 p.m. He’s also on “The Bone” Sundays 11 p.m. to midnight.
George Yamasaki of San Francisco asks: “Besides satellite radio, what do you listen to in your car?” Good timing, George. Having just bought a Honda Fit (in Orange Burst Metallic, but I’m calling it mandarin orange), I had to program the radio. I had six AM preset slots; 12 FM. I can’t even come up with six AMs anymore. I went with KNBR, KCBS, KGO, KKSF, KNBR at 1050 and … done. That’s how much I don’t want to have right-wing talkers hanging around. (Besides, I can find them when I want.) On FM, it was much tougher. I had more than a dozen possible presets: KQED, KDFC, KCSM, KALW, KPFA, “Wild 94.9,” “The Game,” “Alice,” “Kiss,” “Now,” “Star 101.3,” “K-Fox,” KBLX, KOSF, KFOG, KITS (“Live 105”), KMEL and KSAN. That’s 18, so I had to cut six. (I ain’t sayin’. As for the obvious missing station: I’m not a fan of “lite rock.” Sorry. But not really.)
P.S.: “Live 105” has a new morning show: “Megan and Menace.” More on them next time.