RECALCITRANT RADIO - WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT GOT THAT WAY
Recalcitrant Radio is what I used to call a slow motion radio show. I started out in the early days of the current century sending out an mp3 via email to a small list of my friends with a few brief comments. Prior to then, I spent about ten years hosting Radio Collusion on KPFK-FM, a Pacifica station in the Los Angeles Area. My friend Tom Recchion had been doing the show, which was named after a short-lived esoteric music magazine published in the United Kingdom. Tom’s and my friend, Carl Stone, a composer who had been music director at KPFK, may have had something to do with the show in its early days. I didn’t listen because it was on the air from six to seven in the morning on Mondays, at which time I was sleeping. On my watch, Radio Collusion had almost every kind of music mixed together in various ways. Searching the internet, I found a listing for a show in 1989 described as “1973, the year of the newt”. I have no memory of it but I suspect that it featured various types of music released in 1973. I also remember a show devoted to music produced by criminals. It was all over the place. When I did the show, I would record it, at first on cassette and later on quarter inch tape and give it to John Breckow who did the Smoke Rings jazz show in the middle of the night before Radio Collusion. John delivered the tape to the engineer, who played it on the air. Eventually, the show succumbed to station politics and was canceled. By then, I’d had enough but did miss playing things I liked for a theoretically vast audience. So, Recalcitrant Radio.
Bandwidth constraints led to a change from mp3s to links to the recordings on You Tube. The comments grew longer. The comments for the Beatles recording of Mr. Moonlight, an obscure New Orleans R&B B-side, were a few pages long. That record usually wins worst song the Beatles recorded polls but I love it and I tried to explain why. I think I made a good case for it, using mostly musical reasons. The comment on the first track I sent out used some Jamaican hip talk. That was kind of a false start since I generally hate hip talk. The second one, Tell Me Why by Skeets McDonald, still had pretty short comments but that might be my favorite so far. As the years went by, I got new “listeners” and I kept detailed records of who had gotten which emails so everybody would hear all of them. The whole Rube Goldberg structure of the show became more and more of a pain. I also slowed down, at one point leaving a few years between selections. I’d like to pick up the pace a bit and I think Substack will allow me to spend less time on email wrangling, in addition to allowing “listeners” a more convenient way to get these things.
It’s still going to be free. One drawback of You Tube is that sometimes songs go away. Once I had to upload a song since it just wasn’t there. And I had to create an animation (it was pretty rough) for it because You Tube is for videos and wouldn’t accent audio only. So I’m asking people to let me know if a song is no longer available on You Tube. When that happens, I’ll do something about it. I’ll send out notices of that. Comments are welcome. I’m new at Substack but I’m told there is a comment box for each post. If you don’t want me to share your comment, don’t use the comment box but send me a message. I’m not sure about how to do that but I will revise this when I do.
So far, there have been 31 pieces and a few bonuses. I haven’t figured out how to renumber yet and may just leave the old numbers, which aren’t THAT confusing. It’s going to take me a while to get all the old ones up onto the Substack site. I may edit or even re-write some and I’ll probably notify everybody of those too.
By the way, I must admit that the picture above is not of a radio. That is half of a tape player which I believe is from the 1950s. FSC (which is stenciled on the device in the cropped off part of the picture) stands for Fresno State College which is now known as California State University at Fresno. My dad bought that thing at a surplus sale there and I ended up with it when we sold the house in Fresno. It was in two parts, each with a lid that latched on to the device and a handle attached to the lid. The part shown is the amplifier and speaker. The other part was the tape transport with the playback heads.
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