I love being on the radio. I don’t know why, really. I just do, and always have. I don’t think it has much to do with ego, or I wouldn’t use a pseudonym for my on-air presence.
Listening to the radio has been a centerpiece of my life as far back as I can remember, but being on it started in the spring of 1980, when I visited my cousin and his friends in southern California for the first time. He was going to UC Irvine and doing a show at KUCI, and I joined him there one night while he did his shift. Inside it looked pretty much like most small college stations – I remember a huge wall of record shelves and a copy of Jon Hassell’s Earthquake Island on Tomato. Outside it had 10 FM Watts, barely enough to cover the campus, let alone any of the surrounding houses in the massive, radio-dense Los Angeles and Orange County market. But I was smitten. So when I started classes at the University of Calgary that fall, CJSW was one of the places I went in my first week on campus. Bill Reynolds was the station manager. We chatted for a bit and he got a sense of my musical taste – still pretty immature, but already decidedly offbeat. He asked me to show him how I handled records. A couple of weeks later he called and asked whether I was interested in taking over a midnight Wednesday spot. I jumped at it, and I’ve been on the air ever since, on and off. When “off” it’s never been out of choice. We’ve been through a lot together. When I joined we were cable-FM-only, off the air overnight (time we sometimes gave to another college station in town), and precariously funded. We fought the fights, got the funding, put it on the FM dial, and now CJSW is an 18,000 Watt force, by all accounts the best college station in the country.
Over the years, my dad, always concerned about what might (generously) be called “career instability” in my life, asked me from time to time why, if I liked it so much, I didn’t go in for a professional life in radio. I had to explain that my primary interest is in music (something that, as serious music lover himself, he understood, even if he didn’t understand my music) that’s played very seldom and in very few places where one might get paid for playing it. Like (at the time) CBC’s Brave New Waves, and the odds of making it to the chair on that program would be too long. Just wasn’t a viable option.
I had some of that same conversation with a CBC Calgary producer I took sailing (for a feature he does) some years later. I explained to him that on student radio I have freedoms he couldn’t ever indulge in, like playing John Cage’s infamous 4:33. You can’t do that on the Mother Corp, because after 28 seconds of silence the “dead air preventer” kicks in and plays smarmy jazz (or jazzy smarm – could be either one) until someone sorts out the “problem” (perhaps there’s a special dispensation to be had from on high for such antics, but if there is, it’s probably preceded by “Submit this requisition in triplicate and we’ll get back to you by the next fiscal quarter”). To me, radio is freedom, and their version – as much as I enjoy (and learn from) it – just has too many rules.
But here’s my Best Radio Story Ever.
It’s somewhere around 2006, sometime in the fall, something like 10:00 at night. I’m doing a show called Noise, and I’m playing Jaap Blonk’s reading of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, which is such a favourite piece. It’s been performed and recorded by Christopher Butterfield and Christian Bok (what is it about Canadians and this stuff, huh?) and Eberhard Blum (come to think about it, how come every one of these performers has a surname that starts with “B”?) and Schwitters himself, but to my ears the best reading is by Blonk. And it was rare, too – after he put it out, there was some kind of flap with Schwitters’ estate and he was forced to pull it from the market. For a long time the only place I could find his version was on ubuweb as an mp3. So I’m about a quarter of the way into the more than 25 minutes of this wild labioglottal blowout, and the phone starts ringing. It’s mostly calls from the truly bewildered, wanting to know how long the insanity is going to continue. Some callers are open to engaging in conversation about it; some just yell at me and hang up. I’m used to all of this, given the weirdo music I play on my shows.
But what I wasn’t expecting was the call from the guy out in the field outside of Didsbury. You don’t need to know where Didsbury is; stay with me and you’ll get the picture. The call was from a guy who explained that he was in the cab of a combine, and he was there in the middle of the night because they were in the middle of the fall harvest. And he told me about how hard it is to stay clear and attentive, given the long, tough hours they work during harvest and the numbing boredom that comes from driving one line after another, and that when they’re doing that they spend a lot of time flipping through the dial, looking for something interesting, something engaging, something different to listen to. He said that he found me playing this bizarre work, and that it was the most amazing thing he’d ever heard in his life. And that, in turn, was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard from a listener in 25 years, on and off, of doing volunteer radio at CJSW, because reaching a farmer, a rural blue-collar guy who’s about the last guy I’d ever think is my audience, a guy out on a combine in the middle of the night in the middle of a field outside of Didsbury, with an outlawed recording of a Dutch performance artist doing an 80-year-old vocal tone poem by an Austrian Dadaist… well, that was simply the moment that 25 years in radio had all led up to. It was perfect.
And because perfect can sometimes get just a little bit better, I got to tell Jaap Blonk this story a few years ago when he was in Calgary for the spoken word festival.
God I love radio.
I’ve thought for a long time about whether to post this story, because it might come off as too self-aggrandizing, and that’s really not my style. But it was such a peculiar, unlikely event that I can’t leave it out, so please forgive me if it strikes you as a bit boastful.
The context that makes this so improbable is, basically, that I’m a misanthrope. I live out in the woods because I don’t care much for being around people that I don’t have close relationships (work or recreational, mostly) with, and living out in the woods makes casual social interactions (especially in the city) much less frequent and likely. So it was very unusual for me, after finishing another episode of Noise at 10pm on a Thursday, instead of just making the hour-long drive straight home, to pop down to a bar downtown (that I’d never previously visited) where some station people had organized a “games night” (that’s another thing I don’t do much, other than Scrabble). By the time I got there things had largely wound down, but I figured What the hell, might as well have a drink and hang out for a bit.
I was probably still on that first drink when I noticed a couple of guys walking by the club’s storefront window. What made them notable was that one really stood out – tall, well-built, black, and wearing a tour jacket with a huge Warner Brothers logo stitched on the back. Everything about his appearance and the way he carried himself said Not From Around Here, “urban” in the “big city” sense, not the hippety-hop sense. The impression was hardened with each of the two or three passes they made by the window over, maybe, an hour. Eventually they stuck their noses in the door and spoke to someone who then came over to our table and asked whether anyone here answered to “CC” (my nom de radio). I raised my hand and was told that the chaps at the door wanted to speak with me.
I went to the door and we introduced ourselves; the fellow in question was visiting from New York, where he’s in the music business. He said that he’d heard my show, thought it was incredible, and decided to try to track me down and meet. We chatted for a bit and he insisted that I go for a walk so he could introduce me to a couple of friends who were spinning tunes in other clubs down the 1st St SW strip. I did, and the rest of the evening was spent talking and meeting some people.
That’s it. The story doesn’t have a gripping climax and it didn’t signal one of those events upon which the direction of one’s life pivots. Just a really strange thing to have happened at all.
p.s. I’d love to know when, exactly, this happened – I didn’t make note of the date. I keep aircheck CDs of all my shows, and I’d very much like to go back and give that one a listen to see what it was that he found so interesting.
Oh, alright… as long as I’m being immodest, here’s another one:
H.K. has sent you a message. Date: 11/02/2012 Subject: Yer Awesomeness A month or so ago, when you were doing Alternative to What, you played, uninterrupted the entire album "The Sensational Alex Harvey Band". I was driving into Calgary and I heard the entire thing....at one point I was crying...do not have any idea what THAT was about...tears of joy? Anyhow, just wanted to thank you for the incredible radio experience. ciao, H.
I don’t do a lot of interviews, so I try to make the ones I do count. My favourite thing is to find the oddities, the little things that most people don’t even notice or connect up and that I can be pretty certain the subject has never been asked about. And the unexpected interactions are sometimes a real treat. A truly memorable example came from interviewing Philip Glass in 1987 for VOX, the monthly magazine our station used to put out (I was one of the founding writers). I’d been listening to his stuff since the late 70s, having ordered his early “hardcore” (Michael Riesman’s term) Chatham Square LPs through Swamp Bird Jazz Records, and on my first trip to L.A. (see above) driven to San Diego to get a copy of Einstein on the Beach. The kids really don’t get how much work being serious about music was back then. I’d also seen the ensemble play in Vancouver when they were touring Glassworks in the early 80s.
I did a phoner with him from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, before the Ensemble came to play Calgary – the timing worked out well; we had the magazine on the stands by the time of the gig. The interview was a lot of fun, and at the end he invited me down to the Jack Singer to meet when they were doing their soundcheck. So on the appointed day one of my station pals – another Glass fan – and I went down to say hi. As it was getting late in the afternoon, I thought I’d take a flyer on asking them out to supper, though I didn’t really expect the invitation to be accepted. After all, Glass is one of the giants of late 20th-century composition, and it would only make sense for all of Calgary’s arts glitterati to be vying for his attention – surely he already had other arrangements. Instead, I was (and am to this day) gobsmacked to hear him say, “Thank god – not another grilled cheese sandwich on the bus.”
So we called up another station pal and the three of us took Glass, Riesman, and their tour manager (Glass explained that the wind players don’t like to eat before a show) to my favourite hole-in-the-wall Chinatown noodle kitchen (the sadly departed Hang Fung). It was a gas. He particularly dug their congee and I got my LPs autographed in true fanboy fashion. (He added that if I made it to New York he’d return the favour by taking me out to one of his noodle joints. A year later I was there doing my first Survival Research Laboratories tour, and since we were being co-presented by The Kitchen I asked one of their people to get in touch with him for me. As it happened, they were of very little use to us, so that didn’t happen either.) The concert – though excellent – wasn’t very well-attended. If I recall properly, there was some stupid hockey game on and 10,000 Maniacs were playing MacEwan Hall, so there was an unusual level of entertainment dilution that night. We chatted afterward, and when I mentioned it he said he should have had them open for him. I initially took it in jest, but quickly realized he was serious, which makes all the sense in the world if you know about his history as a hot new composer on the rise in New York in the 70s. He’s been here a few times since (with and without the Ensemble), and I always try to say hello.
Nitpicking Bastard 