Thursday, November 18, 2004
One joy of not doing weekly free form radio: Mahler
E mail from a British wfmu listener complimenting my radio programs & asking why I'm not on more often. He likes my low key style. Such responses are - have always been - rare. There's a guy in Texas who's appreciated my shows since WFMU went live on the internet, & a couple of familiar phone voices, but that's about it for regular fans. If I'd drawn a larger listener base over the years I was a WFMU regular, I might still be on-the-air. Not because audience size is an absolute requirement for keeping a program at WFMU, but because lack of an audience in the later 90's slowly undermined my enthusiasm for doing a weekly program, just as it discouraged me from writing columns in a local newspaper. Since I was never paid for free form radio or writing op-eds, encouragement was the only real compensation. By the early 90's, my musical agenda at WFMU was running low. Nearly all of the rare, under-appreciated & out-of-print recordings I'd brought along to WFMU from my own collection & tastes had been generally accepted & were being reissued on CDs. I think all of the DJs of my generation at the station were hitting the same wall. Several who had not already done so narrowed their musical focus. This I could not do, by temperament & preference. I'd also lost interest in maintaining characters & other humorous routines, which have pretty much disappeared altogether from WFMU. (Fortunately, Irwin Chusid's "Old Codger," one of the best & most completely realized characters, survives as a WFMU icon, our Alfred E. Neuman.)
Although I was on afternoons for a number of years, my style of radio evolved mainly out of late evenings, between 11 pm & 3 am, on a smaller station broadcasting from a smaller studio, in the tradition of "classic" 60's & 70's free form. I was the consummate amateur DJ/host, really a radio dilettante, as indifferent to audience size as I was to the scratches & surface noise on the records I played. My programs & sets often followed a personal emotional trajectory; up-down-up or down-up-down, or made very subtle purely musical connections nobody except me understood.
So I'm not on-the-air now, November 2004, by choice, although I did desire a weekly summer show this year & was disappointed when I didn't get on the schedule. Now, the weekly October to May treadmill on what is arguably America's flagship alternative music radio station, with the responsibilities & pressure of an intense two week fundraising marathon (includes creating a special CD premium) has much less appeal. The minimal "celebrity" I gain isn't sufficient payback for the work & committment. Other younger DJs work the same fields I did - if usually with with less musical breadth, & demonstrate a capacity equal to mine for turning mundane personal episodes into monologues that teeter into tediousness. & I've gone back to pre-WFMU musical joys; listening to all the Mahler I want without worrying about what novelties I'm going to play on this week's program.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Although I was on afternoons for a number of years, my style of radio evolved mainly out of late evenings, between 11 pm & 3 am, on a smaller station broadcasting from a smaller studio, in the tradition of "classic" 60's & 70's free form. I was the consummate amateur DJ/host, really a radio dilettante, as indifferent to audience size as I was to the scratches & surface noise on the records I played. My programs & sets often followed a personal emotional trajectory; up-down-up or down-up-down, or made very subtle purely musical connections nobody except me understood.
So I'm not on-the-air now, November 2004, by choice, although I did desire a weekly summer show this year & was disappointed when I didn't get on the schedule. Now, the weekly October to May treadmill on what is arguably America's flagship alternative music radio station, with the responsibilities & pressure of an intense two week fundraising marathon (includes creating a special CD premium) has much less appeal. The minimal "celebrity" I gain isn't sufficient payback for the work & committment. Other younger DJs work the same fields I did - if usually with with less musical breadth, & demonstrate a capacity equal to mine for turning mundane personal episodes into monologues that teeter into tediousness. & I've gone back to pre-WFMU musical joys; listening to all the Mahler I want without worrying about what novelties I'm going to play on this week's program.
