Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the Dr. Demento show began in 1970 on Los Angeles freeform station KPPC as a “rarities” show. By 1974 the popular radio program, which specializes in a mix of music and comedy, moved into syndication all over the country. Hosted by former college radio DJ (at the Reed College […]
As a proud thirty-eight year-old member of Generation X, I have become just a little disturbed by a trend I’ve noticed in the last few years. One might call this trend the “indie-rockification” of public radio. As my fellow grunge-survivors and I, raised on the so-called “first wave” of alternative rock and derided by boomers […]
Amazon.com Widgets I need a good laugh about once every twenty minutes, especially these days. So I listen to Onion Radio News. “A giant 6-year old devastates a local ant community!” announces ORN’s hard nosed reporter, Doyle Redland. “Ant-hill scouts reported today that a mammalian destructo-beast some ten thousand ant-links in height smashed a nearby […]
I forget when I first started listening to Joe Frank. The other problem is that his half-hour to hour long programs are so weird that one can’t trust one’s memory about them. I mean, I think I remember an episode about a hysterical waiter who, after a long tirade, vomits on his patrons, a furious […]
For as much as I love radio I have to admit that there’s very few programs that I might consider appointment listening. Sure, I tune in to NPR daily to catch up on the news with Morning Edition and All Things Considered, but they’re pretty interchangeable to me. If, for some reason, the BBC News […]
Amazon.com Widgets In sharing my list of my 5 favorite radio programs, I’m going to be mixing it up a bit by offering up some selections from both my past and present. So, I thought I’d begin with some of the earliest radio that I remember listening to. I’m pretty much a non-commercial radio loyalist […]
I think I can speak for my fellow Radio Survivors when I say that we really enjoyed putting together our run-down of the fourteen most important radio trends of the last decade. And yet, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the many aspects of radio that we really love. So, beginning this month each of […]
I still think the last word on explaining radio genres goes to Strong Bad of the Home Star Runner series. Listen and loin:
Radio France has quite a few devotees in the San Francisco Bay Area, among them the noted filmmaker Veronica Selver. You can listen to the service live, or you can download podcasts via your iPhone, as does Veronica. It helps if you understand French, of course. If not, she sent us this summary of some […]
I started reading the Professor’s detailed travelogues of his AM and shortwave radio band excursions back when he was writing for WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. After he quit contributing to BotB I learned that he was keeping things going at his own Radio Kitchen blog. The Professor belongs to a group of radio enthusiasts […]
