Radio is a Sound Salvation

For as long as I can remember the radio was there and the radio was on. 

There are four or five radio stations that stick out in my mind when I remember my ‘80s and ‘90s childhood. The first is WIRK 107.9 FM out of West Palm Beach, Fla. It was a country station and we listened to it often on the way to school. The bands at the time were Shenandoah and Ricochet and Blackhawk – along with stars like Wynonna Judd, George Strait, Reba McEntire and Alan Jackson. It was standard ‘90s country radio fare, but I’m often surprised when people find out how popular country music is around Martin and Palm Beach counties. 

When mom was tired of music we flipped over to the AM dial and listened to talk radio – Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, that sort of thing – but also local hosts like Lee Fowler, who we thought was scandalous. He hung up on callers! He argued! He was a blowhard! You could find these guys, both local and national, on two stations – WPSL 1590 AM and WJNO 1290 AM. Good stuff. People who grew up in liberal, NPR-listening households just don’t understand how fun and funny these programs were, and how they were (and are) a release of anger for ordinary people stuck in traffic and trying to make ends meet in an unfair country. 

There was also The Buzz 103.1 FM, which gave me my first taste of alternative bands like Nirvana and Bush. 

But the station that had the longest-lasting impact on me, the one that still sticks in my mind, the one that is playing in my memories – is WSTU 1450 AM. 

WSTU was Stuart’s local AM station, and it played a mix of community radio that’s pretty much gone now. The mornings were reserved for “Breakfast Barry” Grant Marsh, who played a major role in getting the station on the air and who had once worked as a morning man at WIRK. There were both high school sports and Miami Heat, Marlins and Dolphins games. I think there were a few other talk shows. And between it all was a mix of AM Gold and yacht rock that felt as natural wafting over the Treasure Coast as an afternoon rain storm. My dad liked to play WSTU in his truck or plumbing van when he went out to do service calls. I can still remember him tapping the keys in the ignition along to the beat.

I can remember playing in the garage and hearing those songs – “Sunny” by Bobby Hebb, “Stormy” by Florida’s own Classics IV, and occasionally wilder material like the Who’s “Pinball Wizard” and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s “Fire,” which legitimately terrified my young, sheltered mind. Sometimes they played the big band music that delighted the Greatest Generation retirees that were golfing away their golden years back then.

Both the radio and the retirees – those retirees, at least – are gone now. WSTU is still on the air, but from what I can tell it is in a much different format than it was in those days – it has your typical conservative talk show hosts – Fox News stars hitting their marks – but no old music, no “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” by Edison Lighthouse. Baby, things change. 

I’ve written about being zapped awake by Orlando radio before, and it’s true. Shows like The Howard Stern Show, The Philips Phile and The Drew Garabo Show were everything my 14-year-old ears wanted to hear. These shows, along with The Buzz, gave me my first ideas of what being cool was. They felt like MTV felt. They felt like Beavis & Butthead. 

We moved to Texas, where the radio was bigger and louder, but also somehow much less interesting.

In East Texas, there was a Top 40 station, an oldies station a Christian station and a dozen country stations. We were close enough to the Louisiana border to pick up Shreveport stations, where there was The Big Dog 94.5 FM, which played Top 40 hits with some R&B mixed in, and 99x 98.9 FM “The Rock Station,” which I listened to more than anything. It was different from The Buzz in West Palm, which played punkier music like Sublime and Foo Fighters. 99x played harder, heavier stuff – Alice in Chains, Tool – and bluesier stuff – The Black Crowes, Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band. 

I graduated and got out of East Texas with the singular plan of never moving back. I moved to Fort Worth and started classes at TCU, where I discovered a radio station that would totally alter my life – 88.7 KTCU FM “The Choice.” 

It was, in 2003, in so many ways, an excellent college radio station, playing The Flaming Lips and The Shins and Built to Spill. There were weird shows like The Tom and Steve Show that mixed comedy between Elvis Costello singles and spacey tracks by The Orb (a split that would eventually pull the duo apart). Later, there were shows like The Cassette Deck that mixed of Montreal with Bob Dylan. 

I was a journalism major, which meant my classes were on the second floor of Moudy South. The first floor housed KTCU’s studios (Moudy North was home to the art and graphic design departments. It was a wonderful place to be and to meet people). I wanted so badly to be on the radio, but spots were reserved for faculty, staff and radio-TV-film majors, many who were my friends. 

And about once a month, after the DJs had gone through the stacks of CDs sent to them by publicists from indie record labels across the country (and world), they would leave the unselected discs outside their studios for anyone to raid. And raid I did. Many of these CDs still make the foundation of my collection, now in MP3 form. Others, I am sorry to say, were sold for beer money at Movie Trading Company or CD Warehouse. 

KTCU then died a terrible and unfortunate death and we were left to deal with its reanimated corpse. 

A new program director came in and he decided that no one wanted to hear this weird indie rock stuff. Mind you, this was right after the Garden State soundtrack, at a time when “indie sleaze,” as they now call it, was blowing up nationwide. Never mind that, he said, Red Dirt Country would rule the day, and the station made a hard format change to a rotating playlist of Pat Green, Cory Morrow and Randy Rogers Band. Listeners, of course, did not follow because Dallas-Fort Worth was already completely saturated with bigger, better Texas Country radio stations.

I actually briefly had a chance to have a radio show on the station during this dark era, but it all came crashing down when I refused to pre-tape the show so he could screen it beforehand. KTCU, as far as I was concerned, was a live endeavor. 

I did have one other radio detour during this time. I interviewed George Gimarc, who started at UNT’s radio station (the bashfully named KNTU) and would eventually revolutionize the radio business, playing a major hand in the creation of alternative radio with 94.5 FM The Edge. He’d lived a true punk life – he’d written books, written with John Lydon of the Sex Pistols and was generally settling into a “remember when” era of his life when he and I had a long conversation in which, he told me, among other things, that Joe Strummer didn’t actually care about politics that much (I cant verify if that is true or not) and that he was a serial womanizer (confirmed by others). Gimarc was dabbling in Internet radio at the time, but I got the sense it was not the same as broadcasting out over FM waves rippling through the air. 

I graduated and ended up on the radio anyway. I took a job just outside of Fort Worth in a little cowboy town, Weatherford.

The magazine I worked for paid for a morning time slot on KYQX 89.3 FM. We were on right after the morning show. Steve, the host, was our owner, and, even though he wasn’t always the best magazine publisher, he had a genuine love of comedy and media. He hired one of my close friends, Brian, as an ad designer and the three of us started on the show. Later our friend Lee Ann joined us, too. 

What was supposed to be a rather standard community radio interview show quickly devolved into a litany of in-jokes, false starts and baffled guests. Even though it was a dead slot on a low-signal station, we did O.K. Anytime we opened the phone lines, they filled up, ready to answer questions we had posed like “where is the best chicken fried steak in Parker County?” 

We created a character for Brian – still perhaps the funniest person I’ve ever met – named “Quizmo (full name – ”John Quizzy Adams”).” Quizmo’s gag was simple – he was supposed to host a five-question quiz game with our guest each week, except he always screwed up the questions and the game fell apart, everytime. 

I’m chuckling to myself as I type that. The bit worked and Brian became something of a minor celebrity in Weatherford for a while. It was not uncommon for us to go out for lunch and hear some older man in a feed store cap say, “is that Quizmo?” 

We opened another magazine and radio show in Granbury, a neighboring town, and so for a while there Brian and I ran the roads doing two radio completely different and original shows a week. It was fun, but we both desperately needed new jobs that would pay rent, so it was short-lived. My radio days were over for a time. 

Brian and I loved performing and writing together, though, so we started our own podcast. This was about 13 years before the current podcast boom. The Show with Brian & Darren had virtually no listeners but continued to get more ambitious. We created dozens of fake commercials (in the style of The Onion) and eventually started interviewing indie rock musicians like Daniel Pujol. It was too much work, we got married and invested in our jobs and we slowly quit making it. I still have some of the clips and even two entire shows. 

A few years later I ended up on KTCU with my friend Steve (of Tom & Steve fame). His new show Radio Bapola, was a loose theme show that focused mostly on music. It was a blast. Steve was a great guy and he was truly gracious to let me join him for a time. It felt good to be on KTCU. 

I didn’t think much about radio for a bit. I moved back to Florida and started my own higher ed marketing consulting business. I volunteered at church and traveled a bit across the country, which was fun. Media changed fast during those years (the late 2010s) and radio as it had been was almost completely dead. There weren’t as many college radio stations. Podcasts and Spotify radio stations had taken over. DJs? What are those? 

But I am simply crazy and I reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic in a predictably crazy way. 

Friends, I built a radio station. 

I called it DWCo. Radio and I ran it from right here on this website. I learned every detail of radio I possibly could – from “the hot clock” to reporting song plays to publishing companies so artists could receive royalties. I had a show and so did my friends and coworkers Derek (Derek After Dark) and Shelly (The Shelly Show). Again, it had, at best, a dozen listeners. By the end, it had two listeners – my friends Chuck and Philip. Together we traveled through the pandemic, the 2020 election, Jan. 6 and my slow descent into madness. I flipped the switch to off a couple of years ago and that will likely signal the end of my radio career.

So I come to bury the radio, not to praise it. It was beset by too many commercials and program directors who hated music. It was, like the very sound it emitted, fleeting. The second something cool happened on the radio, someone came along and changed the format, all to squeeze a few more bucks out of the listeners, who the radio business saw, more or less, as dopes. 

But those fleeting moments, damn, they aren’t so fleeting if they are still the soundtrack to my memories all these years later. And it wasn’t just the music, it was the rhythm. The way that “Saturday in the Park” by Chicago ended and a Marlins baseball game started on WSTU. The way “The Choice 300” stopped autoplaying as a TCU student started her live show – and the inexorable thrill of nighttime on a college campus began. The way “My City Was Gone” or “The Great American Nightmare” signaled the beginning of The Rush Limbaugh Show or The Howard Stern Show. The algorithm is still struggling to understand what radio programmers from the 1950s understood almost intuitively – that daily life in America has a rhythm in which we all sway and bob. 

The good old days are supposedly right now, but they sure felt a little better with the warm crackle of the dial – and a human being on a microphone on the other side. I miss rock ‘n’ roll radio. It was a great time to be alive.