I am the DJ (I am what I play)

I’m an old retired bastard and that gives you certain luxuries. Number one is time. You got your own. You have control over what you can do with your day. I tend to be super busy. It seems like I’ve always got 25 projects up in the air that I’m working on moving forward. A (mostly) constant for me since Wed Apr 24, 2019 1:00pm, has been FreeForm Northwest, my Pacific Northwest Music radio show. Mel, who was my daughter Kat’s partner at the time, was doing a show at KAOS 89.3 FM Olympia, the college station out at The Evergreen State College, and at some point he convinced me I should go try it out. (KAOS went on the air in 1973 and has one DJ who has been on for 40 years.) I went through the DJ training and said, “Why not?” and a new show was born. As a volunteer DJ at KAOS, you generally come up with a concept of what your show will be and then execute it. I looked at the lineup that they had then and said, “You know what? I don’t see anything on here that’s a Pacific Northwest music show.” That’s certainly an area that I know pretty well and I’ve got a lot of PNW music in my personal collection. I said, “Let’s go with that.”

The name was a tribute to the notion of free-form radio, which kind of started out down in San Francisco in the ‘60s with people like Tom Donovan and which is really the inspiration for a lot of what goes on at KAOS. My show would be all Pacific Northwest music. All genres. All time periods. All great. All the time. What’s not to like about that? Here’s the playlist from my first show:

This first show sets the tone a little bit for what the show would be ever after. Basically all over the map. Stylistically I really like to make jumps, jarring jumps really, from one thing to the next. When I went through DJ training I was told, “You should make all these smooth transitions.” Nah - I don’t always like smooth transitions. Sometimes I like it when you go along all nice and then all of a sudden everything blows up! Not always but sometimes. There’s a pretty good spread of dates when these songs were recorded here. The oldest thing I see is 1982 but in later shows I play music that goes back to the 1920s .

Probably the most amusing thing in my first show was my FCC violation. The Federal Communications Commission has rules on how you, as a DJ, can use the public airwaves, because the airwaves, of course, are owned by all Americans. Despite what you may think, some private radio corporation does not own the airwaves. They just license them from the government. The FCC has rules about what you can do during daytime hours when impressionable youth might be listening. You can’t say what are considered the George Carlin cuss words, based on a great comedy piece he did that you can see on YouTube. You can’t say cocksucker, motherfucker, cunt (even if you are an Englishman), etc. Not only would you be violating your government license, but gosh darn it you’d just be morally wrong. So what happens in my very first show is that I’m playing a great song, “Bob Was a Robot,” by the great band Red Dress, starring the great Gary Minkler. It sounds great! But what I forget, cuz I’ve haven’t listened to it for a long time, is that Gary, right in the middle of the song, is singing to Bob the Robot about how he doesn’t want Bob doing certain things with his girlfriend, including having sex with her, which of course Bob does. Red Dress is funkifying along and they suddenly come to a bang dead stop. Gary goes, “Bob, that ain’t your fucking job,” loud and clear. You can’t miss it.

Oops. As my training instructed, I quickly pulled down the fader and played something else. I noted it in the DJ log that I had made an oopsie boo-boo on my first show. Life went on.

The next biggest change in the show was when I acquired me a sidekick: Rockin’ Stevie T! Steve is my old pal from The Icons, my band back in 1983 and Steve had moved to Olympia. He was living the retired bum life too. Hey Steve, wanna come do my show with me? Steve sez, “Okay”. Here’s how it works. I pick almost everything played on the show - I’m the one with the big Northwest music collection. Steve has a very small Northwest music collection and often the stuff I’m playing on the show he is hearing for the first time ever. Steve occasionally brings in music. He particularly likes some folkier stuff like The Bothy Band from Portland who plays around Ireland. While Steve does contribute musically, he is really the classic Johnny Carson sidekick - Ed McMahon! I mostly pick the songs, I do the most of the blathering, and Steve does Steve. He’s great. Steve ran into some serious health issues, as old people do, and he quit doing the show for a year or two. Let me tell you it was not near as much fun. His health is doing great now and he’s been back on the show ever since. Bravo!

Steve & Tom @ KAOS

The other biggest change for the show was COVID. When the COVID came (yes I got it) we quit doing the show. You could not go to the station. It was closed. I didn’t do the show for about two or three months and then I started doing the show again but pre-recording it from my home studio. On the show we would say we’re broadcasting from high atop Capitol Peak, overlooking the Black Hills and all of Puget Sound but that’s not really true. That is just beautiful radio nonsense.

It’s a very different dynamic when you’re pre-recording the show. The most obvious change is you don’t have to worry about cuss words because you hear them all while you’re recording the show. Then you just go, “Oh I’ll delete that cuss word before I send the show to the station.” After trying various techniques over time, I came up with a simple idea of highlighting the offending word in the song and then reversing it in Pro Tools. Instead of saying “fuck” it says “cuff”, and you still keep your basic groove.

At this time I also became the engineer for Parallel University, Kim Dobson’s twenty-year-long running lefty Pacific Northwest Issues talk show. I’ve known Kim since the third grade. Kim had always done his show live but with COVID, we started pre-recording it on Zoom. I edit the show and send it to Jonny Hamilton, the station manager. Very tidy. Eventually the station’s COVID closure ended but Kim has never gone back to the station for his show. We pre-record them all now

Last summer Steve and I started going back to the station to do the show live. I still don’t carefully audition everything before I play it. I just grab a pile of stuff and we go have at - live radio! Needless to say one or two naughties have slipped through our mitts on the airwaves. Oops! All properly logged after the fact. No FCC complaints have been filed that we have heard of.

In 2020, I started doing interviews with Pacific Northwest musicians and authors who write about NW music. I’ve done a bunch of them, probably at least twenty-five. So far I’ve done a terrible job archiving them but I’ve started working on it - they’re Pacific Northwest history that’s worth preserving. You can find some of them right here:

https://freeformnorthwest.bandcamp.com/

I think the one that really got me thinking “archive” was when I interviewed Michael Moore, an Olympia native who played keyboards with the jazz/samba band Obrador over their 20 year-plus existence. I interviewed Michael three weeks before he died. I knew him kind of casually at that point from recording the “Jazz In Olympia” song on my Olympia: A True Story album. And he was kind enough to sponsor me to join the Fraternal Order of Eagles so I could go to Olympia Jazz Central there on Monday nights. I called him up for something and he said, “I’m gonna die in three weeks.” It was kind of like it was no big deal. Matter of fact. He’d known it was coming and the Docs had given him a day finally. I said, “Michael, you’ve got great stories. We should sit down and record your stories while you can.” He said okay. It was a great show.

The Michae Moore interview - Hit play!

I’ve done a Top Ten PNW Releases of the Year ever since I started doing the show, and you can be guaranteed that they are pretty obscure. Uniformly brilliant but they fit my rather weirdo tastes and it is always an eclectic list. If you want to see what my Top Tens have been over the years, you can go to my FreeForm Northwest page on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/FreeFormNorthwest

Probably the most loved Top 10 album for me is the Kathy Moore Super Power Trio. Kathy is a killer guitar player. The KMSPT super-power trio has never quite got their due, so she mostly keeps doing a lot of her other PNW music projects, where she is pretty much the guitar slinger, not the star. I still play KMSPT years after the fact and will play anything Kathy Moore does. She’s so great!

I must also give props to the Bloch brothers, Kurt and Al. I pretty much play anything they do: Fastbacks, Bad Scene, “"S" BOX, solo stuff you name it. Prolific dudes. Rockin’ dudes.

Probably my biggest change of attitude about anybody’s music since I started the show is Calvin Johnson, the founder of K Records. I’ve casually known Calvin since the ‘80s but he was an Olympia guy, I was a Seattle guy then and our paths didn’t cross much. I mostly knew about Beat Happening, which is still probably his best-known band. Since I’ve moved to Olympia, where K was once king, I started digging into the Calvin discography and I have become a big fan of his catalog. There are basically the two Calvins: the guitar-playin’, low-note-singin’ Calvin, generally with a band of some sort and the Selector Dub Narcotic Calvin, where it’s all hip-trippy-hoppy rappin’ dance stuff. All of it is cool. His Selector Dub Narcotic’s “Ship This Shore“, with Lois on vocals, is probably the most played song we’ve ever had on the show. Played it a million times, so great! Calvin Johnson? Fuck yeah!

So there you have it: Tune in this and every Wednesday 4 pm-6 pm, FreeForm Northwest KAOS 89.3 FM Olympia, on the internet at https://www.kaosradio.org/listen