Thursday, April 27, 2006

Radio Or Not #12 - The First Time-- revisited

Thu, 27 April 2006
Radio Or Not #12 -- The first time-Revisited
I started the Radio Or Not podcast almost a year ago, for a few reasons. I thought it would be fun, plus I had all these interviews I conducted with many of my musical idols during a long, fun, successful radio career.

The high point in my career spanned from 1994-1997. The radio station was KSCA... Southern California's Album Alternative (at the beginning) or LA's Finest Rock (at the end). It was the last station in Gene Autry's Golden West Broadcasters chain. It was fun while it lasted!

We had a little hallway situated between the air studio and the production room, and that's where the musicians who came to visit would play live on the air. Our General Manager, the late and wonderful Bill Ward, dubbed it The Music Hall. The name always elicited a chuckle from our guests because it was... a hall!

The sound, however, was flawless. A big part of the reason was the skill and talents of Pat Dorn, who has graced many a record as engineer, and who ran the sound on almost every single Music Hall session at KSCA. He was so good, in fact, that Lyle Lovett hired him after working with him in the Music Hall, and Sting wanted to take him on tour!

I was reading through some listener emails recently, and one suggested that I re-post the very first episode so it'll be available on iTunes. And judging from the numbers who've listened to my 25th Anniversary tribute to John Lennon, I'd say there are lots of listeners who haven't heard it yet.

So... here it is. A tribute to the work we did at KSCA. It was December of 1994, and we started playing a song by the then-unknown Dave Matthews Band. Listen.. you'll hear us talking of a couple of shows at The Whisky, a little bar that holds maybe 200 people... The show that night was sold out, but there were still some tickets available for Saturday night's show!

Discovering new artists and playing them... based on the quality of the music... that's what it was about. Hopefully I can do that on the radio again one of these days, preferably sooner than later!

As always, if you have any comments, I'd love to hear them at RadioOrNot at gmail.com.

Thanks for listening....

Nicole