Post by bossradio93 on Oct 1, 2003 14:09:54 GMT -5
Ghost Radio (Part 2 of 3)[/b]
Who's behind Arizona's nonstop oddball rock time capsule?
They've had occasional down days," reports Pfeifer. "Sometimes you punch up the station and there's just static, and you think, Uh-oh, that's the end of it,'" he says. "But then you try it again in an hour and, like magic, it's back. And they've been broadcasting that way since at least March of 2002, still without ever playing one commercial."
Like many listeners, Pfeifer has scoured the Web searching for a phone number or location of the station's offices. "Almost nothing is known about KCDX," he marvels. "I've found out they're owned by a company called Desert West Air Ranchers, but good luck trying to find out anything about them. I've also heard that they are operating with an automated CD player out of a trailer near Globe. But that's all I've ever been able to discover about them."
Gary Faulkner, the friendly, suntanned Vietnam vet with a classic rock addiction who runs the Florence Chamber of Commerce, claims he gets calls from people all the time wondering if the mystery station is being broadcast covertly by a couple of incarcerated Blues Brothers out of the nearby penitentiary.
"A lot of people think it's being secretly run by some of the prisoners," chuckles Faulkner. "But I know for a fact that's not true. The station has a license here in Florence, but there's no building. The most I've been able to find out is it's run by a guy up on a mountaintop in Globe."
In fact, some listeners believe there's nothing but a gigantic iPod at the top of that mountain.
"The selection is so random, and some of the segues are so nonsensical, that it sounds like you're plugged into somebody's MP3 player and it's just playing all these thousands of songs at random," says Thurman.
Certainly KCDX's playlist is eclectic enough to suggest it's all streaming from the personal iTunes library of some benevolent hilltop hippie who raided Napster good a couple of years ago and found the perfect old-school way to file-share: over the FM airwaves. At times, the only thing a pair of songs have in common is era. Gilbert O'Sullivan's sunny 1973 confection "Get Down" will inexplicably segue into the ominous opening strains of "In the Light" from Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti. Other times the connection is even odder: On KCDX, the Beatles' perennial "Something" can follow Men at Work's 1983 non-hit "Dr. Heckle & Mr. Jive."
Not that that's a bad thing. On the contrary, KCDX's apparent lack of a human program director reshuffles every record lodged in the baby-boomer memory banks and plays them all back without judgment: Hendrix is cool, but so is early-period Chicago. And younger listeners get treated to some of the strangest music they've never heard, without some media conglomerate market-researching each track for hipness and relevance.
Musical snobbery and DJ attitude are not programmed into KCDX. Graham Nash's sublime, topical-again "Military Madness" can immediately be followed by the early-'80s pop kitsch of Olivia Newton-John's "Magic." The KCDX A.I. is esoteric enough to select the kick-in-the-lobes delight of "Kuiama" when it scans for ELO, but it can just as easily pick "Living Thing." Which it will probably do in five minutes.
KCDX, you see, also has a peculiar habit of heavily showcasing a particular artist every few hours. On the classic rock outlets, such artist showcases are usually smartly assembled Sunday night affairs, distilling the greatness of such Rock and Roll Hall of Famers as Eric Clapton or Led Zeppelin and reexperiencing landmark LPs like The Dark Side of the Moon and Tapestry.
On KCDX, you're more likely to hear a reexamining of Billy Joel's An Innocent Man, sprinkling the Piano Man's long-forgotten odes to Christie Brinkley between totally unrelated rarities by the Buffalo Springfield and Foghat. Inevitably, at some point in a particular broadcast day you will find yourself wondering why you're suddenly listening to more early Blood, Sweat & Tears than anyone has in the past 30 years.
Because of this illogical pattern, a lot of KCDX listeners believe the man behind the curtain is actually nothing more than a very large compact disc multi-player.
"At first, I thought it was coming off a big computer server," says Pfeifer. "But the same artists wouldn't be coming up that repeatedly if you were randomly playing from an MP3 library. That's why I think it's one of those large, 500-disc CD players. Because even when you set those things on random shuffle, sometimes they'll hit the same CDs for a while."
Sure enough, while Pfeifer is talking, the third Rolling Stones song in 30 minutes, "Sympathy for the Devil," comes on his living room stereo. Even if KCDX is just a big CD carousel, there's still the matter of who's loading those CDs, and the lyrics of this particular classic fairly taunt Pfeifer to guess what kind of person would dedicate the time and money to create such a public archive.
Obviously, whoever's providing the Valley with this nonstop classic rock time capsule is, as Mick Jagger sneers, "a man of wealth and taste." But what's puzzling everybody who's discovered this station is the nature of his game.
"I could see if some station owner was just doing this to get a buzz going and get advertisers interested," Pfeifer says.
"But then," he says, smiling, "wouldn't you think there'd be some way to get in contact with him?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About four hours after successfully tuning in the elusive 103.1 on "the good radio" upstairs in his central Phoenix home, Dwight Tindle is on the phone again, raving all about his brand-new favorite station.
"This is amazing stuff!" says the 52-year-old veteran Valley radio man, who now makes his living in the global telecommunications industry. "I can tell you right now, there isn't another station like this in the country. What this guy is doing is very special. Because this kind of thing never happens in radio. This is one of those great rarities."
A former "rich hippie," according to pal Russell "Wonderful Russ" Shaw, Tindle was instrumental in creating Phoenix's other great radio rarity, the original KDKB. Funded by Tindle and Eric Hauenstein, a radio sales guy Tindle met after the two attended Woodstock in 1969, the first KDKB crew, led by the late, now-legendary program director William Edward Compton, served up a unique hippie diet of folk, rock, jazz, comedy and whatever else fit the mood of the moment. It was an exhilarating, weird mix of music that, save for Tindle's short-lived Sunday night program with promoter Danny Zelisko on KMXP in 1998, hasn't been heard on Valley airwaves since.
Until now, that is. While Tindle isn't sure how much of KCDX's programming is automated, he is certain whoever's selecting the music for the station listened to a whole lot of early-'70s KDKB.
I'm hearing a lot of songs with a definite Phoenix signature," he says. "Artists that we developed on KDKB who really didn't get played anywhere else. Jerry Riopelle, early Linda Ronstadt. Whiskey Train' by Procol Harum, Dolly Dagger' by Hendrix, Dixie Chicken' by Little Feat. Records that we played to death on KDKB but didn't get much airplay anywhere else in the country. I'm waiting to hear [Little Feat's] Spanish Moon' on KCDX -- it would fit right in."
For Tindle, listening to KCDX is clearly like being visited by a friendly ghost. "The songs aren't being put together the way a 21st-century program director would put them together," he says. "They're being put together the way we used to put them together. Where the music had a certain flow to it."
A onetime master of the musical segue as KDKB's late-night jock ("Dwight could literally match notes," attests Shaw), Tindle has trouble believing the song sequences he's hearing on KCDX are purely random picks of the computer. "Usually when you talk about automation, there's a mindless randomness to it," he says. "But I'm not hearing that here. I'm hearing something a little bit more purposeful in the selection of the songs. I'm hearing a mind behind the music. Somebody is deciding which song goes where."
A few days later, Tindle calls back following a road trip to Nogales, slightly revising his critique.
"We listened to KCDX all the way down and back -- the signal only fades out when you get a little north of Tucson," he reports. "And sometimes it sounded like it was on some form of automation, but other times there was clearly someone behind the controls. Maybe that's how it's done: generally automated with occasional stints by a human mind in the more listened-to day parts."
Plainly, Tindle does not want to believe all the legendary radio magic he created with his whacked-out crew could simply be duplicated today by a well-stocked computer picking out songs willy-nilly. Better to imagine the ghost of Bill Compton is somehow tweaking with the radio waves bouncing around the heavens.
"The curious thing about FM radio waves is that they penetrate the ionosphere," says Tindle. "Sometimes I regret that we never taped anything at KDKB. We looked at what we were doing as a work of art that we were constantly creating every moment we were on the air, and we just let it go out over the airwaves and disappear. But somewhere out in space, all of those radio shows are still out there."
Could some genius have found a way to retrieve those lost KDKB signals and rebroadcast them, creating a kind of permanent museum exhibition in the air?
"Maybe," he says, laughing. "That would sure be a great thing, wouldn't it? It's a remarkable resource for a lot of wonderful music, though -- wherever it's coming from!"[/i]
End of part 2
Who's behind Arizona's nonstop oddball rock time capsule?
They've had occasional down days," reports Pfeifer. "Sometimes you punch up the station and there's just static, and you think, Uh-oh, that's the end of it,'" he says. "But then you try it again in an hour and, like magic, it's back. And they've been broadcasting that way since at least March of 2002, still without ever playing one commercial."
Like many listeners, Pfeifer has scoured the Web searching for a phone number or location of the station's offices. "Almost nothing is known about KCDX," he marvels. "I've found out they're owned by a company called Desert West Air Ranchers, but good luck trying to find out anything about them. I've also heard that they are operating with an automated CD player out of a trailer near Globe. But that's all I've ever been able to discover about them."
Gary Faulkner, the friendly, suntanned Vietnam vet with a classic rock addiction who runs the Florence Chamber of Commerce, claims he gets calls from people all the time wondering if the mystery station is being broadcast covertly by a couple of incarcerated Blues Brothers out of the nearby penitentiary.
"A lot of people think it's being secretly run by some of the prisoners," chuckles Faulkner. "But I know for a fact that's not true. The station has a license here in Florence, but there's no building. The most I've been able to find out is it's run by a guy up on a mountaintop in Globe."
In fact, some listeners believe there's nothing but a gigantic iPod at the top of that mountain.
"The selection is so random, and some of the segues are so nonsensical, that it sounds like you're plugged into somebody's MP3 player and it's just playing all these thousands of songs at random," says Thurman.
Certainly KCDX's playlist is eclectic enough to suggest it's all streaming from the personal iTunes library of some benevolent hilltop hippie who raided Napster good a couple of years ago and found the perfect old-school way to file-share: over the FM airwaves. At times, the only thing a pair of songs have in common is era. Gilbert O'Sullivan's sunny 1973 confection "Get Down" will inexplicably segue into the ominous opening strains of "In the Light" from Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti. Other times the connection is even odder: On KCDX, the Beatles' perennial "Something" can follow Men at Work's 1983 non-hit "Dr. Heckle & Mr. Jive."
Not that that's a bad thing. On the contrary, KCDX's apparent lack of a human program director reshuffles every record lodged in the baby-boomer memory banks and plays them all back without judgment: Hendrix is cool, but so is early-period Chicago. And younger listeners get treated to some of the strangest music they've never heard, without some media conglomerate market-researching each track for hipness and relevance.
Musical snobbery and DJ attitude are not programmed into KCDX. Graham Nash's sublime, topical-again "Military Madness" can immediately be followed by the early-'80s pop kitsch of Olivia Newton-John's "Magic." The KCDX A.I. is esoteric enough to select the kick-in-the-lobes delight of "Kuiama" when it scans for ELO, but it can just as easily pick "Living Thing." Which it will probably do in five minutes.
KCDX, you see, also has a peculiar habit of heavily showcasing a particular artist every few hours. On the classic rock outlets, such artist showcases are usually smartly assembled Sunday night affairs, distilling the greatness of such Rock and Roll Hall of Famers as Eric Clapton or Led Zeppelin and reexperiencing landmark LPs like The Dark Side of the Moon and Tapestry.
On KCDX, you're more likely to hear a reexamining of Billy Joel's An Innocent Man, sprinkling the Piano Man's long-forgotten odes to Christie Brinkley between totally unrelated rarities by the Buffalo Springfield and Foghat. Inevitably, at some point in a particular broadcast day you will find yourself wondering why you're suddenly listening to more early Blood, Sweat & Tears than anyone has in the past 30 years.
Because of this illogical pattern, a lot of KCDX listeners believe the man behind the curtain is actually nothing more than a very large compact disc multi-player.
"At first, I thought it was coming off a big computer server," says Pfeifer. "But the same artists wouldn't be coming up that repeatedly if you were randomly playing from an MP3 library. That's why I think it's one of those large, 500-disc CD players. Because even when you set those things on random shuffle, sometimes they'll hit the same CDs for a while."
Sure enough, while Pfeifer is talking, the third Rolling Stones song in 30 minutes, "Sympathy for the Devil," comes on his living room stereo. Even if KCDX is just a big CD carousel, there's still the matter of who's loading those CDs, and the lyrics of this particular classic fairly taunt Pfeifer to guess what kind of person would dedicate the time and money to create such a public archive.
Obviously, whoever's providing the Valley with this nonstop classic rock time capsule is, as Mick Jagger sneers, "a man of wealth and taste." But what's puzzling everybody who's discovered this station is the nature of his game.
"I could see if some station owner was just doing this to get a buzz going and get advertisers interested," Pfeifer says.
"But then," he says, smiling, "wouldn't you think there'd be some way to get in contact with him?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About four hours after successfully tuning in the elusive 103.1 on "the good radio" upstairs in his central Phoenix home, Dwight Tindle is on the phone again, raving all about his brand-new favorite station.
"This is amazing stuff!" says the 52-year-old veteran Valley radio man, who now makes his living in the global telecommunications industry. "I can tell you right now, there isn't another station like this in the country. What this guy is doing is very special. Because this kind of thing never happens in radio. This is one of those great rarities."
A former "rich hippie," according to pal Russell "Wonderful Russ" Shaw, Tindle was instrumental in creating Phoenix's other great radio rarity, the original KDKB. Funded by Tindle and Eric Hauenstein, a radio sales guy Tindle met after the two attended Woodstock in 1969, the first KDKB crew, led by the late, now-legendary program director William Edward Compton, served up a unique hippie diet of folk, rock, jazz, comedy and whatever else fit the mood of the moment. It was an exhilarating, weird mix of music that, save for Tindle's short-lived Sunday night program with promoter Danny Zelisko on KMXP in 1998, hasn't been heard on Valley airwaves since.
Until now, that is. While Tindle isn't sure how much of KCDX's programming is automated, he is certain whoever's selecting the music for the station listened to a whole lot of early-'70s KDKB.
I'm hearing a lot of songs with a definite Phoenix signature," he says. "Artists that we developed on KDKB who really didn't get played anywhere else. Jerry Riopelle, early Linda Ronstadt. Whiskey Train' by Procol Harum, Dolly Dagger' by Hendrix, Dixie Chicken' by Little Feat. Records that we played to death on KDKB but didn't get much airplay anywhere else in the country. I'm waiting to hear [Little Feat's] Spanish Moon' on KCDX -- it would fit right in."
For Tindle, listening to KCDX is clearly like being visited by a friendly ghost. "The songs aren't being put together the way a 21st-century program director would put them together," he says. "They're being put together the way we used to put them together. Where the music had a certain flow to it."
A onetime master of the musical segue as KDKB's late-night jock ("Dwight could literally match notes," attests Shaw), Tindle has trouble believing the song sequences he's hearing on KCDX are purely random picks of the computer. "Usually when you talk about automation, there's a mindless randomness to it," he says. "But I'm not hearing that here. I'm hearing something a little bit more purposeful in the selection of the songs. I'm hearing a mind behind the music. Somebody is deciding which song goes where."
A few days later, Tindle calls back following a road trip to Nogales, slightly revising his critique.
"We listened to KCDX all the way down and back -- the signal only fades out when you get a little north of Tucson," he reports. "And sometimes it sounded like it was on some form of automation, but other times there was clearly someone behind the controls. Maybe that's how it's done: generally automated with occasional stints by a human mind in the more listened-to day parts."
Plainly, Tindle does not want to believe all the legendary radio magic he created with his whacked-out crew could simply be duplicated today by a well-stocked computer picking out songs willy-nilly. Better to imagine the ghost of Bill Compton is somehow tweaking with the radio waves bouncing around the heavens.
"The curious thing about FM radio waves is that they penetrate the ionosphere," says Tindle. "Sometimes I regret that we never taped anything at KDKB. We looked at what we were doing as a work of art that we were constantly creating every moment we were on the air, and we just let it go out over the airwaves and disappear. But somewhere out in space, all of those radio shows are still out there."
Could some genius have found a way to retrieve those lost KDKB signals and rebroadcast them, creating a kind of permanent museum exhibition in the air?
"Maybe," he says, laughing. "That would sure be a great thing, wouldn't it? It's a remarkable resource for a lot of wonderful music, though -- wherever it's coming from!"[/i]
End of part 2