Final Full Moon of the Year Edition December 2023
A little over a year ago, with the help of a whole lot of people and some cash from some of them, we launched the Freeform Radio Archive. It’s a place to gather examples of that brilliant time in broadcasting and pay homage to the people who made it happen. It’s been an exciting and humbling adventure.
The first few days it was live, a few people checked it out, listened to the music and the shows, read some of the articles, checked out the interviews, and took time to say nice things about it all. We wondered if that would be it. But then little by little, folks began to send us things, tapes, photos, memorabilia, contact info for deejays we needed to interview. It has become a bit of a haul and we hope it keeps coming.
We’ve added a tremendous amount of great material to the site and encourage you to check it out HERE. More than a few people are doing just that. Last week our posts from the site on Soundcloud drew 2000 separate listens from more than 60 countries around the world. The most came from Egypt, then Saudi Arabia, then the USA, and so many others. The week before had more than 1600 listens with a slightly different lineup of countries leading the pack. All in all, it’s pretty cool and we’re good with it.
For a guy who’s always been pretty full of himself, and who developed one of the seminal magazines of the late 20th century, Jann Wenner as you may have heard has not done a very great job of securing his legacy lately. Like very not!
After being bounced from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, of which he was a founder, and being disclaimed by his son, Gus, who now runs Rolling Stone Magazine, as not representing that rag’s values, whither thou goest, Jann?
If you make your living covering music, it’s hard to believe you find no mastery among the legions of talented Black and female practitioners of the art. Trying to Jann’splain it only made it worse. The term “blindspot” comes to mind. When we begin to think that way, a host of other, if less important, failures are noted.
Our friend, David Shepardson, who ran in the same San Francisco circles as Wenner when they were young, mentioned to me the other day that like everyone else he knew in that time and place, freeform radio was an essential part of their experience, yet Wenner never mentions it in his memoir Like A Rolling Stone. It makes one wonder if the guy’s legacy is about groundbreaking journalism covering the phenomenon of rock music culture, or is it simply about celebrity – white male celebrity at that? Yawn!
Six degrees of separation, right? I know you and you know someone who happens to know this woman who knows a guy who knows the manager of Steven Van Zandt. Or maybe it’s Jack White. Or maybe Gus Wenner. Each of them is someone we’d dearly love to contact. The program director at Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be an interesting possibility, too. Who do you know who knows any of them?
Why? Because each of them for reasons of their own have neural receptivity to what we’re doing at the Freeform Radio Archive. Little Steven created the resource, Teach Rock (HERE), a tool kit for educators to reach and teach kids, and it lacks the freeform radio component. Jack White is a well known rock radio buff who would love our stuff. Gus Wenner might appreciate a feature article about a critically important component of the Classic Era of Rock Music his rag has sadly ignored.
We want to grow the reach of this asset, both the website itself and our series of lectures on the subject. So kindly ask yourself this: if you really wanted to see this happen, who would you reach out to as the first link toward making that connection? From me to you to them are just a brief sequence of blips in the neural circuitry that connect us. Wanna try it? Let’s make it a rockin’ 2024. May yours be that and thanks!