Full Moon Edition August 2026
Do you dream? What I mean is do you have a dream? At this stage of life, wherever that might be, do you still have some idea out there on the far horizon of your reality you would like to have happen, something you dream about actually coming to be? We might think dreaming is childish, that life is just as we find it and we can only take it for what it is. But I believe in dreamers, those certain people among us who imagine that things can be different and who put their heart and soul into chasing that dream.
It might be something big, an earth-shaking project you want to bring to fruition. It might something less grand that is under-appreciated or unrecognized you want to bring into the light and gain the attention it deserves. It might be whatever it is you feel passionate about enough to pursue, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. Because it isn’t about you. It’s about the idea. It’s about the dream of something coming to be that might never have happened if someone didn’t try to get it done.
I’ve had a dream that has kept me busy for much of the past six years. Along the way, sailing those mysterious seas of one’s imagination, I’ve met a lot of people who share that dream or at least appreciate what it’s all about. A lot of them have encouraged me to keep after it. Some of them have told me I’m crazy. Plenty of them have pointed out all the difficulties that stand in the way of ever having it come to be. Some among them have tossed a few dollars into the kitty to keep the boat afloat. Bless them all.
I have a friend named Bill Szymczyk who is a dreamer. When he was a young sound engineer at ABC in New York, he was dreaming of producing records. He convinced his boss to let him produce a blues singer by the name of B.B. King. The record Bill produced was The Thrill Is Gone, which became King’s theme song for the rest of his career. If you know who Elvin Bishop is, you probably can only name one of his songs, the only hit he ever had: Fooled Around and Fell in Love. Bill produced that record, too.
Bill Szymczyk has the ear. He hears music in a way most of us never will. The bands he’s produced in his career cover an entire alphabet from Bishop and Rick Derringer to Edgar Winter and The Who, and including sounds as diverse as the J. Geils Band and Pharoah Sanders. He’s best known for his long association with Joe Walsh, producing the James Gang, Barnstorm, and all of the Eagles best selling albums, including two of the four greatest selling albums in U.S. recording history.
Bill chased his dream through all the ups and downs. As he said to me, “But it all worked out.” He tells me those things, I believe, because he has encouraged and supported my dream since I first began the project. He gets it because he was there. In the midst of producing all those gold and platinum albums, he took a break and did weekend radio shows at KFML AM&FM in Denver, which is where we met. Like all the other deejays there, Bill played the music he liked. He wanted to turn you on to it.
Another guy who shares the dream is David Shepardson, who has worked relentlessly for several years now in promoting the project. David did light shows at The Matrix in San Francisco, produced one of the first live cast concerts of the era in broadcasting, Ike and Tina Turner live on KMPX-FM, and was promotion director at KFML, where he produced a lengthy series of live cast concerts by some of the biggest bands for an audience that loved every minute of it. That’s where we met some 55 years ago.
This project isn’t about that station or any of the other great stations of the time. It’s about telling the story of the FM radio revolution that swept the broadcasting industry for a dozen years beginning in 1967 and gave birth to the Classic Era of Rock Music. It’s specifically about the deejays at all those great stations who were the connective tissue between the new music and the new audience that wanted to hear it. It’s about paying homage to the people who made it happen just because they loved the music.
Realizing the dream has become a project under the working title Radio Active that has evolved from the Freeform Radio Archive at radicalradio.media. It’s a story that wants to be told. Finally, we’ve gotten it into the hands of a person who can make it happen, one of the most powerful in the industry. He says he sees it as a full length documentary that “deserves to be made.” He looked me in the eye and said, “This has big potential.” Will the dream finally come to be? We’ll see. As we say, “Stay tuned.”