Tom Donahue is listening to rock & roll on LSD in 1967 San Francisco and says to himself, “This music has to be heard in stereo. AM radio is a rotting corpse stinking up the airwaves.” He starts calling FM stations listed in the phone book. When he finds one that’s disconnected, he says to Read More
Category Archives: Center for the New Northwest
College Adventure of Joseph McAuliffe
My most memorable moment in college prior to meeting my future wife, Kay Eberle, would be November 7, 1969, the night I met my favorite rock group, The Who. I had returned to Bowling Green State University as a sophomore that fall as a full-fledged freak. The previous summer I had attended four rock festivals Read More
Maybe Again
Maybe again. That’s what we were thinking when we considered the subject of this particular article. Maybe we can write about our freeform radio project again. We’ve been at it for a while now and haven’t been especially shy about sharing the experience with you. There’s that. Then, too, we don’t want to overstay our Read More
Corporate Underground
Corporate underground? An oxymoron you might say. Yet the origins of underground radio in the latter half of the Sixties was at least partly the result of corporate initiative. Or, perhaps, corporate perplexion. The consequences of that curiosity reverberated through the years in very different directions. New FCC regulations in 1966 were intended to develop Read More
Freeform Radio Archive
We’ve written here in several previous pieces about our project to develop a freeform radio archive. Hopefully, we already answered why we want to do it. Suffice it to say it was a critically important aspect of radio history that is in danger of becoming if not forgotten then perhaps not much more than an Read More
Ephemeral Things
Life as an artist. A career in the arts. It’s a passionate need for self-expression and a challenging way to make a living. Like most areas of enterprise in a capitalist system, a few people make a lot of money and most everyone else barely gets by. Employment for artists is an ephemeral thing, a Read More
Turn Your Radio On
There was a new generation of music coming on and a new generation of people who wanted to hear it. There was a new generation of radio personalities, too, who wanted to play it for them. They had different ideas about how it should be done and what the purpose was. Traditional radio was about Read More
Radical Radio
Radical what? Radio. Yeah, that’s what we said. There was a time, you know. And it mattered! Here’s why. It was called underground radio. Freeform was a better name for it. Radio without walls. No separation between different genres or types of music. No restriction on what you could play if you were at the Read More
Merited and Entitled
Since the financial crisis of 2008, we’ve been presented with one example after another of the increasing disparity between the haves and have-nots in American society. Billionaires comprise the 1/10th of one percent and millionaires make up the other 9.9 percent of that gilded group that actually is prospering in our capitalist system. The remaining Read More
Cascadia
Late in 2015, I thought about the recent election and why I continued each morning though November to wake up with the immediate thought that it was just a bad dream, until I was fully awake and realized once again that it wasn’t. I began to sketch out a novel about the dissolution of the Read More