Back on the Air, But Yet Not

When I started this e-journal noting the 40th anniversary of the debut of my long-running (and now long-not-running) radio program “Celebration Rock,” I had no idea that I would be getting back on the air anywhere. I had hoped to volunteer my voice for the local public radio affiliate, but — alas — it’s a union shop, and volunteers aren’t particularly welcome.

And radio has changed so much that even the once-popular BIG stations in town, the ones so many grew up listening to, the ones with local personalities we radio wannabes truly wanted to be — well, many of those stations are now just closets with computers locked inside, with announcer-voices coming from national studios in major cities. So, radio is over. But not out.

In Geneva, NY, there is a so-called internet “radio station,” a web address that carries a streaming audio signal that sounds like a radio station, but which lacks the standard radio paraphernalia, small things like a transmitter and tower. Geneva Community Radio hopes to acquire those things when and if it applies for a low-power FM license. But for now, it is home to some imported and home-grown audio features that fill its internet schedule seven days a week, though not 24 hours a day.

The operator of the station (individual or corporate?) has offered time slots to some religious groups, including the Presbytery of which I am a part. The presbytery’s communications staff person called on two of us who had worked in radio to see what thoughts we had for how to use the free time slot creatively and effectively to — what? — inform? inspire? promote? Frankly, I was reluctant to spend a great deal of time on something so squishy as a radio station that wasn’t broadcasting.

If you go way back in the archives of this blog, you will find that I had begun in somewhat squishy radio. In college, where my radio career, such as it was, began, the campus station had no tower, but relied on low power transmitters in two or three dorms, pushing enough signal through the wiring of those dorms to carry whatever audio emanated from the WCRW* studios in the basement of the library. That was if the students knew we even had a station, and if they knew where to find it on the AM dial. Still, we did pretend that we were a real radio presence, and we also pretended that we had listeners.

At that time it was called “closed circuit, carrier current radio.” And it was a good training ground for future radio station personnel. But truth be told, we probably had more people listening to our music outside the open library window than on their radios. That would be four or five listeners.

So, having begun so modestly, I was (and still am) reluctant to sink hours into preparing anything for an internet “station” that may have fewer listeners than could gather around the studio window. Thus, my brilliant idea: to re-edit and rerun my old “Spirit of Jazz” half-hour shows, the ones in cold storage up there in our attic. To the Presbytery communications person I posed this idea: let’s just run those programs for 20 weeks and see if anyone, I mean anyone, responds.

The shows contain mostly instrumental contemporary jazz, with my brief meditations interspersed between the seven or so music “cuts” in the half hour. Most of the music is still played on jazz radio today, the artists still being popular in their genre, and my comments were not particularly timely, being more general meditations on themes such as solitude, mornings, change, the road, dreams, and jazz itself.

To be sure, there will be some editing necessary. Back then, almost 20 years ago (yikes!), I did refer to “l.p.s” (long play records, for the younger readers here), and some social justice issues in Northern Ireland and South Africa. Some electronic snips, and those archaic phrases are gone. So, we run the shows in the allotted time slot, ask for some feedback via the Presbytery website, and if someone is out there, we could eventually switch over to a new and current offering of some kind. If.

(I have my doubts.)

The process is as follows. I dub the old 7″ reels onto CDs (in the attic audio shoppe), convert the CDs to MP3 files on the computer, edit with Audacity, and email the files to the presbytery office which will forward them to Geneva Community Radio for, um, airing. Or, cybering. Whatever.

Part of the process is to slice away the old outro that offered scripts and music logs and included addresses long since left behind, and add new “credits” mentioning both the original syndicators (Presbyterian Media Mission of Pittsburgh) and the current “sponsor,” my Presbytery.

All that is to say that I am now officially back on the air…but yet not. If I let some old friends know about this venture, maybe they’ll find the show and listen. The internet can carry its audio globally, after all. And that sure beats the closed circuit approach that first carried my voice onto the Philco radio in a women’s dorm room in 1963. I think.

[*WCRW : not FCC-assigned call letters, since we had no license. The letters stood for Westminster College Radio Workshop, a designation that had its roots probably in the early 50s.]