Radio Shows I've Known and Loved (WAIF edition)

Today I want to tell you about my favorite step-child: WAIF, Cincinnati. I’m for real about that. The for-real, legal name, of the organization is “WAIF, the real step-child radio of Cincinnati.” It is fitting for a station that can be considered to be part of Generation X to also be a step-child. The station was conceived in the early seventies, with organization taking place for it in 1973 and it first went on the air in 1975 (that’s what makes it Gen X). The only thing that would have made the name better is if it was the real red headed step-child. Sometimes, when you are involved in community radio, it feels like you are a red-headed stepchild.

I first remember tuning in to WAIF during the summer after the sixth grade. This would have been around 1991. I loved listening to the radio, but it was usually limited to WEBN at that time, as they played the hard stuff. Heavy metal was one of the first subcultural forms of music I flocked to. My older sister Margaret was into metal, as was my cousin Matt Frantz, who now makes post-industrial experimental music (https://mattfrantz.bandcamp.com/music). The older kids on the street I grew up on were mostly westside hoods and they listened to metal. But I start to drift into more alternative sounds whenever I heard them. That was often enough as just then the heyday of alternative music was getting underway. Janes Addiction was in the air, Nirvana was in the streets, and Radiohead was about to creep on in. And I’d heard rumors of something called punk here and there when I came across movies like Valley Girl being played on Star 64.

WAIF wasn’t beholden to corporate playlists, and back in those days, the summer was a fun time to tune in to the station, as it would be flooded with new shows, many of them of the most strident and strange variety. The summer show schedule was different each year and lasted all the way from the beginning of operation until 2012, because for those first few decades of its existence, it shared the frequency with a school.

When a radio station applies for a license it needs to have a probable frequency it will be able to sit on where it won’t interfere with other frequencies. Those can be few and far between in a crowded metro area. So rather sit on their behinds waiting for a miracle to happen and a frequency to open up, they partnered with a vocational school who had station WJVS that operated during school hours, nine months out of the year. WAIF would only come on the air after school was out for the day. This was sometime between three and five in the afternoon and it would stay on until somewhere between six and eight in the morning, except on weekends.

So before WAIF moved to 24 hour broadcasting, their was always a block of shows in the summer that would be temporal, giving people who wanted to have a go at making radio a chance to have a summer show. Tuning in during the summer in the nineties was like being out on the open range. It was a time of wild untamed broadcasts from twenty-something Gen Xers and a slew of weirdos who set upon the station to get their voice and music out on the air.

I remember the day clearly when I first latched on to the station. I was told to wash the dishes and I wanted to be entertained while I did so, so I plugged in the cheap GE boombox I had and tuned around, settling on something that sounded a little different at the far left of the dial. That’s when I hard the announcers read out the “Sensitive Materials” disclaimer warning listeners who might be offended to tune away. After that business was done they played the song “Cop Killer” by Body Count, the legendary heavy metal band fronted by rapper Ice-T. The song had been banned and copies of the record recalled, causing a stir in the media. Yet, it was still out there, and here I was hearing it, in all of its unedited, uncensored glory. Killing anyone is not something I advocate, being of a non-violent persuasion, but to hear such music grabbed my attention to say the least and I became glued to the set. Not the TV set, the radio set.

I wish I knew the name of many of those shows from the summers from throughout the nineties on WAIF, and it’s possible I still have cassette recordings of some of them. I taped what I could, but there was so much, and sometimes I taped over other things. I didn’t think that one day, having already listened to the tapes a bunch, I’d be craving to listen to them again. Maybe some of those shows still exist in the box of tapes in my closet. I hope to rediscover some of them when I make the time to go through those Memorex memories.
As the years went on I became more and more of a dedicated listener to WAIF, and started to discover some of the shows on the evening roster. Some of these are as follows.

Some of the regular shows I listened to included Alien Transmissions a two-hour block of punk rock on between 10 PM and Midnight on Mondays. When the clock struck twelve, one of my all time favorite radio shows came on. This second show, the legendary Art Damage, has had profound influence on my life came on the air. It was hosted by founder Uncle Dave Lewis, but with a variety of rotating hosts that came in and out of the studio doors. A friend of mine had given me a tape of Art Damage before I ever tuned in, but after that I tuned in as often and as much as I could. The tape had been edited to remove all the talking, so for the longest time I had no idea who the bands that had been played were, or who the DJ was. Later, I ended up figuring some of it out, as I encountered those songs again in the wild. There had been pieces by Sun Ra, Nurse With Wound and many others who became staples of my later listening. But Art Damage played a lot of local music too by the bevy of experimental artists and misfits in Cincinnati and hard to find underground sounds from beyond. Every show was an avantgarde education. I had my first exposure to Charles Ives listening to Uncle Dave who rhapsodized about how Ives had been an early music collagist, only doing those audio collages in the idiom of classical music. The people involved in that show also organized a lot of gigs in different venues, and as soon as I could (towards the end of high school) I started going to these, but it took me a bit longer before I actually met any of the people who were involved. After I came back from my brief tenure at Antioch College, where I’d gotten my first taste of broadcasting, I found myself working with someone closely connected to the show and he got me on the air as part of the rotation, but that’s another story.
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One other show I remember clearly from that same time period of first discovering Art Damage, was another summer program and that I don’t remember the name of, had a profound impact on me and my desire to make cut-up tape music with cassettes. The host talked about how it was possible to plug in two different sound sources, one for each of the left and right jacks on stereo, to make a homemade, cheap, down and dirty two track recordings. Because of its nature, this method isolated each sound to one side of the stereo field.  The combined influence of Negativland, Art Damage and the instruction from this show convinced me I could make music with tape myself. I’d already been using the cassette recorder as instrument in my band The Astral Surf Gypsies, so it wasn’t much of a step to  proceeded to make some of my first tape cut-up albums, such as Mental Stirfry. These tapes too sit in my closet (I hope!) and long to be digitized.

Another favorite show on WAIF was Alien Soundtracks. It differed from Alien Transmissions by being more devoted to playing electronic, early industrial music, psychedelic and goth music. The show always opened up with the track “Forever Alien” by Spectrum (Sonic Boom).  Then it would slip into playing music by the likes of Chrome, Helios Creed, The Legendary Pink Dots, and Babylonian Tiles (who I got to see and meet before lead singer Brin sadly passed away). Alien Soundtracks was hosted by Chris Lockhart who had also spent time as an Art Damage host. He gave me my first taste of The Poppy Family and the song “Free From the City” which I’ve remained especially fond of.

Hometown-HiFi was my go to show on Wednesday evenings, on between ten and midnight. It did things that a lot of shows at WAIF did. Since this was community radio nobody was getting paid, and most people had day jobs. This could make it difficult to keep a show going as a solo host. What a few shows ended up doing was have rotating hosts, and different people would come in each week. Hometown HiFi took that to the next level with a different version of the show being on on the first wed., a second version on the second, and a third on the third. While I no longer remember the exact order, or even all of the shows, I do recall most. Poodlebites gave listeners an education in all things Frank Zappa. And while it didn’t turn me into a total Zappahead overnight it was always wild. These days I’d say I’m a Zappa fan lite. I like so much of it and have my favorite Zappa albums, but I haven’t become a totally converted disciple. Another Hometown HiFi flavor was Mekon Country Radio, which I always enjoyed. This was hosted by Michael Riley, a local record store worker, music promoter, and all around hero in the scene. I never got to know him personally but I did enjoy this show which was on once a month, and was devoted to the music of the Mekons, the punk band from Leeds, England. After their initial splash and dash with punk they drifted over into alternative country and roots music, while never losing their taste for DIY or their punk edge. Riley played a lot of other similar stuff from other bands who were mining and making the alternative country sound back then in the nineties. He also worked at the little record store inside the late Buzz Coffeehouse, and back then I barely had enough money for the coffee required to hang out inside, let alone records. If their was a fifth Wednesday in the month it was always devoted to Electric Church, two hours of music by Jimi Hendrix. These were fewer between, but always worth catching. The show is still on, but they’ve moved away from that rotation, now having settled into a format that is still heavy on the Zappa but veers into other rock and roll with large doses of comedy.

Back on the local culture front, the long running Kindred Sanction was always the place to hear all manner of music from the many fine bands in town. Most of it was in the indie genre, but they branched out to play other styles as long as it was from an artist who had a Cincinnati connection.

Weird Trips was a late overnight show I heard only a few times, but boy was it weird. It was similar to Art Damage in some respects, but as if the people involved in Art Damage had gotten taken to a few Dead shows and Rainbow Gatherings. In other words, it was highly psychedelic and very hippie. It featured sound collages, but these were aimed at people who liked jam bands and tie-dies and things with bears on them, more than the art school types who congregated around Dave Lewis and his show.

 Other shows are the stuff of legend. The shows that were on before I heard them myself, and had already gone off the air by the time I tuned into WAIF. Michael Riley’s Danceable Solution explored a wide selection of underground music. Hippies in the late seventies had a late night broadcast called Nocturnal Emissions. Others I heard people talk about and forgot, even as the transmission itself was gone.
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I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the show I spent the most time on the air for at WAIF, On the Way to the Peak of Normal. This program was started by John Cadwallader and Craig Kelley, with Kelley taking over the reigns for many-many years. He was joined by Carrie Nation at times. When my friend Andrew Hissett started filling in for this show, he pulled me in and I became part of the rotation. When Craig wanted to retire from doing the show (he’d done it for close to twenty years since the early to mid-eighties) he handed the reigns over to me, and I kept the show on for a few more years until early 2014. On the Way to the Peak of Normal played an eclectic mix of krautrock, alternative rock, post-rock, electronica and everything in-between. Listening or being on the air for the show, I always felt musically at home.

There were a number of reasons why I ended the show and “quit” radio, but one of them was to focus on writing. I have done that, and have started to achieve some of what I set out to do with my writing. But at the same time, I didn’t leave radio behind for long. In 2015 I got my ham radio technician license, and the following year upgraded to general. I became an active member in the Oh-Ky-In Amateur Radio Society. In 2016, Ken Katkin, the host of another WAIF radio show I love, started asking me to fill in for the first time on his wonderful program of underground rock music, Trash Flow Radio. All these years after I “quit” radio, I’ve been getting on the air with my ham station, filling in at WAIF for Trash Flow sometimes just a few times a year and sometimes more. One of the first things I started writing a series of articles about was radio, and now those articles have become my first book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory. And I haven’t even mentioned getting hooked up with Pete Polyank and DJ Frederick, and the journey taken onto the shortwaves, creating segments for the shows Free Radio Skybird and Imaginary Stations. For those who’ve tasted radio, it’s something really hard to give up. But why would you want to?

WAIF, of course, isn’t the only station I listened to. Stay tuned to this frequency for the next installment of Radio Shows From All Over the Freaking Place That I’ve Known And Loved.