The short story:

My new radio show is called Can Haz DJ it’s on every Tuesday from 10pm-12am on Radio Valencia a brand new community radio station in San Francisco. Right now the station is only streaming online. But soon it will be on FM 87.7. Soon. I will be playing an eclectic mix of awesome stuff. From jazz to rap to punk to electronica in the spirit of John Peel and with an eye toward popular and unpopular music history. It is going to be fun. The show will also be archived and available as a podcast. Stay tuned for more info on that. As to the longer story…

Some of you have heard this story. Some of you have lived this story.

When I was in high school, all i wanted to be when I grew up was a college radio DJ. When I got to college, I found there was no college radio station, just a club of kids like me who wanted one. So I joined the club.

By the end of my first year in college we were broadcasting over the PA in a building on campus. With a library of less than a hundred lp’s & cd’s, plus all of our collections to fill out our individual shows.

By the end of the next year we were actually broadcasting on FM. 88.7 WXJM in Harrisonburg, VA (top of every hour, if you know what I mean). In the process we had to make a ton of decisions, create rules, tell people ‘no’, ask for money in a very structured way to buy very specific things (even if we spent the money eventually on other, related things), and many other bizarre and boring tasks for the greater good of playing cool music. I became part of a weird, wonderful and genius management team, all making it up as we went along. I ended up as Music Director, which if you know how it works is ‘chief music nerd’, for me it was an amazing opportunity to get educated on the best of everything from punk to metal to jazz to a diverse range of international music.

In retrospect I know that WXJM was in effect (and reality) my first start-up and equipped me incredibly well, by accident, for the work that I’ve done at tech companies. It iwas definitely the formative experience of my life. I learned by following my absolute passion for great musical art with a like-minded group of smart amateurs about all sorts of practical matters of organizing an enterprise, communicating with and managing a staff, and how to create a form or process where there wasn’t one there before. Mother of invention, muthafucka. Music & art as the Mother of my having some practical skills, too, I guess.

Anyway, I’ve dabbled only a little with radio since at a few other colleges that I wasn’t attending. You realized quickly that college radio is height of freedom, and commercial radio entirely diferent, it gives you a paycheck and no freedom or creative satisfaction.

So largely I just kept building my own music collection and making mixes. The audience is smaller: Danielle drives to work to my mix CD’s often, and I’ve been giving out an annual Christmas mix for a couple years. And sometimes my buddy John Hell would me come on his show A Season in Hell on various pirate community radio stations over the years—John used to be a DJ at the mighty KFJC which I now know is one of the best college radio stations in the country.

John is one of the folks who started organizing Radio Valencia. I’m thrilled that he let me in on it early on, so I could be a part of what looks like an amazing group of folks that are passionate about radio for music’s sake. I still haven’t grown up, but I am a DJ once again.