The Cherry and the Needle
My favorite DJ is, without question,
Cole. When I was growing up in the Twin Cities, Kevin DJ’ed shows
on Modern Rock KJ104 which folded because the powers that be decided
the station should change their format to country (ugh). Later he
DJ’ed with Rev105 and I lost track of him for a while.
Then years ago I loaded up the truck and I moved to
Washington–Seattle that is–and one day after a Bob Mould show I was
hanging out by the stage trying to get a set list and noticed two
ambassadors of Minnesota:
Mofo Billy Batson (helping work the stage) and Kevin Cole who was
in the crowd. It turns out he moved to Seattle and took a position
with Amazon helping their online music store. He had a radio show with
KCMU which became KEXP and his weekend Variety Show has recently
switched to a daily 2-6 slot (yippee!)
But trouble may be brewing. The Twin Cities finally has a competitive
radio station that launched yesterday from
Current. Nick has heard enough to decide it’s
these Twin Cities have been missing since the brilliant Rev 105 left
the air years ago”. A great lineup and commercial-free. They have
a good quality
stream and so far I’m super impressed, too. The comments on the
blog are overwhelmingly positive and I’ve noticed two people drop
Kevin’s name. How many DJ’s can you name? How many DJ’s can you name
who hosted a show you listened to maybe 10 years ago who you’d request
by name on a new station? Let’s hope he doesn’t heed the calling. 7
months of blistering cold or 7 months of rain?
One side-note: I shouldn’t make the Minnesota radio situation sound
quite so dire since there have been two other great stations around
for a long time: KFAI (whose slogan
was once “a different station every hour” but could arguably be “the
best station on the air, but only for one or two hours a week”) and
college radio and as such was only available on AM for a long time and
has a pretty unreliable signal.