When you canât find a friend youâve still got the radio.
I am not a writer, and I am definitely not a speaker, but I am in shock, and KHSU being shutdown has affected me in a way I hadnât been prepared for, so I felt like the only thing I could do at the end of the day was sit down and write something to read at its funeral to process all these feelings of sadness and rage.
When I first moved to Arcata almost six years ago I constantly had the radio on in my house. My new roommates were gone for the summer, I didnât have a job or friends yet so it was just me and the radio. My first friend in Humboldt.
I was raised to be a radio person. I grew up and went to college in the Bay Area. As a child, in the car with my dad on a Sunday morning, or sitting in the kitchen while he was making breakfast, it was KPFA, Across the Great Divide and Americaâs Back 40. I didnât realize until I was older what I was actually listening to, and looking back I was completely unconscious of the effect radio was having on my subconscious and my soul. Besides a brief early phase of arguments about how often we had to listen to radio Disney, the rest of the time we always had KFOG on. We kept it on when we left the house to keep the dog company, and it woke me up every morning in high school, playing me Leonard Cohen, Natalie Merchant, Tegan & Sara and The Ditty Bops while I braced for a day full of kids that wouldnât shut up about how cool the Green Day concert was. After college I volunteered at KALX on the UC Berkeley campus, and I quickly realized I could never make it as a music programmer because I canât stay up past ten and newbies go on at 3am. But I stayed an avid listener, even when the toy store I was working at had to ban me from tuning in because it was just too all over the place and too often âweird,â and at home my parents would switch the kitchen radio back to a then much more mainstream, commercial KFOG whenever I went downstairs. I learned a lot from those radio stations, not the least of which was that I liked âweird peopleâ music and âold peopleâ music, and that I very much did not like most young people music, or the way young people listened to music.
So when I moved here, knowing there were two great community radio stations, that was it. These were my people. Iâve never needed spotify, Iâve never needed an iphone or any kind of streaming thing, and when my old ipod broke a few years ago I never felt a need to replace it, I had all the content I needed. When I started to work at Eco Groovy, the CD selection at the local library helped fill in a bit when customers didnât want to be subjected to the news, but mostly it was the radio. My coworkers all know that when I get in, the radio goes on, and they have long given up any power over where the dial lands, because they know that ultimately, I know best, or maybe just that itâs just best not to argue if they donât want to hear a very passionate rant about the importance of community and having an open mind and listening to things that wouldnât necessarily be our first choice to better understand the human condition and different experiences, except if itâs reggae for more than two or three songs in a row, Iâm sorry, I just canât.Â
I immediately caught on that on Wednesdays from 2-4 KHSU was the place to be. Vinny DeVanyâs Fougu is quite possibly the greatest radio show that has ever aired in the history of the world, and if you think Iâm exaggerating please come show me one thatâs better. Sistah Soul not only brought the best music over from the Bronx and into Humboldt, she started a movement and provided a lifeline for the men at Pelican Bay and their families, standing up for the rights of prisoners, speaking out against solitary confinement and other injustices committed by the government, and gave people a voice in a society that says they donât deserve one. And I feel so lucky to be able to help out at The Sanctuary, where I have the library that helped make up Brooksâ Keys to the Highway right at my finger tips, helping make my itunes library something my dad would be proud of, and reinforce what he drilled in through our home radio and yearly excursions to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.
There were too many current shows I was tuning into for me to share my thoughts about them all, and there were a lot of late night ones I was just starting to make a part of my routine when I wasnât in the mood for the news, because I realized just because I donât stay up past ten doesnât mean that I canât wake up in the morning and find out what Diddie Wa Diddie means. One of the most frustrating things is the day the station died, I started listening to every archived show one by one, thinking I had two weeks left, and I needed to live it up. I didnât make it very far before they got taken down. But they were all amazing. Every one. Even ones that werenât exactly genres I would want to consistently tune in for, I appreciated. Even the reggae. Because thatâs why I love the radio. It makes me listen to things I wouldnât hear in any other way, that I would never have put on myself, or have known about otherwise. I get to hear it all. Basically everything but the top 40.
I once did a job on a hill with some friends, just for a few weeks, and we were off the grid, and our only entertainment was the music we had on our devices. We took turns putting on playlists or podcasts or just leaving it to shuffle. After a few days all I could think was damn, this is getting old fast, what I wouldnât give for a radio signal. Putting out that much music, with that much diversity, 24/7, 365, is a monumental effort. We could barely make it through a few weeks before losing our patience with the constant having to get up and pick out something else every hour or so, and we werenât even doing a very good job most of the time. To just be able to flick a switch and know you are going to hear something good, something different, something constant, something made by your neighbors, made for your community, made just for you, that is a truly valuable service. One that should be cherished, one that I have treasured, and one that I know many of us will miss like weâve lost a dear friend. Nanci Griffith sings, âwhen you canât find a friend, youâve still got the radio.â KHSU, my dear dear friend, thank you, you have always been there for me, you will be profoundly missed.
