Tonight on The John Zone
It’s another Friday, and with that we all bid farewell to menial tasks, inexcusably weak coffee, and restless nights. It is a day to take a breath, dance a dance, and welcome the opportunity to relax and enjoy ourselves for a couple of days. Additionally, as of a month ago, it also means it’s time for yours truly to dust off this Russian microphone and take to the virtual airwaves to harass the masses.
For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, permit me to invite you all to pull up a proverbial carpet square and listen to a story. The Centers for Disease Control, the World health Organization, and NATO have all established through independently conducted studies that I have always been a strange person. Growing up, I whittled the hours away by making tape recordings of myself imitating a radio disc jockey. Of course, being a child of the 1989s, I used cassette tapes instead of actual records. This bizarre habit of mine began in the fall and winter of 1993, when I was but a lad of nine years old. (A top ten countdown I made that Christmas break still survives to this day.)
I continued making these tapes sporadically until my freshman year in high school. I stopped in part because I had grown out of it but also because my dual cassette recorder finally bit the dust. Besides that, my brother and I had begun producing crudely made Christmas CDs for our friends and family, which sated my creative cravings.
This eccentric fairy tale picks up again during my sophomore year in college when my brother began exploring the possibilities of Internet broadcasting. Through his connections on one channel of communication or another, I became vaguely aware of Andre Louis, a jolly sort of fellow from London and Patrick Perdue, who I only knew of as the guy who harmonized himself with speech synthesizers. In January of 2005 the three of them joined a few others in starting up their own internet radio station called the Beyond Radio network.
Stephen began broadcasting regularly a month after the network’s inception. During this stage in my collegiate career I had just joined several student organizations, on top of regularly enrolling in five or six classes every semester. On Saturday nights I would often frequent Club IHOP or just go driving around with a mutual friend of ours, cranking up the speakers in his Mercedes and annoying the greater Denton County area with the likes of Scatman John and Vanilla Ice. This wasn’t every weekend though; and when I was at home, I would sit across the room with my laptop and listen to my brother broadcast. Our modem was somewhat unsteady at times; and as soon as his signal dropped, I would dive for the splitter and reset the connection.
For the first time since I was fifteen, that pang of interest in broadcast festered back to the surface. In October I started doing broadcasts on a Shoutcast server Stephen owned called U182, named for a cabin we had shared with some friends of ours on a cruise with our orchestra back in March of 2003. Andre and presumably others on the Beyond radio Network would periodically listen in. I was asked to join the fledgling network early in 2006 but upon hearing their own broadcasts, Patrick’s in particular, I decided I needed a little more practice.
April 4 marked my first official start on the network. The global accessibility of this medium really appealed to me. During broadcasts, listeners could write in via instant messengers such as AOL or MSN. There was an 800 number for the network which each broadcaster could forward to themselves through the use of softphones, which are, as you might expect, software packages that emulated telephones. Case in point, during my longest continuous broadcast I interacted with people from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Poland, Finland, Sweden, England, France, and Japan. That level of interactivity was something I had never seen before.
I continued with my hobby of internet broadcasting until the summer of 2011 when I realized I needed to take a break. My grandfather passed away that May, and somehow that precipitated a change in direction for me. My last official broadcast was on September 3. In another six months, I had two part-time jobs, a girlfriend, and had moved out. A lot of things in my life changed very quickly, and as much as I enjoyed it, broadcasts weren’t exactly a priority for me the way they once had been.
To an extent, I remained somewhat involved in the medium over the next two years. If someone had a shaky connection, I would relay them to the appropriate stations. I made promotions for a few people if and when they asked for one, and I helped with compiling material for holiday automation. I even made a couple of prerecorded broadcasts for a severely autistic friend of mine who had been a devoted listener to the Beyond Radio Network for almost as long as I had been a part of it.
By the fall of 2013 things had stabilized to the point where I thought I might be able to make room for broadcasting again. I was nearing the end of my stint in the University of North Texas’ media program; and if radio was going to be a possible career choice, I felt I owed it to myself to be as rehearsed as I could be. To test the waters I made a one-off broadcast on the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The rust was certainly there, but it felt good.
March 14 marked my official return to weekly broadcasts. Since then I have asked myself what I wanted to do with this format after being apart from it for so long. When I had stopped in 2011, I had five years to define what my shows were about. At that time, my broadcasts were characterized by sequences of music and comedy based on themes presented to me by either the listeners or myself during the broadcast. These sequences were interspersed with a relaxed atmosphere of conversation, as well as an increased emphasis on historic events and/or birthdays of notable personalities.
I still don’t know how things will change in the coming weeks, but it is this third element of my broadcasts which I know I want to emphasize more than I have in the past. For instance, on this day in 1713, the War of the Spanish Succession came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht. Johann Sebastian Bach premiered his St Matthew Passion in Leipzig on this day in 1727. Tokugawa Yoshinobu surrendered Edo Castle to Japanese Imperial forces on this day in 1868, which marked an end to the Tokugawa shogunate and began the Meiji Restoration. In tribute, I just happen to have a few things on hand to commemorate these pivotal events in world history, thanks in no small part to the likes of David Starkey, Richard Chamberlain, and the Chamber Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera.
There are some who seek to avoid topical events altogether so that their broadcasts retain a timeless quality during subsequent listenings, but I have always taken the opposite view. For you see, the comedy world has lost two of its most talented members this spring. During a stop off in his home town of Columbus, Georgia, comedian and country musician Tim Wilson suffered a massive heart attack after complaining of shortness of breath earlier that afternoon. This past Saturday, John Pinette succumbed to ongoing heart and liver disease. The official cause of death was given as a pulmonary embolism, which just sounds excruciatingly painful! These were two very funny men, men who brought me a great deal of laughter and joy over the years. In their memory, I would like to indulge myself a bit in some of their most recognizable contributions to the comedy world, both to honor their legacy and to introduce their talents to those who may be unfamiliar with their body of work.
Today also marks the births of such venerated personalities as Josh Server, 35; Tom Thacker (of Sum 41), 36; Oliver Riedel (of Rammstein), 43; Steve Azar, 50; Nigel Pulsford (of Bush), 51; as well as the late Richard Berry (of the Flairs), who would have been 79 and the celebrated Indian singer Kundan Lal Saigal who would have turned 110 today if alcoholism had not taken him from us in 1947.
So if you find yourself with a free evening, or you’re just in the mood for some background music as you commit mild acts of debauchery, why not put your galoshes in the freezer, microwave the dish washer, and join me tonight at 7PM Eastern Daylight Time, 6PM Central Daylight Time, 4PM Pacific Daylight Time, 1PM Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time, noon Samoa Standard Time, or Saturday at midnight British Summer Time, 1AM Central European Summer Time, 2AM Eastern European Summer Time, 9AM Australian Eastern Standard Time, 11AM New Zealand Standard Time, and 1PM for you folks over in the Line islands. That’s right! I didn’t forget you, either!
To listen, you need only click here for the mp3 stream or here for the ogg stream. If you can’t listen, all recent broadcasts can always be found at this happy little page, where my shows inexorably find themselves within a day or so after the live broadcast.
For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, permit me to invite you all to pull up a proverbial carpet square and listen to a story. The Centers for Disease Control, the World health Organization, and NATO have all established through independently conducted studies that I have always been a strange person. Growing up, I whittled the hours away by making tape recordings of myself imitating a radio disc jockey. Of course, being a child of the 1989s, I used cassette tapes instead of actual records. This bizarre habit of mine began in the fall and winter of 1993, when I was but a lad of nine years old. (A top ten countdown I made that Christmas break still survives to this day.)
I continued making these tapes sporadically until my freshman year in high school. I stopped in part because I had grown out of it but also because my dual cassette recorder finally bit the dust. Besides that, my brother and I had begun producing crudely made Christmas CDs for our friends and family, which sated my creative cravings.
This eccentric fairy tale picks up again during my sophomore year in college when my brother began exploring the possibilities of Internet broadcasting. Through his connections on one channel of communication or another, I became vaguely aware of Andre Louis, a jolly sort of fellow from London and Patrick Perdue, who I only knew of as the guy who harmonized himself with speech synthesizers. In January of 2005 the three of them joined a few others in starting up their own internet radio station called the Beyond Radio network.
Stephen began broadcasting regularly a month after the network’s inception. During this stage in my collegiate career I had just joined several student organizations, on top of regularly enrolling in five or six classes every semester. On Saturday nights I would often frequent Club IHOP or just go driving around with a mutual friend of ours, cranking up the speakers in his Mercedes and annoying the greater Denton County area with the likes of Scatman John and Vanilla Ice. This wasn’t every weekend though; and when I was at home, I would sit across the room with my laptop and listen to my brother broadcast. Our modem was somewhat unsteady at times; and as soon as his signal dropped, I would dive for the splitter and reset the connection.
For the first time since I was fifteen, that pang of interest in broadcast festered back to the surface. In October I started doing broadcasts on a Shoutcast server Stephen owned called U182, named for a cabin we had shared with some friends of ours on a cruise with our orchestra back in March of 2003. Andre and presumably others on the Beyond radio Network would periodically listen in. I was asked to join the fledgling network early in 2006 but upon hearing their own broadcasts, Patrick’s in particular, I decided I needed a little more practice.
April 4 marked my first official start on the network. The global accessibility of this medium really appealed to me. During broadcasts, listeners could write in via instant messengers such as AOL or MSN. There was an 800 number for the network which each broadcaster could forward to themselves through the use of softphones, which are, as you might expect, software packages that emulated telephones. Case in point, during my longest continuous broadcast I interacted with people from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Poland, Finland, Sweden, England, France, and Japan. That level of interactivity was something I had never seen before.
I continued with my hobby of internet broadcasting until the summer of 2011 when I realized I needed to take a break. My grandfather passed away that May, and somehow that precipitated a change in direction for me. My last official broadcast was on September 3. In another six months, I had two part-time jobs, a girlfriend, and had moved out. A lot of things in my life changed very quickly, and as much as I enjoyed it, broadcasts weren’t exactly a priority for me the way they once had been.
To an extent, I remained somewhat involved in the medium over the next two years. If someone had a shaky connection, I would relay them to the appropriate stations. I made promotions for a few people if and when they asked for one, and I helped with compiling material for holiday automation. I even made a couple of prerecorded broadcasts for a severely autistic friend of mine who had been a devoted listener to the Beyond Radio Network for almost as long as I had been a part of it.
By the fall of 2013 things had stabilized to the point where I thought I might be able to make room for broadcasting again. I was nearing the end of my stint in the University of North Texas’ media program; and if radio was going to be a possible career choice, I felt I owed it to myself to be as rehearsed as I could be. To test the waters I made a one-off broadcast on the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The rust was certainly there, but it felt good.
March 14 marked my official return to weekly broadcasts. Since then I have asked myself what I wanted to do with this format after being apart from it for so long. When I had stopped in 2011, I had five years to define what my shows were about. At that time, my broadcasts were characterized by sequences of music and comedy based on themes presented to me by either the listeners or myself during the broadcast. These sequences were interspersed with a relaxed atmosphere of conversation, as well as an increased emphasis on historic events and/or birthdays of notable personalities.
I still don’t know how things will change in the coming weeks, but it is this third element of my broadcasts which I know I want to emphasize more than I have in the past. For instance, on this day in 1713, the War of the Spanish Succession came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht. Johann Sebastian Bach premiered his St Matthew Passion in Leipzig on this day in 1727. Tokugawa Yoshinobu surrendered Edo Castle to Japanese Imperial forces on this day in 1868, which marked an end to the Tokugawa shogunate and began the Meiji Restoration. In tribute, I just happen to have a few things on hand to commemorate these pivotal events in world history, thanks in no small part to the likes of David Starkey, Richard Chamberlain, and the Chamber Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera.
There are some who seek to avoid topical events altogether so that their broadcasts retain a timeless quality during subsequent listenings, but I have always taken the opposite view. For you see, the comedy world has lost two of its most talented members this spring. During a stop off in his home town of Columbus, Georgia, comedian and country musician Tim Wilson suffered a massive heart attack after complaining of shortness of breath earlier that afternoon. This past Saturday, John Pinette succumbed to ongoing heart and liver disease. The official cause of death was given as a pulmonary embolism, which just sounds excruciatingly painful! These were two very funny men, men who brought me a great deal of laughter and joy over the years. In their memory, I would like to indulge myself a bit in some of their most recognizable contributions to the comedy world, both to honor their legacy and to introduce their talents to those who may be unfamiliar with their body of work.
Today also marks the births of such venerated personalities as Josh Server, 35; Tom Thacker (of Sum 41), 36; Oliver Riedel (of Rammstein), 43; Steve Azar, 50; Nigel Pulsford (of Bush), 51; as well as the late Richard Berry (of the Flairs), who would have been 79 and the celebrated Indian singer Kundan Lal Saigal who would have turned 110 today if alcoholism had not taken him from us in 1947.
So if you find yourself with a free evening, or you’re just in the mood for some background music as you commit mild acts of debauchery, why not put your galoshes in the freezer, microwave the dish washer, and join me tonight at 7PM Eastern Daylight Time, 6PM Central Daylight Time, 4PM Pacific Daylight Time, 1PM Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time, noon Samoa Standard Time, or Saturday at midnight British Summer Time, 1AM Central European Summer Time, 2AM Eastern European Summer Time, 9AM Australian Eastern Standard Time, 11AM New Zealand Standard Time, and 1PM for you folks over in the Line islands. That’s right! I didn’t forget you, either!
To listen, you need only click here for the mp3 stream or here for the ogg stream. If you can’t listen, all recent broadcasts can always be found at this happy little page, where my shows inexorably find themselves within a day or so after the live broadcast.