Progress

Barack Obama Talks with Beth & Bill on 99.9 KEZ

2008-02-05T12:35:00.000-08:00

Today is Super Tuesday 2008. This morning Barack Obama spoke with our 99.9 KEZ morning team Beth & Bill during their monthly interview with Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano.
The interview is available on the beth & Bill page at www.kez999.com

Barack was on 99.9 in Phoenix thismorning...http://www.kez999.com/pages/bethandbill.html

How many blogs do you have?

2007-05-29T16:49:00.000-07:00

I was just adding some old photos onto the KCAC Lives blog (link to the right) and bumped into myself on this original mistake blog. Along the way since I accidentally started this blog I picked up a page on the www.kez999.com site, since these days pageviews seem to be more important to the radio powers-that-be than on-air listening estimates. I guess part of that is .. why estimate when you can count actual pageviews? Of course what we have readily found is that pageviews can be manipulated as readily as the old Arbitron numbers.
So anyway, now I contribute to KCAC Lives, plus KEZ with my personal page, an events page, and the Beth & Bill show page, as well as this occasional bump in the road.
This is why I'm getting fat and slow and will eventually fade away, while this page may last forever, since there won't be anyone to delete it.
So if it's now the year 2085 and you're reading this, go ahead and delete it. I'm sure you'll know how.

2006-10-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

Progressive still

2005-03-22T18:12:00.000-08:00

Well, here we go into the 21st century. Jimmy Megahern has created a blog for all the old KCAC & KDKB geezers to communicate. I'll give it a try although I think I already messed up. I was just trying to join in on his blog and wound up creating my own. Not unlike my 35+ years in radio. I just keep jumping in and eventually learning how to swim. What I remember from actually learning to swim at the old Phoenix Boys' Club (no girls there then .. we swam naked!)
was that the biggest problem was being afraid of the water. Halfway across the deep end on my first try I sank like a rock .. almost literally scared to death.
So, I just usually take a shot at the new stuff and read the manual later. Can anyone actually read an instruction manual for a piece of electronic equipment that he doesn't already know how to use?
When KCAC started it was a whole new way of doing something that people had been doing for years .. radio. We (Bill included) didn't invent it. The idea of doing things this way probably started with Thom Donahue in San Francisco, but even he was just reshaping the way he had been doing things for years.
My first experience with "free-form" radio was listening to Bill do the KRUX Underground show on Saturday nites on KRUX 1360 AM. I literally couldn't get out of the car. I remember sitting in the car for hours at 7th Street & Pierce. "Darkness, Darkness" by the Youngbloods
grabbed me and wouldn't let me go.
Along the way we've gone from AM to FM, from mono to stereo, from 8 tracks to cassettes, cassettes to CDs, and from there to Mp3s & radio station existing entirely on servers. We no longer have a reel-to-reel tape recorder anywhere in the building. In fact, the chief engineer
gave them all away to the first takers. Pretty hard to find a turntable as well.
And just when you're about to say "Too bad the programming stopped being progressive as well", along comes satellite radio! I got one for Xmas and finally got it installed around March 1.
Now I'm hooked! Why listen to bad sports talk radio when I have 3 24 hour comedy channels
to choose from? And a bluegrass channel. And a blues channel. And lots more, with little or no
advertising cluttering up the flow. For now.
It'll take a while before it takes over, if it does at all, and that's a good thing for a guy who makes a living doing commercials. But it does make you wonder what Bill Compton would be doing now, 27 years after his untimely death. I think he'd be looking at satellite. And figuring out a way to do it better than anyone else.