25/09/2023
To paraphrase The Dude, I've never been into "the whole brevity thing." I know this is long, but for those who've been on this Dirty Roots Radio ride over the years, please give it a read. A farewell to something...the birth of something totally new...it's bittersweet but I'm so excited...
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I've been wanting to get back to doing something with Dirty Roots Radio for a good long time.
That show started in 2006. One year prior to that I took a job in healthcare marketing/PR/fundraising - the first "real" job I'd ever had outside of radio. I started the show just as a way to keep my hand in the radio game and as something fun to do.
The first four years I worked at the hospital were the best I'd ever experienced, professionally. During that time I also started running the college ministry at our church. Conversations that happened in both of those settings led to the formation of a charity called the Dirty Roots Revolution, which primarily involved a weekly homeless outreach run by college students. For a time, the show became a mouthpiece for that organization/mission.
The second four years at the hospital were among the worst of my life. A bad work environment, faith deconstruction, and the unfair forced ending of the homeless outreach led to some dark days.
Steve Earle has said many times that you don't have to be in tragedy to make good art. A lot of good art HAS come from tragedy but he's said he's made some of his best work since he got clean and came through his dark days.
While I agree with him in theory, it was my experience that my dark days led to the best radio I'd ever done. I was writing a lot. I was named a featured blogger for No Depression Magazine (a music magazine - nothing to do with mental health…it references an old Carter Family lyric), and my work was being read a lot. The writing brought a lot of attention to the Dirty Roots Radio show.
I got to meet so many of my favorite artists and have them on the show. I was attending concerts almost weekly.
Since Dirty Roots was on a college station I had no "corporate structure" that I had to fit into or abide by. So I set out to try something totally unique. I scrapped all "traditional" radio rules. I talked over songs. I brought a police megaphone into the studio to mess with. I talked as much or as little as I wanted. I yelled and screamed. It was raw. Really raw.
My writing and that show became my lifeline. My therapy. In many instances it was what kept me going.
So I pushed farther.
In psychology terms, I tried to achieve the "Id". I adopted Jack Kerouac's "first thought, best thought" mentality and tried to shut off my conscious brain and let my lizard brain run wild.
I did away with a playlist and started selecting the songs in real time as I went. Live without a net.
I adopted a bit of an "evangelist" persona, preaching the healing power of the music I was playing. Many people told me listening to the show was, weirdly, almost a religious type experience. Which was what I was going for.
It was wild.
And then the day finally came where I didn't work at the hospital anymore. And the days weren't so dark. I went back to the radio station I'd worked at twice before and really fell in love with the work this time. Things brightened.
I still did Dirty Roots, but the professional radio I was doing during the day added some polish to the rough edges I'd worked so hard to achieve on Dirty Roots. It just wasn't the same.
Interestingly, as my day job polished the rough edges of Dirty Roots, the Dirty Roots experience caused me to let loose a little more than I previously would have while doing professional radio. The two experiences rubbed off on each other.
So I kept going with it. It was different but still good.
And then in 2016 I had the opportunity to work as an adjunct professor and assume leadership of WGRN, the home of Dirty Roots Radio and the station where I had many of my best memories from my college days.
To say I poured myself into WGRN wholeheartedly during the first several years would be an understatement. I loved it.
But doing radio 8-10 hours a day at my day job and then going to another station for several more hours, sometimes late into the night/early morning didn't leave me with much energy or creativity left to put into Dirty Roots Radio.
The experience I'd crafted Dirty Roots into demanded both. And, as had become clear, it also demanded a certain amount of tension and wound-up-ness from me that my daily life wasn't providing at that point. (That’s not a complaint).
Steve Earle said things don't have to be bad to make good art…and while I was so much happier in life and I wouldn't trade that for anything, Dirty Roots just wasn't the same.
So I pushed pause. I tried to turn it into a podcast but it just didn't work without that “live without a net” vibe.
It's been several years since I hosted my last Dirty Roots show.
And I've wanted to come back. But age hasn't helped my energy level. I've taken on much more at my day job and my days there are more like 10-12 hours now. My daughter, who many of you will remember from our annual Dirty Roots Christmas extravaganzas, is now 16 and keeps us busier. And I still run WGRN.
So I leaned into all this for a while. Always wishing I could come back to something with Dirty Roots.
Since Covid, things slowed down at WGRN. After several booming years of growth, the number of students were down and there wasn't much energy/momentum behind it.
I decided this school year was the year to change that. So I put everything I had into recruiting a new leadership team from among the university students. And I did it. I have an AMAZING team of seven managers that I work with and I feel like we've become kind of a little family. We've recruited several dozen students to fill out the station staff in various ways.
The momentum and energy has gone off the charts. In a good way. It's all I can do to keep up.
Just before school started my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. It's been quite a trip already and we're still in the early stages of putting together her official treatment plan. It's a weight on my whole family and it's always there, just under the surface, emotionally.
Things are piling up. I'm busy from the time I get up (4:45 AM) til the time I tire out and crash for the night (which is getting later by the day, recently). I'm always rushing to/from one thing to the next. And I'm always thinking about 15 things at once, no matter what I'm doing.
And that old familiar radio itch has come back around again. The one that led to Dirty Roots becoming what it did. The one that I had to scratch to keep myself sane.
I didn't think I could feel that while still doing so much radio throughout the day.
But here it is and it won't be ignored.
So I'm coming back. But not as Dirty Roots.
As much as it pains me, it just wouldn't be the same.
Technology has rendered most of the way I ran the old show obsolete so I'm going to have to modernize that part of it.
And as I said, I don't quite have that music evangelist energy anymore.
Rather than try to capture former glory or revamp what used to be into something else, I want to let Dirty Roots stand as a beautiful memory. Something unique and special for those who experienced it and shared it together.
So what do I do? I'm not exactly sure, to be honest.
A phrase started rattling around in my head the past several weeks: The Rural Electrification Sideshow.
Rural electrification as in the programs that brought electricity to remote areas back in the day. Sideshow as in an exhibition, usually involving some degree of weirdness, at a fair or circus.
I don't know where it came from or exactly how it translates, but that's exactly how I came up with the name Dirty Roots. The muse brought it and I was smart enough to go with it. The definition kind of came later. I know enough to do the same this time.
So the show is The Rural Electrification Sideshow. No tagline yet and I don't know what it will "be" like yet.
But it's me and it's my music. The music will come from the same place as Dirty Roots did. So while it'll be a different experience it'll exist within the same universe.
For those who don't know, Dirty Roots "explored the twisted roots - and branches - of American music" and played "renegade country, raw blues, vintage gospel, greasy soul, punk, and funk."
I recently made a musical pilgrimage to Memphis, Tennessee, and Clarksdale, Mississippi, with my daughter. Best vacation of my life. For those who don't know, Memphis is home to Sun Records and the mighty Stax Records and Clarksdale is where bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of Highways 49 & 61.
That rekindled a lot of interest in me for the music from the area, so we'll start there. That’s Ground Zero.
And we'll figure out the rest as we go.
At the same time, I've had the idea for another show.
A few years ago, Dr. Ivan Filby was president of Greenville University, which owns WGRN. He came on a student show as a guest and told them when he was in college he had a radio show called Garageland, named after a song by The Clash.
The next time I interviewed Dr. Filby I thanked him for joining the students and told him Joe Strummer, of the Clash, was a personal hero and the Patron Saint of the Dirty Roots Radio Show. That led to a lengthy conversation about shared love of music that wouldn't have happened without Joe Strummer.
A few weeks later Dr. Filby (who is originally from England, by the way) emailed me with an idea for a show for WGRN. We each brought in five songs to each show (we did one a month) and told each other about why they were special to us. It was called Atlantic Crossing. One guy (a little younger) from the American side, one (a little, but not much, older) from the British side.
It was great fun. And that gave me the idea to do something similar with this great new group of students I have at WGRN. I'll have one on the show at a time and we'll each bring songs to tell the other about.
I had no idea what to call that, and the thought of taking on two new shows - when not long ago I couldn't manage one - seemed unwise.
So I'm rolling that into The Rural Electrification Sideshow experience. Every other week I'll go nuts solo and on alternating weeks I'll have a student join me.
Their music will be very different from mine, most likely, but I welcome and look forward to that. And I look forward to sharing the music I love with them.
So let's see how this goes. Let's see what it becomes.
The Rural Electrification Sideshow will be on Thursdays from 7 to 9 PM, starting Thursday, October 12. On that show, I’ll have my daughter join me so we can kick this thing off by reliving our musical expedition to Memphis, which we took exactly one year ago to the week of the show starting. After that, on October 19, I’ll have a GU student join me. Then we’ll start alternating.
I hope you’ll join us!
