Friday, September 01, 2006
Blues Hotel RIP
KXLU's Blues Hotel aired for the last time on Wednesday August 30. I had planned to listen and to call in to wish Papa John, Morris Beef and Ian well. Alas, I fell asleep during the 10 pm non-news.
I don't really know why Blues Hotel has ceased to exist after something close to twenty years. Even if I did, I probably wouldn't tell anyone. But it just saddens me to know that Papa John's musings will never ring through the night frequency of 88.9 F.M.
When I started working at KXLU, the guys from Blues Hotel were amongst the first people to accept me, even though I was the freaky goth chick. Beef took my friend Amy and I to see Guided By Voices one night. He made us stay through all 62 encores (why does the number of encores increase every time I mention this?). We still had fun. At Blues Hotel, I also learned one of the most important lessons of my college years. Bud Ice is evil. Then, there was the time when they brought up Wayne Kramer during a fundraiser week. We ended up hanging out in the AM booth smoking cigarettes because it was before anybody really cared too deeply about enforcing smoking rules. Somewhere, there is a picture of the lot of us posed with smokes and Wayne Kramer, Mr. MC5, standing between us.
There were times when we butted heads, mostly when I was program director and had to say program director sort of things like, "If I let you have 15 minute air breaks, then I have to let everyone have 15 minute airbreaks and do you really want to listen to that all day?" In the end, though, we always respected each other. These are some great guys, low on pretension and high on a commitment to radio.
So, for the guys at Blues Hotel, so long and good luck.
I don't really know why Blues Hotel has ceased to exist after something close to twenty years. Even if I did, I probably wouldn't tell anyone. But it just saddens me to know that Papa John's musings will never ring through the night frequency of 88.9 F.M.
When I started working at KXLU, the guys from Blues Hotel were amongst the first people to accept me, even though I was the freaky goth chick. Beef took my friend Amy and I to see Guided By Voices one night. He made us stay through all 62 encores (why does the number of encores increase every time I mention this?). We still had fun. At Blues Hotel, I also learned one of the most important lessons of my college years. Bud Ice is evil. Then, there was the time when they brought up Wayne Kramer during a fundraiser week. We ended up hanging out in the AM booth smoking cigarettes because it was before anybody really cared too deeply about enforcing smoking rules. Somewhere, there is a picture of the lot of us posed with smokes and Wayne Kramer, Mr. MC5, standing between us.
There were times when we butted heads, mostly when I was program director and had to say program director sort of things like, "If I let you have 15 minute air breaks, then I have to let everyone have 15 minute airbreaks and do you really want to listen to that all day?" In the end, though, we always respected each other. These are some great guys, low on pretension and high on a commitment to radio.
So, for the guys at Blues Hotel, so long and good luck.
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i was dubbed it after dancing around to the Velvet Underground's "Heroin". the blues hotel gang wanted to declare open season and take my dancing ass down!
*stillwoundedantelope
*stillwoundedantelope
Hey Liz,
Thanks for the obit/tribute, as it was very flattering. And now we're dead, given that the human version of the ebola virus fired us (well, me, actually...Morris walked in solidarity). Nonetheless, your words were truly appreciated, so thanks. By the way, while we try and figure out a way to real back into actual L.A. radio, we are seriously looking into podcasting-- but, being complete tech idiots, this will require some research...
But, we're not nearly done. Not even close. Neither love nor hate is the most primal force. The most primal force to me is...spite.
An idiot decided our fate. We think her wrong, as we know who we are and what we did when it came to KXLU. Ideally, we'd have made a few adjustments (timeslot shift) and would still be there; but, in her glaringly finite wisdom, she decided otherwise, so...
Sadly, our future efforts will not be under the banner of KXLU-- a station for which we regularly were called upon (in both our afternoon rocks show, The Morris Beef Show, and BLUES HOTEL) to do more than our fair share, considering some of the other folks who thought Fundraiser to be the perfect time to just eat free food, do lame little faux-comic bit, talk about drinking Guinness and eating macaroni and cheese, as the listeners and the potential dollars just fell away, bushel by bushel.
AND WE WERE THE ONES DEEMED AS BEING EGOTISTS?!!!!
We'll eventually pop up elsewhere, either doing a show like the Morris Beef Show, or another go-round of THE BLUES HOTEL. But, for the moment, we're gonna bide our time by trying the podcast route, just to see what happens....
Oh yeah, Wounded Antelope; there was one night in Nov. '96 when you danced your BEST dance of all. It still remains both a closely guarded secret, and one of our favorite memories of our now-deceased show, as it was a LEGENDARY performance on a night so cold I (a lover of cold weather) was actually wearing an army jacket inside the building while you were not....
I dunno who it was exactly, but whoever spearheaded the repealing of the Prohibition Act should be given a star on Hollywood Boulevard, a place in the Baseball Hall Of Fame and a bronze staue at the western extry point to any village, town, suburb or city where the population totals above 15,000--as, whoever it was, made such a night possible, all by himself.
As did the environment of KXLU at the time.
Those of us at THE BLUES HOTEL were just lucky to have stumbled into such a world, and are thankful said world lasted as long as it did....
From the real KXLU, we at our shows got to meet some of our biggest music heroes,and hear from listeners as music-geed up as were we. We got to do he kind of shows we ourselves would've been looking for on the dial if we weren't fortunate enough to sneak into the world of radio. None of us ever financially profited from any of it; but, in other ways we made out like (to quote a man named Hitchcock, who started BLUES HOTEL) "drunken pirates":
The privilege of mixing all the insane music we found with booze, tobacco, drugs (though Ian was past his weed phase and just loved the drink and cigarettes), dancing nudity, sex, the occasional vomiting (Morris Beef, step forward!), the listeners (both cool and freaky/scary), and even the odd specific death threats, and so much more....
Drinking with Willie Nelson, even (thanks to Cowboy Nick).
NONE of this could've been possible without what we saw as the 'real' KXLU which , for us, existed from '87-'03....
An era we were just lucky enough to stumble upon.
Basically, a group of miscreants who, individually, wandered into the greatest ongoing party ever, got together, and saw and experienced shit most would never have the fortune to see. Okay, you can attribute maybe 15% of that to us; but, the other 85% was just pure luck.
We were merely the beneficiaries.
That time is gone forever; but, when it was here, us, and scores of others, got to see and live something that will most likely never be again.
A KXLU that presented us complete freedom.
On that score, I hope I am wrong; as it would suck to think some future KXLUers won't get a crack at such an environment, as it was a fucking blast...
And, surely, there are some future someones who would dig it and run with it as much as we lucky ones did.
The listeners of the future deserve that.
And, a radio station cannot ever hope to be great unless it opens up it's strictures and environment, and makes the listeners the #1 priority.
Not the university, not the priests, not the various smarmy people who sit on the boards, just collecting their fat-cat checks for doing absolutely nothing-- and, definitely not the faculty/staff advisors who only seek to use their non-verbal lingual skills to placate and loosen the tight assholes of those from whom they seek affirmation.
Licking the board of regents' ass does nothing for the listeners.
Serve the listeners first, back thefuck off and allow your on-air folk to do what they can do without you standing over them and, after that, just loosen up and let it all fall where it will.
Board members/regents/focus groups and priests were never the lifeblood of a place like KXLU.
Even us, the jocks, were fairly secondary.
The lifeblood of any such station will always be the listeners.
So why the fuck are they always the last to be considered?
Yeah, it was time for us to go.
Sorry for babbling so long, but I am pissed...
best wishes to all,
chris checkman (no current station affiliation; for now anyway)
Post a Comment
Thanks for the obit/tribute, as it was very flattering. And now we're dead, given that the human version of the ebola virus fired us (well, me, actually...Morris walked in solidarity). Nonetheless, your words were truly appreciated, so thanks. By the way, while we try and figure out a way to real back into actual L.A. radio, we are seriously looking into podcasting-- but, being complete tech idiots, this will require some research...
But, we're not nearly done. Not even close. Neither love nor hate is the most primal force. The most primal force to me is...spite.
An idiot decided our fate. We think her wrong, as we know who we are and what we did when it came to KXLU. Ideally, we'd have made a few adjustments (timeslot shift) and would still be there; but, in her glaringly finite wisdom, she decided otherwise, so...
Sadly, our future efforts will not be under the banner of KXLU-- a station for which we regularly were called upon (in both our afternoon rocks show, The Morris Beef Show, and BLUES HOTEL) to do more than our fair share, considering some of the other folks who thought Fundraiser to be the perfect time to just eat free food, do lame little faux-comic bit, talk about drinking Guinness and eating macaroni and cheese, as the listeners and the potential dollars just fell away, bushel by bushel.
AND WE WERE THE ONES DEEMED AS BEING EGOTISTS?!!!!
We'll eventually pop up elsewhere, either doing a show like the Morris Beef Show, or another go-round of THE BLUES HOTEL. But, for the moment, we're gonna bide our time by trying the podcast route, just to see what happens....
Oh yeah, Wounded Antelope; there was one night in Nov. '96 when you danced your BEST dance of all. It still remains both a closely guarded secret, and one of our favorite memories of our now-deceased show, as it was a LEGENDARY performance on a night so cold I (a lover of cold weather) was actually wearing an army jacket inside the building while you were not....
I dunno who it was exactly, but whoever spearheaded the repealing of the Prohibition Act should be given a star on Hollywood Boulevard, a place in the Baseball Hall Of Fame and a bronze staue at the western extry point to any village, town, suburb or city where the population totals above 15,000--as, whoever it was, made such a night possible, all by himself.
As did the environment of KXLU at the time.
Those of us at THE BLUES HOTEL were just lucky to have stumbled into such a world, and are thankful said world lasted as long as it did....
From the real KXLU, we at our shows got to meet some of our biggest music heroes,and hear from listeners as music-geed up as were we. We got to do he kind of shows we ourselves would've been looking for on the dial if we weren't fortunate enough to sneak into the world of radio. None of us ever financially profited from any of it; but, in other ways we made out like (to quote a man named Hitchcock, who started BLUES HOTEL) "drunken pirates":
The privilege of mixing all the insane music we found with booze, tobacco, drugs (though Ian was past his weed phase and just loved the drink and cigarettes), dancing nudity, sex, the occasional vomiting (Morris Beef, step forward!), the listeners (both cool and freaky/scary), and even the odd specific death threats, and so much more....
Drinking with Willie Nelson, even (thanks to Cowboy Nick).
NONE of this could've been possible without what we saw as the 'real' KXLU which , for us, existed from '87-'03....
An era we were just lucky enough to stumble upon.
Basically, a group of miscreants who, individually, wandered into the greatest ongoing party ever, got together, and saw and experienced shit most would never have the fortune to see. Okay, you can attribute maybe 15% of that to us; but, the other 85% was just pure luck.
We were merely the beneficiaries.
That time is gone forever; but, when it was here, us, and scores of others, got to see and live something that will most likely never be again.
A KXLU that presented us complete freedom.
On that score, I hope I am wrong; as it would suck to think some future KXLUers won't get a crack at such an environment, as it was a fucking blast...
And, surely, there are some future someones who would dig it and run with it as much as we lucky ones did.
The listeners of the future deserve that.
And, a radio station cannot ever hope to be great unless it opens up it's strictures and environment, and makes the listeners the #1 priority.
Not the university, not the priests, not the various smarmy people who sit on the boards, just collecting their fat-cat checks for doing absolutely nothing-- and, definitely not the faculty/staff advisors who only seek to use their non-verbal lingual skills to placate and loosen the tight assholes of those from whom they seek affirmation.
Licking the board of regents' ass does nothing for the listeners.
Serve the listeners first, back thefuck off and allow your on-air folk to do what they can do without you standing over them and, after that, just loosen up and let it all fall where it will.
Board members/regents/focus groups and priests were never the lifeblood of a place like KXLU.
Even us, the jocks, were fairly secondary.
The lifeblood of any such station will always be the listeners.
So why the fuck are they always the last to be considered?
Yeah, it was time for us to go.
Sorry for babbling so long, but I am pissed...
best wishes to all,
chris checkman (no current station affiliation; for now anyway)
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