Late-night radio

My first Sunday night at the Bible College I turned on my portable stereo — my Boom Box, my Ghetto Blaster — and searched the FM dial for sounds I couldn’t get back in Winnipeg. Eventually I skated into “Situation” by Yaz. The next song was Doctor & The Medics’ cover of “Spirit In The Sky.” I was hooked.

Still am.

I’d found CFNY.

A guy down the hall overheard, poked his head in. “This is the station that inspired ‘The Spirit of Radio’ by RUSH,” he said. We’ve been friends ever since.

When I got homesick I might turn to Q107, Toronto’s AOR station, similar in format to Winnipeg’s 92 CITI FM (so similar, in fact, that Brother Jake Edwards skipped the 'Peg to be the morning man for Q a few years later). But when I got terribly homesick, I tuned in to CFNY — to remind myself why I was in Toronto.

Spoons, Boys Brigade, Images In Vogue, Blue Peter leavened into a mix of British acts and a few American ones — also Dub Rifles, who could not be heard anywhere in our home city. This was it, this was the good stuff. I was exactly where I belonged.

I wasn’t, of course. I returned to Winnipeg and spent the remainder of the 80s being lost in the city of my birth. And I didn’t miss CFNY, because CBC FM had launched this crazy late-night show called Brave New Waves, with Brent Bambury. He and his cohort played music that was, in fact, even further out on the edge than what CFNY served up. BNW could afford to — it was funded by the tax-payer, and broadcast at an ungodly hour.

My friend Kaz would record the show on a 120 minute cassette. He’d hit “Record,” doze off, then wake up when the “Record” button snapped out, and flip the tape for the next hour’s worth of content. I took occasion to borrow those cassettes, and the many LPs and CDs he purchased after listening to Bambury’s show.

When I moved to Toronto in the 90s CFNY had become a different thing. The morning “personalities” were snarky and mean, signalling an end to the empathetic curiosity that showcased music nobody else was playing. It still billed itself as “alternative” radio, but my psychonaut co-worker in the bookstore basement would sneer whenever he heard it. “Alternative to what?”

Bambury hosted Brave New Waves into the mid-90s, then stepped into a higher profile at the Corp. I had tuned out by then. Kaz was mailing me mixed tapes from Winnipeg that were painstakingly curated affairs. Indeed, I was becoming increasingly aware of a cultural fermentation in my old hometown that put to shame my adoptive — flashier, blander — city, the supposed Centre Of The Universe.

The last item Kaz sent me was a CD filled with hundreds of mp3 files. Napster was in the ascendant. I was living in the country. An era had definitively closed.

No complaints from me — hey, internet radio is a great thing! Aquarium Drunkard is always worth a listen. Dani Elwell, CFNY’s last good DJ, has her own thing going on at Mixcloud. And I’m holding out hope that Spotify’s terms of use for music and podcasts will entice Darko back behind the pop-filter.

But a smidgen of well-placed nostalgia is worthy of protection and projection. This post was inspired by James A. Reeves’ magnificent remembrance of Detroit’s Electrifying Mojo, and Graeme Thomson’s salute to Lou Ottens, inventor of the blank cassette tape, the innovation that liberated music for my generation. Also:  “Nobody thinks they’re the only freak in the world when they hear Throbbing Gristle”  — Brent Bambury reminisces.