Do you approach the tunes you play more as a musicologist
or as a fan?
I’m definitely more of a musicologist than
a fan. I’m always figuring out whether something is funny or entertaining,
whether today’s audiences would like it, and whether it sounds best
before or after this other song.
However, I don’t emphasize that during my show. . . . people tune
in to be entertained, not lectured to. If I were in non-commercial radio,
that might be different, but Doctor Demento is a creature of commercial
radio, which exists purely to be entertaining enough so that people will
hear the commercials.
What kind of criteria do you have for what you
play? Would you play a song recorded in 1936 that seemed to have negative
racial stereotypes, but not one recorded in 1996?
Nowadays, the 1936 one probably wouldn’t get
on the show either. People have become more sensitive about such things,
as well as to gay references. Attitudes about women have also changed
considerably, though a certain amount of humor that might be considered
sexist is still tolerated, in fact encouraged, on many stations that carry
the show. On the other hand, standards have become more liberal about
other things. Fart jokes are perfectly okay now; in 1970 they weren’t.
Same with humor about condoms. In 1975 the show lost several affiliates
when I played Tom Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag.” Now, no one
bats an eye.
Radio has undergone a tremendous centralization
of ownership in the past decade. Has that made your job harder, either
by limiting the number of places that carry your show, or by narrowing
the scope of listeners’ interest?
It hasn’t made it any easier. Companies like
Clear Channel and Infinity do allow their local management a certain amount
of discretion, and we are on quite a few of their stations. However, centralization,
and the huge prices fetched by good licenses in major markets, has encouraged
a culture of going by the book. My show flies in the face of much corporate
thinking about radio, which dictates that programming should appeal to
a particular demographic niche, such as men 18–34 or women 35–49.
When I started, there were a lot more mavericks programming major stations
than there are now.
Art critic Manny Farber once famously contrasted
what he called White Elephant Art (big, visible, public, and, today, corporate
art) with Termite Art (art that is being done away from the limelight
and which eats away at the foundations of Elephant Art). In the face of
global cultural homogenization, do you think Termite Art will continue
to thrive? Will there always be a place for music and art that is outside
the mainstream?
Yes. Thanks to the internet, the termites find it
much easier to reach at least a small public than they used to. People
used to put out great self-produced records and then have a terrible time
trying to get even a few stores to carry them. Nowadays all they need
is a website.
Have you ever gotten a song from a Reedie?
“Microsoft Word” by Paul Anderson ’92
was abig hit on my show in 1994–95—it was the #8 most requested
song of the year in 1995. “Brain Toast” by Slack (supposedly
inspired by non-sanctioned chemical experiments at Reed) got several spinsin
1989 and afterward. Slack was a Reed band that made a couple of indie
albums that got a bit of national exposure.
Do the submissions and the requests reflect the national
psyche at all? For example, did you get a lot of post-9/11 submissions?
Yes . . . since mid-September I’ve gotten three
to five songs a week relating to the war. They range from totally serious
to totally silly. I’ve found a few that are worth airplay . . .
but my most requested war-related song is still “Kick Ass U.S.A.,”
which was recorded back in 1987. It was #1 during the Gulf War.
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