I met a guy at a friend’s party last year and we both were sure we knew each other, but we couldn’t figure out how. After about 10 minutes of what-do-you-do, do-you-know-this-guy, etc., we realized that we were both longtime frequent attendees of poorly attended rock shows at the dearly departed Lounge Ax in the halcyon 1990s. The two of us must have acknowledged each other’s faces at 13 Nightmares or Precious Wax Drippings, at King Kong or Royal Trux or The Coctails, and those blurry photos got stored into the Indiana Jones Warehouse that is in our cerebral cortexes, just waiting to be surfaced. But when we talked now, as older people in a world that only bears a passing resemblance to that one, I thought to myself: this is a fellow traveler.

Before the internet, before everyone could build themselves a perfectly manicured silo that contained only the exact things they already liked, before anonymous algorithms dispensed bespoke recommendations based on the things you had previously selected, finding the cool shit was the way many of us found our people. For me, it was WaxTrax and Lounge Ax, it was English music magazines, it was mixtapes from cool people who were a year or two older than me, it was the opening band at a show where the headliner only drew 73 people. And the treasure hunt part of it made it that much dearer - I felt like a kind of ownership over these low-profile bands and records and movies and TV shows that I don’t think happens very often anymore. I want to be clear that I don’t mean this as a form of gatekeeping; I never understood “I don’t want the normies to know about this.” I was always trying to get people interested in whatever weird shit I was into, whether it was Robyn Hitchcock or Headache City or Clyde Federal or even stuff that later got relatively big. That didn’t happen that much, to be fair.

But for me, one of the central and pivotal ways I have always defined “my people” is the people who are into the same stuff I’m into. Of course there are innumerable subreddits about the most arcane hobbies, and the internet has made it possible to connect with people everywhere with your same obsession/fetish/addiction. This, on the whole, is good. I’m for it. But when things were harder to find, when you couldn’t access every song ever recorded from wherever you happened to be, it felt like when you stumbled upon someone else who had turned down the same cul-de-sac you had, that you assigned that person a little extra value because you admired their pluck. Which is certainly a form of narcissism - if this person got to this same destination, then I must have been onto something.

As a quick side note: I learned about good music from my dad. I grew up in a house with a crazy amount of jazz records, rock records, reggae and country, a deep and varied library of things to absorb. But I learned about cool music from my friend Jason Roth, who you might remember from his star turn as the subject of the bonus episode for S2E5. Jason’s dad was the bureau chief for Variety in Chicago, and as such was extremely plugged in to stuff that hadn’t made it into my dad’s collection yet. Thank you Jason, for The Ramones and The Cure and New Order and Ministry and Yaz, for both the Dead Kennedys and fucking Tommy Roe, and taking me to see Rocky Horror and Liquid Sky over and over again while I was probably wearing an Izod with an “Eat The Rich” badge on it. You definitely saved/ruined my life by showing me a world I would never have found otherwise. I am forever in your debt.

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This episode, to me, is about those shared communities. College radio was (is?) a beacon in the night, an opportunity for a not-totally-pro DJ to spin records that they really cared about to an audience you could comfortably fit in a Burger King. When you live in the not-terribly-large broadcast range of one of those stations, you build loyalty to the jocks and shows you like the best, and it becomes a small village of like-minded weirdos. I’m sure that this part is still very much in effect on Reddit and Letterboxed and, I don’t know, certain YouTube home improvement channels, but there was something about these shows unspooling LIVE that made it seem like you were really invited to a party. 

Since the most common response to our animating question What would YOU do with your last 20 minutes on Earth? is “spend time with my loved ones”, we wondered: what if they were just the people you know from the radio? As we talked about in the bonus episode with Jason, in the pre-internet era, most people didn’t have a platform to talk to strangers. But if you called into a radio show, they would put your voice on the air and you could speak your mind to whoever was listening, even if all you said was “Can you play Nemesis by Shriekback?”

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This episode marks the S2 return of my writing partner and main homeboy Chris Pahlow, who joins us from his native Australia. Chris is not only an imaginative and hilarious writer, but he is deeply intentional about his work in a way that always elevates everything he touches. He and I worked hard to build a scaffold that would support this story, and he indulged many of my dumber ideas along the way. That’s love, that is. 

But what you may notice is that the people sound like… people. That is because all the dialogue in this episode is improvised by these funny and deeply flexible actors. The hilarious standup comic Beth Stelling stars as host Beth Whatever (I miss DJ noms-de-guerre), with an incredibly funny menagerie of callers, including Owais Ahmed (Deli Boys), Brad Morris (The Bear), Elizabeth Levy (The Groundlings), Jack Foley (Advantage: Weinberg), and Ron Song (Jury Duty). This is what we call a Murderers’ Row of improv, people.

Another aside. Jack Foley has been in a million things, but I listed Advantage: Weinberg because it the first short film I ever made and Jack is the titular star. We have been friends ever since. You can watch it over there.