There seems to be a golden age for every type of entertainment in every town. It appears that it may have taken a pandemic to usher in Knoxville’s golden age of Internet radio. At least two very distinctively different stations, Rawkous Radio and Real Knoxville Music, sprung up during 2020 and have futures that look poised to expand long after COVID-19 is just a bad memory. This month we’ll look at Rawkous Radio. Editors Note: Blank Contributors host shows on Rawkous Radio.
“Tune in together” isn’t just a nice slogan for Rawkous Radio (available at rawkous.com and on the LIVE365 app), it’s the entire reason the station exists.
It started when a group of friends living in the North Hills neighborhood realized that the initial COVID-19 quarantine was going to force them to stop getting together for regular visits and parties.
“‘Rawkous’ has just been a moniker we’ve operated under for a while,” says Rob Travis, the man the rest of the crew credit with starting the station. “That was the brainchild of myself and Cage [Beals]. We sort of created a fictitious rock band.”
The Seed
The idea came up one night long ago while the two were at a bar. Beals drew a lightning bolt logo, but neither knew what the idea would actually turn into.
They created some short films under the title and, later, Travis simply dubbed the community of friends, husbands, wives and children living in the North Hills neighborhood “The Rawkous Family.”
“We have a huge group, and we’d just hang out, and we were always listening to music,” says Travis.
That family includes a wide array of personalities with different backgrounds, both personally and professionally. They quickly realized they needed each other’s company during the big q(uarantine), one way or another.
“There were a lot of yard parties and we went to the lake a lot,” says Paxton Sellers, known as “The Professor” on his radio shows.
“We used to pass the phone around and make playlists,” says Buffy “Mamma” Dove.
“We have kids that are about the same age, in the same neighborhood,” says Bob Hess. “We were sharing music and collaborating on playlists, and we’d listen to music that way. Then when the quarantine started, we were separated.”
“We knew things were gonna get weird,” adds Travis.
It was Travis who decided to start a Rawkous Friday night party by way of Zoom. The event was dubbed “The Social Distancing Disco.”
“Everybody had their cameras on and was dancing,” says Travis. “The kids could see the other kids. Then we realized it was a lot of work, and we had problems with people not muting their computers and that sort of thing.”
That led to another idea.
“One of my favorite movies has always been ‘Pump Up the Volume’ with Christian Slater,“ says Travis. “So it was my dream to have a pirate radio station.”
“Rob is the tech guy and the brains behind it all,” says Sellers. “You could be sitting around and come up with some crazy idea, like, ‘We oughta do this!’ With Rob, you’re actually doing it.”
Travis and Beals both had backgrounds in college and/or high school radio, as did some others in the group, and Travis’ father-in-law is legendary local engineer Don Burggraf, so there was plenty of radio experience from which to draw.
Going Live
The first idea was to set up a small FM radio transmitter only powerful enough to be heard in the neighborhood. So, on March 23, 2020, Travis started broadcasting a signal from his house.
“We fired it up and saw the limitations fairly quickly,” says Travis.
Some friends in close proximity could barely pick up the signal. Internet radio immediately seemed like a better option.
“The first incarnation was just a logo and a playbar and me playing music,” says Travis. “By the end of that weekend we had a fully featured website. Then everybody was like, ‘I want a show!’”
It didn’t take long before Travis was delivering sanitized laptops, microphones and earbuds to his friends so that they could broadcast through the station from home.
“I said I could do a hip-hop show,” explains Sellers. “Then Rob had the microphones and digital interface and dropped off equipment on my front porch. Those first shows sounded like trash, but it piqued people’s interest.”
It was on from there, according to Sellers. “Then the gaps started filling in… John Flannagan came over one night when I was doing a show and he said, ‘I gotta get into this.’”
“He let me sit in with him a couple of times and I was hooked,” Flannagan explains.
Flannagan and Rusty Odom started the BLANK-sponsored show “Road Trip” shortly thereafter. The show, which airs each Monday evening from 5-7, features music from a different city or region each week.
“I’ve always wanted to do a radio show,” Flannagan notes. “My late uncle Mike (Flannagan) started ‘All Over the Road’ on WDVX and hosted shows before that on WUTK, so I used to hang out w/him in the camper on Norris campground before WDVX moved downtown and it was a lot of fun helping him decide what to play and joking around off air. Music’s in my blood and I always felt at some point I would explore doing a show somewhere. The Rawkous platform has been great and now, having done this for almost a year, I find myself trying to stay even more tuned in to what’s going on in music and trying to play current stuff, not just my favorite tracks. Now I’m doing ‘Robot Ears’ on Saturday nights after Paxton’s show in addition to ‘The Road Trip’ and it’s been an absolute blast.”
Personalities
Each DJ brings his or her own element and style, which keeps the station fresh and engaging around the clock.
“Everybody latched into their own little niche,” says Beals. “I started off with yacht rock stuff.”
The yacht rock show ended with the end of boating season at the close of summer and became a show of all cover songs. In addition, Beals hosts a punk music program called “Punkous.”
“It’s taken on a life of its own,” says Hess. “At some point we decided to share responsibilities and just run with it. We never intended to professionalize it. We just wanted a creative way for friends to stay connected.”
Travis says the station wanted to follow the legal rules from the outset. No pirates, Rawkous Radio pays music licensing and publishing fees.
The eclectic programming schedule is not unlike the classic radio stations of the 1950s or FM stations in the ‘70s. There’s a sort of standard mix of rock, pop, R&B and other styles on weekdays and specialty shows at night and on weekends. The fare ranges from shows dedicated to genres (electronic, blues, hip-hop, classic soul and others) to shows specifically focusing on live performances by the Grateful Dead and Phish. There are themed shows like Beals’ all-covers program. And there are programs with more esoteric subject matter like “Porch Sittin,’” which really only Jody Collins (known as Feral Giant) can define.
“Radio is more than just music,” says Travis. “People immediately get bored of it. It’s also about voices, people talking to you. … Especially with things as weird as they were, I knew people needed to hear voices and also have a routine. People needed to know what day it was and who was on the air.”
Dove says she based part of her philosophy for what she plays on Fulton High School’s Falcon Radio, which plays a combination of classic oldies and newer alternative rock.
Dove says she grew up listening to B-97 in Pittsburgh and absorbing all the music and feeling connected to it, so she understands the importance of radio.
Dove says she and her husband, known as Rev. Shawn “Love” Dove, started out pre-recording their shows, but once they did the shows live, they were hooked.
“Once you go live, you don’t ever NOT want to go live!” says Dove. “You don’t want to let listeners down. My mom is listening in Pittsburgh. I have friends listening in Seattle. I don’t know how many people are there, but I like to pretend the whole city is listening.”
For a while, the station used a service that showed where listeners were tuning in.
“We had ONE fan in Kansas,” says Beals. “We’d always see that spot light up and say, ‘Please call us! Tell us who is listening, but they never did.’”
During the summer, there were shows where the audience could call in and request songs and tell stories about the songs. Also during that time, the DJ’s kids got into the action, choosing songs and running their own mid-day shows.
“There’s a tremendous amount of joy with being involved in it,” says Hess.
“It’s awesome to see how it’s evolved and all the unique flavors the DJs have brought into it. We have the freedom to be experimental and approach it from a mindset of just curating quality content. We’re pretty well able to play whatever we want.”
Everyone involved seems to have an emotional commitment to Rawkous Radio.
“This radio station has kept me sane over the last year,” says Travis. “I think it’s a real lifeline for all of us.”
The station will hit its one-year mark in late March. With the end of the pandemic now in the foreseeable future, the founders had to decide if what had begun as way for friends to stay connected really was going to become a permanent entity.
“The answer back was, ‘Oh, hell yeah!’” says Travis. “I know Paxton would say, ‘I’m gonna be sitting here listening to music anyway, so there might as well be somebody else listening with me.’”
“I’d like to have a way for it to have a life of its own,” adds Hess.
Hess can see a future where the station grows enough to actually pay people for their efforts for the station, but he’s not interested in turning it into an actual commercial venture.
“As long as we have DJs and listeners, I’m excited about it,” says Hess. “I don’t want to ever feel like it’s a chore.”
Beals says he’s anxious to meet some of the DJs he’s never met.
“I kind of look forward to the time that I don’t personally know anybody on it!” he says.
“There’s an older guy in the neighborhood who is a blacksmith. We tell him, ‘You gotta do a metal show!’”
Dove says the radio’s professionalism has grown exponentially, but she hopes the flavor of the station never changes so much that “silly moms” won’t have a place in the programming. Still, she foresees the station doing remote broadcasts from the lawns and parking lots of local businesses. And the founders hope they will continue to grow listenership and, maybe, be an inspiration for other friends with crazy ideas.
“It’s cool to watch it grow,” says Beals. “I have a friend who has a baby [born during COVID] that I haven’t been able to see. Now that kid can walk. That’s kind of like this radio station.”
Listen live at www.rawkous.com or via the Live 365 app (Search for Rawkous).
bledsoe@blanknews.com
