In the sleepy seaside town where I grew up, I acquired a reputation for being an obsessive collector of old phonograph records. While still in grade school, I could often be found cruising the bins of the local record stores and Lighthouse Avenue antique shops. Each weekend, I would prowl the garage sales listed in the Monterey Peninsula Herald, in search of vintage records. For a mere pittance, many of my classmates were grudgingly persuaded to clandestinely sell me their grandmother’s collection of dusty 78-rpm records. Back in the 1970s, before NPR tranquilized the airwaves with its homogeneous corporate-centric programming, the left-hand side of the FM dial was populated by small, listener-supported, non-profit community public radio stations. These eclectic regional stations featured local volunteer programmers broadcasting recordings from their own personal record collections or playing albums from the station’s vast music library. The Great Silence Broadcasting company, a hometown non-profit corporation, signed the tiny ten-watt Continue Reading

On a Saturday night in May of 2003, I was invited to perform a living room house concert in Modesto, California, with a handful of other musicians. Although we were all friends we had never performed a show together and weren’t really familiar with each other’s repertoires. It was small crowd; it seemed there were as many of us performing as there were seated in the audience. Arriving late, about halfway through the show, a group of people seated themselves, more than doubling the size of the audience. Now the living room was full of people. Everybody was having a good time and they didn’t want the concert to end. Surprised by the need for an encore, we scrambled to quickly come up a song we all knew well enough to perform together for a big finale. This small group of musicians had in common a love of bluegrass and Continue Reading