Gizmo Pimp

I’ve had people ask me how I got into podcasting, which, truth be told, may seem a little odd to people who know me. It’s certainly not because I am so arrogant and outspoken that I feel a need to force my opinions on the world, nor because I think I am a particularly entertaining on-air personality. Mostly it comes from the thrill of sharing interesting news and ideas with like-minded people.

But I was recently thinking about what it is that really introduced me to the concept of broadcasting in general, because never once when I was growing up did I ever dream of being a radio DJ or anything of the sort. I believe I can trace it all back to my first brush with college/community radio, and a certain program called Mods and Rockers.

When I was in high school, Mods and Rockers aired on Monday nights on CIUT, the University of Toronto’s campus radio station. At the time, I was becoming heavily enthralled by punk rock and various kinds of alternative music, and suddenly here was this weekly radio show that introduced me to a limitless supply of bands that I never even knew existed. The host, JC (aka Jeff Cohen, a well known concert promoter in Toronto), spoke with a high-pitched chipmunk-y type chatter and could not hide his excitement and enthusiasm for the music he was playing. He would also often go off on personal stories and diatribes about various issues that he felt were important to himself and the “scene” as it were.

This was unlike any kind of radio programming I had ever known… completely unprofessional, but totally genuine and honest, and I absorbed as much of it as I possibly could. It blew my mind that there was so much good music out there, and I somehow made it a point to tune in almost every single week.

Now keep in mind, this was also just when the internet was still in its infancy and things like Napster didn’t quite exist yet. No one had an internet connection fast enough to share full MP3s — in fact, I don’t think MP3s had even been invented yet. Little did I know that the internet would soon become the ideal medium for independent broadcasting and communication, and the ultimate resource for alternative music and just about any other underground culture.

As it turns out, Mods and Rockers inspired me to start my own radio show in my last year of high school, when our school started up a “radio club” that broadcast throughout the hallways before class. A few years later, I continued to do a radio show in university when Brock U founded their own campus FM station as well. For years I continued to have various forms of involvement with CFBU, until the station was eventually shut down by the student union due to a financial dispute (a common fate among college radio stations). Brock Radio eventually found its way back on air again a year or two later but in a rather tentative and low key manner. Most of my own passion for it had long since been exhausted, so we thought it best to call it quits.

It was around this time when I started to hear about something called “podcasting”. To me it made sense… recording MP3s of yourself talking and sharing them online. It actually wasn’t anything new, but with iPods and portable MP3 players gaining steam, suddenly people could take these pre-recorded MP3s with them anywhere they wanted. More importantly, there was no rules and you didn’t need a professional mixing studio and a transmitter to get your message out there. (Think about how much work it was for Christian Slater in Pump Up The Volume!) Once someone came up with the clever idea of using RSS feeds to syndicate the content, presto… a phenomenon was born.

We started doing a podcast for the Space Junk website (now Film Junk) about a year and a half ago, inspired in part by a desire to get back to the fun we had broadcasting on CFBU, and also in part by our friends at The Movie Blog who had just started one of their own. I’m pretty sure we now have more regular listeners than we ever did on Brock Radio, although one can never be 100% certain. But we definitely have more fun with it and all the freedom in the world to do what we want, and that’s really what counts.

As an aside, Mods and Rockers eventually fell apart after being pulled off the air due to some comments that JC made about a local club owner, accusing him of anti-semitism. They attempted to regroup and broadcast the show online instead, but online radio technology wasn’t quite there yet. I soon stopped listening because I was growing out of punk rock anyways, but it’s too bad podcasting wasn’t around to save Mods and Rockers at the time. Weird to think that around the world there are now so many people just like JC, informing and educating their own online communities in much the same way he did for his listeners in Southern Ontario. Now *that* really blows my mind.

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