I think the most difficult part about making a radio show is coming up with the name for it. After that, with a show like this one, you're basically finding music and sharing it until your time's up. When we launched The Elliot Potter Show in 2008 we wanted to name it something that was completely vague. There were so many hosts back then and we'd introduce ourselves as if we were filling in for Elliot. We received a number of comments from listeners who thought that name was completely plausible for a public radio program of any sort, which is hilarious and more than we could have hoped for it.
I wanted to start the notes for this first show writing about Elliot Potter because that's actually a good shorthand for what Left of the Dial is going to be like. "Left of the Dial" is of course a song by The Replacements that's basically about college radio, and I love college/public/community radio, so I love that song. I became inspired to use it as the name of this radio show as I was listening to a KRCU membership drive, and one of our guests was talking about driving from region-to-region, state-to-state, and how that when he'd lose the NPR station he was listening to he simply needed to tune around that lower end or left side of the FM radio dial to pick up another one. I immediately thought about The Replacements and realized that was the name of my music show. It's about non-commercial radio and it's absolutely the kind of song that we'd play. Not vague like The Elliot Potter Show but also not immediately recognizable to just anyone, yet when you learn what's up with it, I think you get it.
So on this first show I play tracks from the '80s and '90s, and even some very late '70s, to try to capture tiny moments of what college radio stations might have sounded like in those decades. I could probably do these decades for every show, but there's way too much new music for that, and I'm excited to share it with you as this show rolls along.
Thanks very much for checking it out, and know that I'm receptive to your comments. You can leave them on this post (provided that Disqus is working), write to comments@krcu.org, or find us on Facebook.
For further reading, I thought it was a cool coincidence that The A. V. Club released this playlist featuring The Replacements on the day before Left of the Dial launched on KRCU.