Let's get this out of the way real quick: I ain't no expert. I've never actually been a musician unless you count a few years in high school playing trumpet (and who would do THAT?). I've never been connected to the music industry, though I have a couple of friends who are. My record collection is probably small by d.j. standards, but I'm too middle aged to care. The only thing I've got going is a desire to play the blues on the radio with the instrument I know best...the record player.

A Florida boy, I moved to Atlanta in 1973, and in the course of seraching for a station to wake up to on my clock radio, I found the show that would change my life. On one of the city's AM stations catering to a largely African-American audience, I heard a guy who just wasn't following the rules. He'd play the same song three times in a row simply because he liked it. He wouldn't tell you what time it is. Well, he'd start to but then he'd say "It's twenty minutes after, aaah, you know what time it is".
He made constant fun of the city's black politicians and preachers. He'd read commercials for tire stores, barbeque joints, neighborhood supermarkets, and barber shops. He took phone calls that more often than not became ads for the caller's store. Reeling off today's specials they'd go on about something happening down the street and that would turn into a story about a mutual acquaintance, or something. And for three hours every weekday afternoon he'd do all of this with a voice rougher, louder and more enigmatic than anything the hipster rock stations could even dream of. Oh, and he played the blues.

This guy's name was Alley Pat, and over the next 15 years I'd do everything I could to catch his show. Often was the time I'd walk in late for work because I'd been sitting in the parking lot listening to him sing over a Ray Charles record or interview Clarence Carter, calling him a "blind, lyin' fool" for not confessing to having three women on the side. After a couple of station changes, he finally moved into an afternoon drive slot on WYZE-AM, which billed itself "the jazz and blues station", though Alley Pat's was the only show playing either one. As it increasingly became the domain of preachers and gospel shows, Pat got even more cantankerous with the clergy. After playing particularly raunchy records, he'd identify himself as Deacon Esmond Patterson, host of one of the morning revival shows. He'd mention being at Marco's Tabernacle (his term for Marco's Lounge) last night tossin' back a few with this or that preacher and watching them leave in a big new Cadillac. Of course, as the local politicians would get into trouble for one reason or another, Pat would lay into them with the same glee. Simply put, he was the funniest person I've ever heard on the radio.

And it was Alley Pat who turned me on to the blues. The mainstays of his playlists were Bobby Bland, Denise LaSalle, Esther Phillips, Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Little Milton, Latimore, and Brother Ray (the "Rev", as Pat would say). This is obviously not the sad refrain of the Delta, but the lush laments of cheatin' lovers, worthless men, and schemin' females. It wasn't looking back at history, but dealing with the now,

and so, it really connected with his audience. You could never accuse his show of being too slick, and it was that pure sense of a genuine human being behind the mic that made him such a joy to hear. It sure hit me in a way I can't really explain except to say it was new and intriguing and gave me a glimpse into a part of America I was supposed to fear and revile. Call it the "I wanna be black" routine that's common to middle class white kids. All I know is that it was a lot more interesting to me than anything else before or since.

The radio bug lay dormant in me since I was 16. In those days, maniacally infatuated with The Firesign Theatre, I was lucky enough to get a job in a Northwest Florida head shop in 1971. The manager was also into TFT, among other things, and though he was in his mid-twenties, we hit it off tremendously. He got the idea for doing radio spots for the store, an unheard of practice in Panama City, and at the time somewhat dangerous from a legal standpoint. He let me write and perform two of them at the local Top 40 AM station. I vaguely remember the result as convoluted Firesign rip-offs, but hearing them on the radio between "Green Eyed Lady" and "Cherokee Nation" was about as much of a thrill as I could handle. I was in the industry! It didn't last, though. In retrospect, those commercials may not have been as brilliant as I thought. I was never asked to do another one. That year I would go on to flunk the F.C.C.'s second class permit test not once, but twice. I figured that was a sign (and not a fire one). Bye bye, radio, it was fun.

Let us thankfully skip ahead to 1995. Through a dear friend who told me about a little station in Marin County that actually NEEDED disc jockeys, I was given a chance to try it one last time. After three years on that station, it seemed to have took, and now I'm doing my dream: playing the blues on a "real" radio station that people can actually hear. And I'm playing the blues that turned me on way back when, because I never hear them anywhere else. And I'm trying to have a little fun with it. I can't tell you who the bass player used to work with when he was twenty, or why the producer used this mic or that one. Or even why that singers last record was so much worse than her first. Frankly, I don't know a descended seventh from a V-8, and couldn't care less. I leave that to the experts.

Hope you like the show.