A few months ago, motivational speaker Tony Robbins managed to get two out of three right on Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me.  Normally this would be of passing interest at most, but he happened to be playing for “Bill Childs of Austin, Texas.”

Hey, that’s me!

Well, today I got the voicemail message from Carl Kasell.  I also got a special treat for listeners of the radio show — but you’ll have to wait until this weekend’s show to hear that.  But you can hear the message that callers to my cell phone now hear, featuring him reciting, beautifully, some of the lyrics to They Might Be Giants’s “Dr. Worm”:

(Click to the left of “00:00” if you don’t see a play button there.)

Huge thanks to Carl and the nice folks at Wait Wait.  It’s a total delight.

We’re traveling and so we recorded a few shows ahead of time.  So I can’t do anything on the radio about Charleston, and I don’t know that I would or should anyway.

But I do want to write a little bit here before our day in London starts.

When a person of color, or a person of a non-Christian faith, does something horrific, the narrative is about the group or groups to which they belong.  And just as often, when a white or (nominally) Christian person does a similar act, the narrative shifts to being about mental illness, and how surprising the act was.

Of course we have to talk about mental illness, and of course a fully healthy person doesn’t do these things (though lets steer clear of making this yet another chance to stigmatize those with mental illness).

But we can’t end the conversation there.  I think we have to think about how children are raised — with love or with hate, and with active conversations about race and class and differences and privilege.  And about guns.  When those conversations are not part of our culture, it’s not at all surprising that these killings keep happening.

I don’t know anything about the Charleston killer’s childhood beyond what has been reported, and I don’t know if that’s all been accurate. I’m not saying a thing about his parents.

But I do know that he walked into a place that welcomed him and sat down next to people who were raised to welcome visitors with open arms and open hearts and open minds.  He at least pretended to pray with these loving people, and then he stood up, looked around at them, these people who had welcomed him and prayed with him, and he shot them to death.  With a gun given to him by his parents.

It’s reasonable to ask why I’m posting about this on the website for a children’s radio show.  Jessica Luther, an Austin mom, posted this on Twitter yesterday:

“A 5yo black girl survived last night by playing dead. Surely my 6yo white son can survive a conversation about why she matters.”

Maybe naively, I think part of that conversation can be started and facilitated through music.  Music that celebrates love and difference and play and fun and history and the future.  Music that gets kids dancing together, spinning together, singing together, holding hands together.  Music that asks interesting questions and hopefully gives parents a chance to talk about some possible answers.

So, put on some music, hold your kids, and, if the time is right, have a hard conversation about what happened.  It can only help.

Love you all.

As usual, Elizabeth Mitchell (here with Dan Zanes) is a great place to start.  Hopefully the embedding will work:

P.S. Please don’t make the narrative be just about the South, either. South Carolina has some amazingly wonderful and loving people, and every state has its problems. Certainly there are regional issues but these are not issues unique to anyone or any state.

You might have seen this post I did over at Zooglobble about how to introduce someone to the current world of music for families.  (And Dave Loftin did one too.)  That was based mostly on the playlists from the first couple of weeks on the air at KUTX, but obviously only the songs from people who were doing music for kids.

I thought it might be worthwhile to look at the rest of what we’ve played early in our tenure here on KUTX.  I sort of think of these as what political hacks call “dog whistles” — things with multiple meanings, except where in dog whistle politics the additional message tends to be “I think them gays are icky too but need not to say that out loud,” my additional message is more like “Hey, music nerds, you’re safe here.”

So far, the radio nerd dog whistle songs have included:

• Brian Eno, I’ll Come Running – I still remember in the early fall of 2005, when we’d first launched, another volunteer at Valley Free Radio coming up to me and saying, “You know, I thought what you were doing was interesting and stuff, but it was when I heard Eno that I really got what you were doing.”  It’s no surprise that it was the third song we played on KUTX.
• Elizabeth Mitchell, Lovely Day – Yes, this was on the Zooglobble list too, but it fits here too, because (a) it’s originally by Bill Withers, one of the finest songwriters and singers in history; (b) Elizabeth and Daniel have a long and amazing musical history outside of family music; and (c) I really wanted to also play Withers’s Lean On Me, but don’t think I can play that without crying yet (listen to this show and read this post for why).  I’ll get there soon.
• The Ramones, Spider Man – It’s the Ramones.  No explanation really needed.  (As an aside, I filled in for my friend Elizabeth McQueen in doing an interview with John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants for her great podcast This Song.  His choice for the song to discuss was the original Batman theme.)
• Asylum Street Spankers, Sliver – Again, this is on the Zooglobble list, but here because (a) the Spankers only did one (amazing) family record and (b) it’s a Nirvana cover, and a song that is not obviously something you’d play for kids.
• Mates of State in-studio – I could have held onto this until later and gotten more songs in, but this seemed totally perfect to me.  I mean, sure, part of it is that I just adore MoS, and one of my great joys is that they did a Guided By Voices cover on the Science Fair CD (the end, with their kids singing? gets me every time).  But again, it signals something about our show that I don’t think any other show for families does (or if they do, I don’t know about it).  Those were two songs by a really well-respected internationally touring band that you cannot hear anywhere else in the world!
• Prince, Starfish and Coffee – again, like the Ramones, probably doesn’t need much explanation, though I will also note that this is a bit of a shout-out to the many Minnesotans resident here in Austin.
• Carrie Rodriguez in-studio – Carrie’s Sacred Heart Project is fascinating and gave us an opportunity to share some Mexican history — musical and otherwise — from someone whose music I think is accessible to kids without being aimed at them.  I’m also trying to be more intentional about having Spanish language songs in particular.  And again, her second song (“Lake Harriet”) was about one of Minneapolis’s lovely lakes.
• Willie Nelson, Won’t You Ride in My Little Red Wagon? – It was frustrating not to get get Willie into the first week’s show, so he definitely was getting in the second.  He’s so fundamental to Austin music (there’s a statue of him!) that it was a necessary wave to the history of the town.  Plus, uh, he’s Willie Nelson.
• The Pixies, Tony’s Theme – Same category as the Ramones, really.  I figure a lot of current parents grew up on the Pixies (and Nirvana, etc.), and the rest at least heard them on (sigh) “Alternative Classics” or whatnot.  This song (and Prince, too, I suppose) makes a particularly good example of us finding kid-friendly songs from bands that most do not do that, and not just songs that get contributed to kids’ compilations (though nothing’s wrong with that).
• Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings – Ever since I heard this done on 89.3 the Current, I’ve felt like it’s one of the very best versions of a song with roughly 34 millions versions of it out there.  Sharon Jones, of course, also appears on the Baby Loves Jazz releases, and does a fine job there, but the Dap-Kings…well, they’re ridiculous.

I still feel like we’re in introduction mode and will be for quite a while.  This week, the nerd whistle songs will include Loretta Lynn, Dean Jones with the Felice Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Fugazi, Frank Turner, and Cornershop.  Should be fun!

We had a great couple of shows during SXSW (check out our Facebook page for photos and more), with at least 2,000 coming out on Wednesday and more than that on Sunday.  Thanks to all of our sponsors and everyone who came out!

And we’re still totally amazingly excited about launching on KUTX starting May 10—and now we’ve got another station launch to announce!  Starting this week, we’ll be heard on WNKU in Cincinnati, Ohio and Northern Kentucky, every Sunday morning at 8:00.  And that actually means we’re on four different stations in the Cincinnati region, including a 100,000 watt station!  Check out where we’ll be hearable on the little maps below, or click here to see a PDF of them all combined.

That is a massive set of signals, blanketing the entire Cincinnati metro area, with WNKE reaching all the way over to West Virginia (even covering a little of Charleston!). Looking over a map, it looks to me like it easily covers all of the Cincinnati metro area…that’s a total population of over 2 million people.  Whoa!

WNKU is, like KUTX, an eclectic listener supported station.  Glancing at the playlist right now, I see Chris Smither, The Decemberists, Old 97’s, War on Drugs…tons of stuff we love.  It’s going to be a great fit, and we’re just totally thrilled to be joining them!

There’s something a little extra special for me.  I’ve never lived in Ohio, and have only visited Cincinnati a few times (I coached a moot court team whose competition was there every year), but WOXY, a station broadcasting from Oxford, Ohio, was a huge part of developing my love for radio.  WOXY was a terrific commercial alternative station that I turned to after the demise of my beloved Rev-105, and for years, WOXY was the little station that could, moving from terrestrial radio to internet radio, being revived like a horror movie villain multiple times, until it finally died its final death after a move here in Austin, Texas.  Its signal was pretty weak and its budget low, but they continued to make great radio for years, and I’m thrilled to be on in the same market they were.

And that’s not even mentioning WKRP, the fictional radio station that was central to a ridiculous number of radio people’s love for the medium.  Did I buy the full DVD set recently?  Of course I did.

It is no coincidence that we have imaging for our show that incorporates audio from both WKRP and WOXY.

So: Hi, Cincinnati and northern Kentucky!  We are super excited to meet you.

Last week’s show was all about friendship, and, as some of you know, that’s because I was heading to Minnesota to be with my friend Eric (pictured, left) as he reached the end of his life.

As I posted on Facebook, I told Eric that I was there with many many other people in spirit, hovering behind me.  The stuff below (posted with Lisa’s permission) is largely for those hoverers, to try to help them know more about the end of Eric’s remarkable life, but it’s also a way to share with more people the amazing life of an amazing man.  His obituary tells much more about his professional life, helping countless veterans, and you should read that too.

I’m starting this document on Tuesday, March 10, 2015. I’ll be getting on a plane at a stupidly early time tomorrow to go up to Minnesota; Eric will be taken off of his ventilator on Thursday afternoon. He will probably die before I leave on Friday. I don’t know if I’m going to do anything with this, but I wanted to get some thoughts down.[1]

I told Ella last night that I think Eric’s dying is to me something like what my dad’s dying was like to her. (She was 10 when he died.) When my dad died, it was shocking and awful and devastating to me, but at some level, it wasn’t surprising. He was 73 and, while I hoped he’d be around a lot longer, and he certainly had more good things to do and good thoughts to think, nobody looks shocked when a 73-year-old dies.

Except that’s not true for grandkids. His death came out of nowhere for them, and Ella, being the oldest of the grandkids, might have been immediately impacted more through sheer awareness. It just wasn’t fair, or right, or sensible that her Granddaddy was dying.

Eric’s my age. He’s got kids younger than my kids. And so, even though we’ve known that this was coming for Eric for a couple of years, it still feels like the rug is being pulled out from under Eric, and Lisa, and the kids, and us all. It isn’t fair, or right, or sensible that he’s dying, any more than it was when David Banigan-White died.[2]

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

(Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dirge Without Music)

I suppose quoting that poem is on par with reading the “Love is patient” Corinthians verses and having the Pachelbel Canon at your wedding. (We did both.  Go ahead, judge.) But there it is, saying what I want to say, better than I can say it.

• • • • •

Eric told me when I was visiting a couple of months ago that he sometimes worried that his girls wouldn’t remember him. He knew rationally that they would, but the fear would sneak up on him. I asked if I could write to them about him, and this is what I sent to him to pass along to them.

Dear Vica & Kaia:

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about your dad lately.  He mentioned that it’d be okay for me to write some of that down and send it along to y’all.  (I live in Texas now, so I get to use the word “y’all.”  You probably shouldn’t unless you want your Minnesotan friends to look at you funny.)

 

I’ve known Eric since I guess 10th grade.  (That makes it almost thirty years now.)  He played French horn in the full orchestra (I played violin), and we crossed paths in various nerdy activities (this probably doesn’t surprise you).  Among other things, we both took tests well so we ended up as National Merit semifinalists:

 

We hung out a fair amount in high school — Eric played in a band that played in the Battle of the Bands that I helped run, and we just ended up in many of the same places, classes, etc.

 

Eric started off at Hamline University for college, as you might know, and then took some time off for health reasons.  After that, he lived in my parents’ house for a while — I don’t actually remember how long, but maybe a month or so?  Right around that same time, I decided to take the second semester off of my first year and so I had to move off campus.  And that was when Eric was looking to move back into St. Paul.  So, in January of 1990, we both moved into 1598 Dayton Avenue in St. Paul, in the far right apartment on the first floor:

 

It was…an adventure.  The apartment itself was nice enough, though we had some neighbors with, uh, sanitation problems, leading to there being perhaps more roaches than you’d want.  The back porch had bright green astroturf on the floor, for indeterminate reasons.  And it had no dishwasher, but it did have a trash compactor for reasons that pass understanding.  But it had a couple of bedrooms, everything worked, the landlords were nice, and it was cheap.

 

We got a cat (Trillian, pictured below, along with us and Rogers, in Rhiannon’s room), and another cat (Ione).  Trillian was smart and mildly sociopathic; Ione was very sweet.  Rocket scientist?  No.  But sweet.

 

That summer, I worked in Tennessee and our friend Rhiannon (whom I was then dating) lived in the apartment over the summer.  I think some other people might have been living there too.  In any event, your dad and Rhiannon looked to see if they could find a bigger place, unsuccessfully, so that fall we also took over the neighboring apartment, converting its living room into a bedroom.  We added more people at that point – Jim & Kim, Rogers at some point, maybe others.

 

That fall, we initially thought we were going to rent the house at 1650 Dayton Avenue, just down the street, and then it turned out that the potential landlord was not successful at buying it, so my mom and I did and we all moved down the street one very cold day.  (The cold, it turns out, was a good thing, as we could leave all of our stuff outside overnight and kill the cockroaches, other than one über-cockroach that we found a good while later.)

 

I’m honestly pretty bad at remembering specific things; Rhiannon is better at that and I bet she’s doing something like this too.  But we lived in that house, with that core group, from late 1990 through sometime in 1994 (when Dena and I got married and the various roommates moved out).  People who lived there for various times: me, Eric, Rogers, Rhiannon, Jim, Kim, Dena, Scott Keever, Steve Bucheck, Britta Gustavson, Tom Flood, Judah something-or-other, and I’m sure some other people I can’t think of.

 

Some things I remember:

• We got your dad a piano.  He was really good at it, and even though it was a pretty cruddy piano, it delighted me to no end to hear him playing it.

• We had bands play in the basement from time to time.  It was college, so that was almost required.  Some of them were better than others.

• We had one rotating roommate slot where people would move in, I think be befuddled by us, and move out.  One of them almost certainly either stole or arranged for the theft of a pretty nice TV.  But I digress.

• We lived pretty cooperatively.  I think we all wanted a feeling of family and we got it.  Not that we didn’t have a feeling of family from our, you know, families.  But we seemed to want something like that there too.  We ate together pretty often, we went grocery shopping together, we hung out.

• We had a “grill night” most Tuesday nights.  We’d be out on the second floor porch (no railing, amazing nobody ever fell off) with a grill (also amazing we never set anything on fire), we’d grill, we’d talk, we’d drink beer, we’d laugh.  It wasn’t mostly where Big Things happened (though, walking Dena home from Grill Night on November 19, 1991, I asked her out), but it was a place where dozens or hundreds of small good moments happened.

That last thing is key for me.  If you see the movie Boyhood, it makes the point way better than I can, that life is a series of moments, most of them seemingly unimportant at the time, that add up to something.  The thing that makes me know that there was something pretty special as a result of all of those moments is how immediately and completely we can settle back into comfortable and loving togetherness any time we get any subset of that group together.  And your dad was the foundation of all of it; the creamy nougat center, if you will.  That’s from those small moments.

 

I’m sure I have more to say about your dad, and I always will. But I’ve been puttering along on this for several weeks and I think I’ll send it off now.  I’m sending it to your dad (hi, Eric!) to pass along to you whenever it seems appropriate.

 

I know you know this, but I want to say it again for emphasis: your dad is the best.  He’s the kindest guy I know, he’s wicked funny and crazy smart and caring beyond measure.  (Your mom is all of those things too, but I never lived with her, so I’m not writing about her.)  I’m so glad I have known him for as many years as I have.

 

Love,

Bill

(As Rhiannon reminded me, we also all sang in the Fairmount Avenue United Methodist Church choir, often walking down to rehearsals. Those walks, and those Sundays, were weekly touchpoints that I honestly had forgotten about, and of which I am glad to be reminded.)

• • • • •

In Eric’s last post on Caring Bridge, in which he shared his decision to remove the ventilator, he wrote:

I will miss my life and the opportunities the I would have had without this disease. More time with family, more friendship, more meaningful work, watching my kids grow and loving them and being a part of that, growing old together with Lisa. I’m sad about losing all of that, all the love that has been part of my life. I will miss it greatly.

I am so glad to have been part of Eric’s remarkable life. I am so angry and sad about what he, and we, will miss because of ALS.[3] I was looking forward to being an old man, hanging out with Eric, alternately making poop jokes and talking about significance testing in epidemiology. I don’t know anyone else who can do both of those things nearly as well as Eric.

When my kids were in elementary school, the years often ended with teachers declaring something that I think was attributed to Dr. Seuss – “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” That was never particularly effective with our kids, especially Ella, who was bitterly angry any time she didn’t get to go to school, and it’s not very effective for me right now either. I think I’ll stick with crying for a while.

But I do hope and expect we’ll eventually get to the smiling part. Eric’s life was too filled with, and too much the source of, joy, for the smiling not to happen. Not today, not tomorrow, but sometime.

 • • • • •

March 13, 2015

Eric died last night, just about two hours after his ventilator was removed.[4] I don’t feel any need to go through the details of the day, since they don’t really relate much to what his life was about. But there are a couple of things that bear mentioning.

The day had a lot of laughter. Eric was drowsy, but conscious pretty often throughout the day, and had a chance to talk with everyone who was there. I also learned how good Lisa was at understanding what he was saying, even from behind the cumbersome mask. I’d hear something that sounded like the grown-ups in the old Peanuts cartoons, and Lisa would know he was asking for us to start up his mix CD again.

Sometime during the morning, I got to talk with him a bit, and I made sure he knew that a lot of his friends were thinking of me as sort of their representative. I told him to picture them hovering behind me, if that wasn’t too creepy. He didn’t think it was creepy, and I hope he pictured so many friends hovering around him in a non-creepy way. (More like Harry Potter’s moving pictures, as Rhiannon suggested.)

Eric’s death was peaceful and comfortable. As my friend Aran pointed out last night, no matter how much we tell ourselves things like that and things like “it’s a blessing,” it still hurts. Well, yes. That is painfully true. But there is some small measure of comfort in the relatively quiet way he died.

But the way he died was also much of how he lived: gently, with dignity, and with generosity. I think he knew that starting the final process the way he did was the way that had the greatest chance of making it so he could have genuine time with his loved ones right up until the end, with him aware of it all. And he did; we each got to give him a real goodbye.

Others’ goodbyes are their stories to tell or not tell, but I will tell mine.

My goodbye was right before he took off his ventilator mask. They’d already been slowing down the frequency with which the ventilator was forcing him to breathe, and increasing the sedatives, but he was awake, alert, and entirely Eric. His eyes were clear and bright, his smile his, his humor intact. He was him.

I gave him a hug and told him I loved him. He said, muffled, “I love you too.” I pointed out that I could understand him, even with the mask – no Peanuts grown-ups issues that time. And he laughed at the cartoon reference. It wasn’t one of those head-back belly laughs that I’m going to miss (he was too weak for that), but it was still that sense of delight, of joy, of love. It was Eric.

Then he held my eye contact, completely steady, for at least 30 seconds, and just nodded, as I think he did to others in the room. It was, I expect, part of his way to confirm what I knew: this was his decision, he was good with his decision, and he was ready. And I think that message was not just to me but to all the hoverers – the friends and loved ones who were with him, even if not in person.

• • • • •

Sometime during the day, Eric asked to hear the mix CD that some of his psychiatrist colleagues had put together for his retirement, and it ended up playing on repeat throughout the day. Right around when the hospice nurses and the ALS doctor started the sedative process, we turned it off. I am pretty sure the last song he heard was the Beatles’ “Two of Us.”[5]

You and I have memories

Longer than the road that stretches out ahead

 • • • • •

So: I still do not approve, and I still am not resigned. But I am glad for the fact that he got to give his family one final gift, the gift of being with him – with an aware, engaged, loving Eric – at the very end. And, as he wanted, he got to be aware of his passing from life into death: one final bit of scientific curiosity about what happens next.

Goodbye, Eric. I love you.[6]

You should feel encouraged to donate to the ALS Association of Minnesota in Eric’s memory, or to support his family’s ongoing expenses.

[1] Fuck ALS.

[2] See id.; also aneurysms can go to hell.

[3] See id.

[4] See id.

[5] I am glad the last song he heard was not the South Park song that also appears on the CD.

[6] See supra notes 1-4.

As some of you know, I’ve had a monumentally rough week, saying goodbye to a friend who I’ve known since the 10th grade, and with whom I lived for a little over four years.  So I am utterly delighted to have some good news:

As we approach our tenth anniversary (this August!) and our 500th show (April 4), I am beyond thrilled to announce that we have a new flagship station, 98.9 KUTX – The Austin Music Experience.  We’ll launch on Mothers Day, May 10, and will air Sunday evenings at 6:00 p.m.

KUTX is a relatively new station, having launched just over two years ago, but its seeds were planted as far back as 1925, when the first station with the call letters KUT launched in Austin.  (The station disappeared from 1927 to 1958, when it relaunched.)  KUT is Austin’s home for National Public Radio and had eclectic music programming for decades.

When the 98.9 frequency became available a few years ago, KUT acquired it and KUTX was born at the start of 2013.

The new station has what, if you were prone to understatement, you’d call a pretty big signal, as you can see on the map.  Basically, it blankets Austin and much of the surrounding areas.  The station’s playlist is eclectic and diverse, and there just couldn’t be a better fit for us.  It sounds like Austin.

What will change?  Not much.  We’ll identify KUTX as our flagship station during the show.  It’ll still be made available, for free, to any stations that want to air it.  We’ll record it in our same little studio, though we’ll also get to do in-studios at KUTX’s Studio 1A when schedules permit.  (And they get some amazing acts there that we hope to “borrow.”)  Hopefully we’ll get some musical ideas from the hosts there.

We’ve had some initial discussions about doing events with the station, and I definitely have big hopes to do some amazing stuff for the families of Austin beyond what we’re already doing.

But that’ll all come.  For now, I’m obsessing about what to play for those first few shows, as we introduce ourselves to Austin.

I’m just so excited.  I hope you are too.