Talk:KDNA (St. Louis)

This is the section of Leonard Slatkin's Conducting Business in which he discusses KDNA:

"In the center of the city (St. Louis, Missouri), the majority of nightlife used to be concentrated around Gaslight Square, but the late ’60s had reduced the area to a set of run-down and decrepit buildings. One of those housed a small radio station that billed itself as ‘Radio Free St. Louis.’ It was run by a group of slightly aging hippies, most of whom lived on the premises. Whoever got up first in the morning would turn on the transmitter. There was no NPR at the time and stations like these were usually referred to as alternative, or underground, radio with little or no format.

“One day, while the [St. Louis Symphony Orchestra] strike was still on, I was asked to come down and do an interview. The staff seemed surprised by my familiarity with so many different genres of music. At the end of the program I was offered my own show. I agreed, and so every Thursday for three years, from two until six in the afternoon, The Slatkin Project aired on KDNA, 102.5 on your FM dial. I selected an eclectic mix of any music I could think of. Using the station’s library and my own record collection, the program drew a lot of listeners. It was also possible to connect up to six phone lines and have call-in conversations with residents all over the city. I learned what they liked and disliked about the symphony. Best of all, sitting alone in the studio, I could hone my speaking skills and discover how to communicate to a large number of people at one time.

“Ultimately, the station fell victim to the expanding airwaves and, as the ‘70s arrived, alternative radio gave way to other forms of listening experiences. It didn’t help that KDNA was busted a couple of times for drugs and violating all sorts of building and FCC codes. But I loved every minute of my three years there. Much of what I would do in programming for the orchestra could be traced to comments people made over the airwaves….

“In the summer, the orchestra moved across the river to the campus of Southern Illinois University to play a series of concerts at the Mississippi River Festival. The festival was under the auspices of the school, but the symphony organized all the programming, including the pop acts that occupied the early part of the week. Jim Cain had minimal knowledge in the field, so he left it up to me to recommend which rock-and-rollers he should book. In doing so I got to meet Janis Joplin; Yes, Jim Croce; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Joni Mitchell; plus others who were hot and whose records I was spinning on the radio.”

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Here is one of the co-founders discussing the other co-founder in Ralph Magazine:

"Jeremy Lansman recently turned sixty years old. Since I knew him many years ago and I had worked with him to build several 'community stations,' I was invited to send a small tribute to his birthday party. This is what I came up with. --- L. W. Milam

"Jeremy Lansman is hard-wired a little differently than the rest of us. When we were building KRAB in Seattle, Lansman, Gary Margason and I were living in a houseboat on Lake Union. Jeremy had an old Hallicrafters Short Wave receiver, and told me we could listen to some of the repeater stations of Radio Moscow from the eastern part of Russia. However, to do so, he said, we had to match the ground conditions of the transmitting antenna. He did this by the simple expedient of placing the Hallicrafter's antenna in the freezer compartment of our refrigerator, and running a wire to the receiver.

"Since this did not jibe with anything I had ever learned in college physics, I had my doubts --- not only about receiving Radio Moscow but as to whether this guy could actually do the engineering to get our radio station on the air, as he claimed. Well, we did get Radio Moscow that night, and --- within six months --- KRAB was on the air....

"I actually met Jeremy as a result of an ad I had placed in Broadcasting Magazine for an engineer, stating that I wanted one "who was willing to suffer nobly for a cause." To my surprise, I got thirty responses, but Jeremy was the only one to appear on our doorstep. Since he looked to be about sixteen at the time, I had my doubts, but he claimed to have just built an FM station in Hawaii, so I took him on provisionally.

" 'How old are you?' I demanded. 'Uhn, I'm not sure,' he said. And he wasn't kidding. For one who could figure out the exact service area of a broadcast station in millivolts per meter, and could actually make our pre-colonial FM transmitter work, he was disturbingly vague about whole numbers and was totally baffled by his number of years on earth. Thus I have many doubts that the party you are giving for him tonight has any legitimacy at all....

"After one of our weekly differences of opinion on the programming of KRAB which caused Lansman to get my attention by breaking out most of the windows in my houseboat, I banished him to St Louis to build KDNA. I had some doubts as to his ability to get anything done without me hectoring him, but he got the station up and running in no time at all. It was, however, less the BBC for the Middle West (which was my ideal) and more like the voice of Catalan Spain from the 1930s. I was concerned that his Anarcho-Syndicalist gang there in the dying Gaslight Square area of the city could make a go of it, but, to my surprise, it survived, and heartily so. In fact, its noisy programming irritated the city fathers so much that they invited Richard Nixon's COINTELPRO operatives to come to town to see what they could do to put it out of business (we found all this out later from documents obtained from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act).

"Not only did KDNA survive the ministrations of COINTELPRO, it succeeded in inspiring a bevy of similar stations in such unlikely places as Atlanta, Dallas, Cincinnati, Miami, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Madison, Wisconsin. How Lansman did it was simple: he adopted, whole-cloth, my system of banishing dissidents to other cities with a fake letter of financial assistance and an invitation to get back in touch with him if they had any problems. Since for most of them their problem at KDNA was Lansman, there was little chance of their calling on him for anything whatsoever." TheScotch (talk) 07:43, 13 June 2015 (UTC)