Bill: Every Tuesday while I was researching and writing "Radio Activity" my friend Victor Hawkins would come over for what came to be known as "Tuesdays, 'Tinis and Tunes."
Anyway, Victor and I would sit in the Way Back Studios every Tuesday, drinking martinis and figuring out cool segues with the music from that era of FM rock radio. In time, we made a lot of ‘em. After “Radio Activity” was published, George Taylor Morris, program director of XM’s Deep Tracks channel read the book and got the sense that I knew what I was talking about. A mutual acquaintance (Greg Bell, who programs XM’s Radio Classics channel) introduced George and I, and we had a chat. We seemed to hit it off. Just for fun I sent him a collection of the sets of songs we’d been compiling in The Way Back Studios. Next thing I knew, we were working out the details of the show.
It’s called "Fitzhugh's All Hand-Mixed Vinyl" because it's all done by hand, the way a deejay used to work on the air. It’s not all vinyl, but there’s a lot of it. (Some of it’s pretty scratchy too.) But it IS all Hand-Mixed, no ProTools or other editing platform. You either hit the segue on the fly or you miss it. It’s a high wire act, just like being on the air used to be.
Corey: The big one: the future of Radio. Your thoughts?
Bill: I think terrestrial radio and satellite radio will coexist peacefully just like broadcast television and pay cable. Some people are fine with a constant rotation the same 200 songs. Some people are happy to listen to 12 to 15 minutes of commercials per hour. Some people don’t care if they can only hear the station they like in the market where they live. Others want a huge variety of music, commercial free, that will play on their car stereo no matter where they are in the country -- and they’re willing to pay for it.
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Visit Bills' "All Hand Mixed Vinyl" listing at the XM Satellite Radio website.
