DJ Resuscitation: The Loft (SiriusXM 30) and The Mansion of Fun

SiriusXM's channel 30, The Loft, poses as nothing specific, and is therefore such a repository of unique, free-form broadcasts by intelligent individual DJs, that the station as a whole serves as a monument to a form of entertainment that might be in the process of being swallowed up by the podcast: back in the day, when we'd all gather around the hi-fi (mono) and hear voices speak to us from afar, and people who knew music would pick songs to contrast and flow, and carry all of us along.

There's a variety of celebrity-guest-show-hosts across SiriusXM's music channels; enough to support at least twice as much discussion as you'll find here. And anyway, I find I can't tear myself away long enough to flip channels, and be willing to miss what's going on on Channel 30. The Loft carries in its roster some of the 20th century's most important music people, including longtime New York DJ Vin Scelsca, whose "Idiot's Delight" is piped in twice weekly from his home in New Jersey. Bernie Taupin's "American Roots Radio" comes live on Saturday nights from the songwriter's western ranch. Both shows mix banter with careful and premeditated choices, of artists and songs; Lou Reed and Hal Wilner's late-night Saturday "New York Shuffle" is especially unpredictable in this: a few months ago, Lou and Hal called for requests, and shouted out an email address. After a set of electronic trance, jazz, and rock, the pair returned and talked about how great their picks had been-- so good that the set needed to be repeated, and all requests flatly ignored. This contemptuous audience participation stunt might be expected from the man who released revolutionary garbage noise AND started the Velvet Underground shuffle-pace in rock. But what's important here is the autonomy The Loft imparts to its DJs-- are they performers themselves, even, as they create that "rich musical tapestry" that might compete with our playlists and self-generated shuffles?

There are no voices on Pandora, no sense to the juxtaposition of tracks that a database of taste determines a listener is likely to enjoy. I find there to be little soul behind automatically-selected music, because I have always known the cumbersome and human alternative to be available: I grew up listening to 1590AM WCZN, 94.1FM WYSP, 88.5FM WXPN, and 93.3WMMR, and each station had its human and musical identity-- built of people, making choices for the good of the group, live, to whomever was listening.

So SiriusXM's structure permits stations such as The Loft, and The Loft enables the biggest of musical brainiacs a few hours of thematic and musical exploration. Perhaps one of the format's finest hours comes each week between 12pm and 3pm on Sundays, as New York Doll and musicologist David Johansen ("Shri-Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong" is his broadcast surname now; it was "Buster Poindexter" in the 1980s) presents a compilation that is true musicology, leaving the magic to be discovered by the individual in the juxtaposition of wildly divergent tracks. Johansen insists on dramatic opera (specifically arias, usually Callas), jazz (Paul Desmond is an obvious favorite), country (each show ends with Billy Joe Shaver's "Old Chunk of Coal"), reggae, do-wop, Brazilian arrangements and energetic Cuban swing, big band (Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Prima), Appalachian field recordings and original blues music. Johansen introduces sets with digestions of philosophy-- as if, beneath a massive reel-to-reel recording deck in his home studio, Johansen has stashed all thirty volumes of Brittanica's Great Books of the Western World. 'Why does a history of humanity identify an unecessary move away from a place of innocence?' 'How is music the lone redeeming response to a less-than-fluent experience of life?' Each show ends with his personal promise: "we'll be back next week with a much better show, because out of perfection, nothing can be made." Since when, through the presentation of other's recorded material, is a human 'putting on a show?' Like a projectionist in a theater, the radio disc jockey-- and their knowledge, of the form and the content-- are valuable, and perhaps not relics of an antique form. Since the Dawn of the Mixtape, and its evolution into the digital preference-building at play online today, radio DJs are a rare breed-- for this and so many reasons, I cherish Sunday afternoons in David Johansen's "Mansion of Fun."