This is fun. Like maybe footsteps or something. Get whatever the name of this building is and like where we are located since we will be hearing the space and people will naturally –

Please tell us what we just listened to.

I think he was sort of playing around on a guitar there as well as he introduced it. And I think in 97 parts of this, 1997, parts of this was packaged with his “Flaming Pie” CD release. I think it mainly circulates as sort of bootlegs now or as this recorded version that was kind of sold at Best Buy. It was like a compendium of some of the shows, but I don’t know if the full complete package has ever resurfaced. But what I find interesting about it is it sometimes airs on the Beatles channel on Sirius XM Radio, which is sort of subscriber-based radio.

So it’s like people kind of paying for access to a radio service that kind of digs around and finds these oddities and packages them on these channels that are all about bands like “The Beatles” or “Tom Petty” or “Bruce Springsteen.” I also like in this clip, and the reason I chose this one, it was probably hard to hear from the laptop into the recorder, but early on, it emphasizes that it’s widescreen radio. And I think that the development of satellite radio kind of piggybacks on satellite television.

The first thing I thought was mid-nineties television that I grew up with. It was kind of like the sound that I got from that.

But I’m really, I have to ask, as like a book historian myself, about the materiality that you’re kind of engaging with as you’re following its trajectory and thinking about how people are engaging with it.

I don’t know. Can you speak to that at all? Thinking about the ways in which it’s becoming available, or how, I guess literally, the material of the media is informing it.

Isn’t there a famous quote about that? The media is the –

You can access it on demand, but then it goes away, or it’s kept in this place, this company, this publicly traded, massive media conglomerate now SiriusXM is owned by Liberty Media, which has stakes in like Live Nation and Ticketmaster and all these things. So researching that is different from some of my work on campus radio history where you can track stuff down. It’s still kind of scattered, but people are willing to give it to you. And now they’re not.

So, McLuhan also writes a bit about acoustic space and cyberspace coming together and how it’s like all around and you sort of dig around and look for these things. So that’s kind of where I end up finding a lot of this stuff is through spending time on the internet and seeing who’s put something somewhere online that you can listen to.

Exclusive, exclusivity that’s applied to something that was experimental and odd. Yeah, I don’t know. Something about the, yeah I guess just a bigger kind of broader question about the role of listening in the work that you’re doing and what that, how that interacts with what you, what you do and how you do it.

Even most research paths people take, that’s never the case. But part of it ends up being, like listening a lot of the time to different satellite stations, satellite radio stations, or channels.

There’s only one station now I guess, but they have a variety of channels. And then trying to find things like this and thinking about is this available elsewhere? And in the cases where it’s maybe the work of a major celebrity, like I’ve written a bit on Bob Dylan’s theme time radio hour, which is kind of like this, where it’s, you know, somebody using their time on the radio who has like the star power but wants to use that time to showcase all these old quote unquote forgotten songs or songs that haven’t really entered the canon, so to speak, but have been massively influential.

In terms of thinking about what they’re finding and putting together, and there’s a curatorial aspect to it.

Do you kind of start to get a sense you can start to become familiar with yourself?

Oh, I bet so and so, put this one together.

But you do get a sense of his own relationship to these songs. But then, through digging a little bit as well, you find that he’s crafted as the curator or the person who has all these shows. It turns out it was a major TV producer responsible for massive commercial television productions. Oh, wow. Over the years, that has the music collection that Dylan’s kind of borrowing from. So you have these other connections –

That they’re working in. And he makes it sound like he’s, you know, he constructs this whole world where he is broadcasting out of this historical Abernathy building, but really he does a lot of it on tour and from his house and, you know, it creates this radio world, but it is kind of an entryway into a different side of these massive celebrities and their personalities that people will pay for.

And these satellite radio companies kind of know that. So, you know, know, part of what I’m interested in is before we even get to your Spotifys and Apple musics, this radio company was kind of setting the stage for that idea of exclusivity or, you know, giving big name performers, big talent contracts to then entice subscribers to say, I’m gonna pay like $16 or $20 a month to have access to this stuff –

A colleague of mine and myself just started a campus radio show here. So every week we’re kind of listening a lot to a radio show based on a theme or a topic each week. So I’m kind of constantly thinking about what would be good to put on this week’s show. And a lot of that is Canadian. We have, you know, Canadian content regulations and these sorts of things. So that’s been a lot of fun and that, I know that’s not really answering anything specific, but –

And I kind of just took, you know, another person to be here too and be like, let’s do it together. And that it makes it more social and more fun. And it has been a lot of fun.

But this was just such a fun way for us to wrap this day up.