Absinthe Radio Part 1 1983
In 1982 I studied for a semester in Barcelona. Felipe Gonzales was elected the first socialist president of Spain. Reagan was rattling sabres and making the world unfit for communism. In the spring of 1983, some fellow students returned from their full year in Barcelona, bringing with them several bottles of Spanish absinthe. They agreed to bring this liquid to a meeting of the On-Air Absinthe Arts Society, that is: we shared in the mixture and performed a radio show for the express purpose of discovering how creative we could possibly be under the circumstances.
Absinthe has long been known as the aperitif of poets. And although it was banned across most of Europe after a series of gothically dramatic crimes in the early 1900's, a cult following has remained for the stuff, in fact only growing due to its disrepute. There are now countless websites devoted to the stuff, tours of Prague to savor flaming shots of the emerald elixir, and worldwide mailorder availability.
In 1982, we did a series of radio shows under its spell. The effect is akin to a combination of hashish and alcohol; absinthe's active ingradient, thujone, is chemically akin to THC. I recall that there were many intelligent people at these gatherings and that our program became a bit folkloric due to these acid tests. Programmers from Brandeis University's radio station WBRS began making frequent visits to WMFO; they liked the sense of experimentation they saw on the 3rd floor of Curtis Hall. More people began doing outrageous experimental radio shows, and I don't think I'm inflating my own head to say it was partly because of our willingness to push the envelope, to try to do fabulously strange radio. The world was getting frightening with each new year under Reagan, a swaggering idiot with his finger on the button if you asked me, and this acting out, our radio activity, was a method of coping with a world going insane.
One of the great aspects of these radio nights was being able to organize group radio shows where no one was in charge. Nominally I was the host of the show, but we regularly took turns, each doing a different aspect of the show-making and then shifting. The production studios allowed people to craft unique short pieces for playback while others were doing an on-air mix. Some weeks we had 10 or 12 people all interacting in the radio studio. I also got into a thing where I set up a curtain around the DJ console which made it impossible for an visitor to see what the DJ was doing; the radio studios can feel like a fishbowl sometimes, with people dropping in and watching, so that was a way to claim back some secrecy or privacy.
One absinthe radio show was recorded by a high school kid across town in Brookline named Tim Clifford, who brought the tape over, declaring "I have a beaker!" and "You stole it from the chem lab" as he heard it from the tape. He started doing radio regularly with us, although we later had a falling out when he spilled bongwater at a David Tudor concert.
