radio

What happens when the veil is lifted, but the beginning of the end.
The slow Mercedes represents the fires of orc. The Chief Engineer is J.F. Sabastian.
They are so dismissable, Aren't they?

I really want to read your story in the future Ms. Carpenter.
Please show your face and tell us what happened in 1981/82 to you.
The book might not sell as many copies but it could reveal that part in all of us that wants to be free.

The narritive is wonderfully honest and sufficiently detailed but also a bit dry. For all her counter-culture bravado (on the outside she is a leather-clad, motorcycle-riding radio pirate with a junkie boyfriend) she frankly says that inside she thinks of herself as the nerd from high-school that never quite made it to the cool level. The problem I had with the book was that she never really delves deeply into how she feels about things. Her reasons for starting the station are vague, and when you get right down to it, what she really did was play mama to the project and put her ass on the line as the one responsible if the FCC came knocking. She only learned as much as she needed to in order to operate the equipment, she only DJ'ed a few hours a week, and most of the time WBLT was on the air she was living at her boyfriend's while letting a series of kleptomanical strangers have full run of her apartment where the studio was located.
Her "hilarious" scenes are not really set up well enough to generate a great deal of humor, and she could do a much better job with her dialog, but on the whole the story carries well. What would have put this book over the top for me would have been a series of interviews with DJ's, famous guests, and loyal listeners. That would have given the reader an outstanding perspective on the project.
If you are at all interested in underground radio, or had experience listening to KPBJ or KBLT in the 1990's, or just want to get an extremely honest insight into what it's like to be a leader of a group of vacuous leftist misfits, don't miss this book.

It tells an interesting story about a cat-and-mouse game with the FCC, but more importantly, one person's drive to create a true alternative radio station where the DJs have total control over what they play. Ironically, before creating her pirate radio stations, the author wasn't actually a huge alternative music fan and mentions attracting all sorts of semi-famous musicians to the station,without being all that steeped in their music. Clearly, this woman was unpretentious. She mentions the sacirfices she made to keep the station going.

There's a blatant honesty to this story that just kept me reading. If you're a fan of alternative (oooh! there's those incredibly overused word again) music and sub-culture, then this is for you. If Celine Dion is more your cup of tea, then you may not appreciate why she bothered in the first place to risk jail in order to liberate the airways, even if it was for the benefit of a small radius of listeners around her house.