(Circa 1998) I was using Winamp to listen to what was a growing library of a new type of digital file known as a .mp3. I found that I could make playlists, something that I had been doing since I was a child and put them all together and listen to them by just clicking a mouse. I was always fascinated with radio and had been since I was a kid listening to Casey Kasem's American Weekly Top 40 on 55 KTSA AM out of San Antonio, Texas in the 70's. In addition, there was a friend of my Mom & Dad's named Patrick Culp who was a professional radio announcer, which gave me the idea that even I could work to achieve this dream. I would often take an old record player and play my favourite 45's, albums, basically everything I could get a hold of to make shows that I would record on a cassette recorder. Most time I would use the built-in microphone, but one day I was able to get a small mike that I would plug into the recorder. This was so I could talk between the songs and then put the mike on the record player speaker during the tracks. I would spend a great deal of time thumbing through the 45's at the local record store in Cuero called the Cuero Music Company, owned by the late Kathy Dell. Making a collection for my shows and then listening to them, honing my skills.
I would later go on to making proper recordings of my favourite songs, sans the talkovers, and distribute them to friends, family members, anyone who would listen. I felt that those songs represented a view-port into who I was and what made me tick, tunes carefully picked to tell a story when listened to one after another as they had said something to me that I identified with. This went on until the mid-1980's when I got the opportunity to work in radio. On the advice of a friend of my Dads who worked a local radio station in his free time, I spent hours reading magazines, newspapers and books out loud to work on the inflection in my voice. Being from South Texas and raised by a family who were all raised in the Southern US, I had quite a local dialect in my voice and I wanted to work to get myself sounding more professional.
I ended up eventually getting a job as an engineer for the Rick Dee's Weekly Top 40 on 95.1 KVIC FM in Victoria, Texas for a short while, but not having a formal educational background in radio announcing, I wasn't able to get a job in radio as an announcer at the time. Being from a small town and not having the opportunity to get that experience elsewhere, I turned to working in nightclubs and bars as a DJ. I found that I had quite the knack for this kind of work and went from my first job to working around Texas playing different clubs and events. Occasionally it was a full-time gig but for the most part it was something that I did in my free-time apart from a regular job.
I finally got a break when I was given the opportunity to work as a Sunday morning replacement for a guy on sick leave at 94.1 KQXY FM in Nederland, TX. At that time they had a "beautiful music" format, which was mostly automated reel-to-reel, that I would pre-record the weather and news to "cart" and the automation would play it at the top and bottom of the hour. That led to a job at KZZB 95 FM which got me more into the producer/engineer side of things. Even though I had the gift of gab, my talent lied in engineering and producing shows, so I moved in the realm of "club DJ" where I would work mixing in dance clubs packed with people as well as the occasional DJ for hire.
This went on until I was in my early 30's (back to circa '98) when I found that I could open multiple instances of Winamp on my computer and produce shows again, similar to my shows I did when I was a child. I thought it was a waste not to share this with the world, until I discovered the world of streaming media. I was able to work a deal with a local ISP, and then located at PNX.COM on a Real Media stream from a server at his location, that I could stream live from my house and the small studio that I had thrown together. One that was completely independent and had to do all of the processes that it took to get Internet-streaming radio station content out to the public. When you connected to the station, you were connected to us. This in conjunction with harassing everyone that I could find via ICQ (an instant messaging client) and their Find a Chat function, to come and listen to my station. In a very short period of time, this became quite popular due to the fact that just a handful of people were doing LIVE internet radio at the time. Especially not one that the in the early IM chatting communities, could make Live requests to a DJ and actually heard them played on the air! The format was a bit mixed due to the fact that we tried to play every request we got, even if we had to find it and play it on another show. This was the time that acquired the small mixer board and some microphones and stands and asked a friend to join me occasionally to do shows. Any topic and any music were fair game and we made a regular habit of putting on shows in my bedroom of my duplex apartment, where I was also running a small home business. We were attracting so much of a following wanting more content, that I was putting together shows with my friends, neighbours and basically anyone who was willing to put a bit of their time into a radio show. I leased the domain andhow.org, started a website and spent most of my time working on the site and producing shows. AndHow Web Radio was born.
This lead to us eventually moving to the Windows Media streaming services that were offered with the brand-new Windows 2000 Advanced Server package. This mostly due to the fact that most people were reluctant to download something from the internet just to listen to the radio and Windows Media Player came installed with all new Windows OS computers. This also allowed us to tweak our stream to get better compression and sound quality from a dial-up (32Kbps) stream. Yes, this was all in the era of the 33-56K modems that most people had at the time. Plus it seemed to be a bit more stable with the amount of listeners that we were starting keep coming back on a regular basis, along with everyone that they could get to come along. We actually did a live, on the air, broadcast of a party at the ISP that we were also providing the music for during the NYE 1999. We were looking to debunk the myth that whatever people thought was going to happen during Y2K and show them how silly the hype really was all along. Not surprisingly, nothing happened as predicted, but what did happen is that we had a large number of listeners from all over, most of them trapped at work during New Year's Eve with access to a computer.
We were starting to overload the server and bandwidth that we were being allotted by the ISP and due to personal differences, we were forced to move the station to a co-lo or co-location server, which is a hosted server. We were pulling in about 800 listeners a day and could only handle about 10 simultaneous listeners. In fact, we were putting so much of a load on the server and networks of a server host, that they asked us to leave. This lead us to come a bit more creative about how we could stream our content, some of the methods ISPs and hosts had never experienced before and really didn't know what to do to fix the problem. All of this continued until an ISP in Nederland called Pernet came along and had listened to the station and wanted to work with us on getting us up and running. He was willing to offer us all of the hardware, software and bandwidth that we needed to stream the shows. We were also able to work out a deal to trade advertising on the station with local businesses to barter for what we needed to run and broadcast the station on a commercial level. The end-goal was creating a commercial radio station that was completely independent, inter net-only and did not simulcast from a traditional Terran (AM/FM/Shortwave) broadcast.
We ended up producing (14) 4-hour shows a week, with automation in the open schedule, to a listening audience of up to 1500 listeners a day from over 100 countries, all over the world. This is where personalities such as Reverend Aquaman, Doctor Dude, Bad Karma & Riley, Anarch & the Chaos Kid, Le Music de Femme, Big Gay Tito and O-Braonain would produce shows from all kinds of formats along with their personal statements and countless characters, all broadcasting non-stop 24 hours a day. I had to remove the bed and furniture from my bedroom and turned it into a studio. I then took to sleeping on the sofa. I had someone usually always doing a show in my house, either myself or one of the other many volunteers who were keen to show up every week, some daily, to do a show. There was the non-stop coffee maker in the kitchen, which always had a pot 24 hours a day. We had a guy from the Northern US, his name completely slips my mind, who had a deep, booming, big-market radio voice was doing our promos and station IDs. Our production sounded pretty great considering it was all done on a home PC. We eventually got a compressor/feedback destroyer (a cool, little box) to make the sound of our voices a bit more professional. I had an ISDN line installed to my house, ADSL was not yet available back then, and was able to stream to a media server hosted at Pernet who would handle the streaming load and bandwidth. We did the first ever live-performance simulcast of an Internet-only radio station in that part of the US, at the Logon Cafe' in Beaumont, TX and that even ended up being a weekly show. They had the occasional open-mike night and bands would come in and perform on their stage we would do a live broadcast from the show and would play the station and our music during the set breaks. The whole station was marketed to 'jamming the free world, one person at a time!', even if you only had a dial-up connection, you could listen to AndHow. Because of this and our interaction with our listeners, made this station unique and a draw for hundreds of thousands of people who would tune in.
We were all having the time of our lives. I was given the opportunity to live my dream of having my own radio station, playing what I thought people wanted to hear. We had proven our steadfastness and determination, as we had now been doing this for a couple of years but due to the record companies and their infinite wisdom and greed, we were not able to become a licensed-radio station. There was no licensing for internet radio stations at the time and all of this was playing out on a world stage prior to the dot.com crash when every one was trying to squeeze a dollar out of this new "internet". Without licensing, we could not get sponsors to buy our ads that we were capable of making and a radio station that we could prove that people listened to, lots of people....without those ads....no revenue.
By that time the other business that I was running to keep my head about water was starting to fail due to the fact that I had spent the past 2 years running a radio station, which was now consuming 50-60 hours a week of my time. I was willing to do whatever it took to keep the station running, but it was starting to lose its steam. Since we were not able to make money with the station, we slowly started losing the interest that we were getting from our sponsors. That I was at the end of my tether and sold everything that I owned and moved to the other side of the world to New Zealand to try something different. I wanted to find a place where I could take my now "pirate radio" station and find a place to make my stand.
After spending some time in New Zealand and taking work in the IT industry based on my experience with the radio station I had to make a choice. I had the possibility of a career in the IT industry, making a good living from something that I was already doing for free. I decided that AndHow Web Radio was all starting to get a bit much and I had lost the passion that I had when running the station from "high atop the Rainbow Bridge in Bridge City, TX" (We claimed to be broadcasting from on-top of there from laptops and lawn chairs). Plus, I came to the decision that I couldn't do it on my own, the expenses were too much and I just didn't have the creative group of people that I did in the US. So on the 14 of December 2002 at about midnight, the great AndHow Web Radio went off the air.
I don't regret one minute of that whole experience. It was a rush, a dream of mine became its own entity and took on a life of its own. It touched the lives of many people and brought me to live 10,000 miles away from home on the other side of the world. This into a life, a career and an opportunity that I could have never imagined possible.
I recently have found a new project for AndHow and it is currently in development. FM broadcasts, Podcasts and the return of Internet radio now in CD-quality sound with AndHow Web Radio and andhow.FM!
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