The Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine (November 1995 – August 2006)

The Wayback Machine radio show existed on KDHX-FM 88.1 in St. Louis, MO from November 18, 1995 straight through until August 28, 2006… almost eleven years. The show was hosted primarily by myself, but I shared the show with a co-host, Jaimz Feté, for much of that time. I originally got the idea to do this show after moving back to St. Louis from Kansas City in the spring of 1994. I’d recently gotten into the more trashy and primitive garage-punk sounds of the early ’90s, including bands like the Mummies, Phantom Surfers, New Bomb Turks, Trashwomen, 5.6.7.8’s, Cynics, Sons of Hercules, Untamed Youth, Rip Offs, Supercharger, etc. I also had discovered the rare but incredible ’60s garage stuff through various tape-trading friends that I met online (the old AOL message boards), which led to me trying to get my hands on just about every ’60s garage comp I could find. This led to even more discoveries of great early rock’n'roll, lost rockabilly and R&B, plus surf, soul, exotica, and beat music, not to mention ’70s punk, power pop, pub rock, the ’80s garage & surf revival and more. Once I started discovering more and more of these bands, I couldn’t get enough of it, and I soon decided that I wanted to host a radio show to spin this great music for whomever would listen.

I’d hosted other punk-type radio shows at KYMC in Ballwin, and I also had majored in Broadcasting & Film at CMSU, gotten professional education at Broadcast Center, so hosting a show on KDHX would mean uniting two of my strongest passions: radio and rock’n'roll. So I quickly drafted a program proposal and submitted it, along with a sample show tape, to the programming committee at KDHX, a station that I had originally wanted to become involved with after graduation from college in 1988. I decided to call the show “The Wayback Machine” because it would be presented as a sort of time machine, visiting different periods of time throughout rock’n'roll’s storied past, and showing the connection between modern garage and surf bands with the bands of the past.

I was informed that my proposal had been accepted and I would be put on a waiting list for an opening in the program schedule. I knew that would take some time, so over the next 11 months, I bought, borrowed, taped and somehow accumulated as much music I could get my hands on. I became an active participant on such online forums as the alt.music.banana-truffle newsgroup and the Bomp List. Then, in November of 1995, I began doing my show on Friday nights (Saturday mornings) from 3–6 a.m. Soon after starting my show, I invited my friend Jaimz Feté (“The Mad Daddy”) to join me on the air, and we became co-hosts, splitting the show in half, giving each of us a turn at spinning and yapping about our favorite music while the other commented on it.

The show went through several time slot changes over its ten-plus-year run, but the mission never wavered. It wasn’t until after my first son was born and I also started podcasting that doing a weekly radio show became too much of a strain on my personal and family life, so I ended the show in August of 2006. I do miss doing it, but I doubt I’ll ever have the time to do host a weekly radio show again. So this site was created as a personal tribute to the program, and I’ve also added audio recordings of as many episodes as I could find… many of them recorded directly onto CD-Rs while I was on the air during the last few years or so. The quest for recordings of these shows continues, and I’m adding more and more to this site every chance I get. As I dig up more recordings of the show, I will post them here, so check back often. Playlists from most of the episodes are included, too. I thought this would be a good way to preserve online what Jaimz and I did over the airwaves for those many years, so I hope you enjoy checking out some of these sick sounds. And please, by all means, let me know what you think. If you like what you hear, please consider joining the rock’n'roll social networking site I now run, the GaragePunk Hideout. And feel free to spread the word.

Thanks for visiting and tuning in,
Jeff “kopper” Kopp