And welcome to 35000 Watts: The Podcast. I am Michael Millard and a former college radio DJ at KTXT FM at Texas Tech University and the producer and director of the feature documentary film, 35000 Watts: The Story of College Radio.
And I’m Lisa Ray Girard, also a former college radio DJ from KTX TFM there at Texas Tech. And, I helped Michael make this film. If you’ve learned about this podcast on social media, this is probably something I posted.
And being that this podcast is kind of an extension of that, it makes sense that our first episode, we’ll we’ll talk about the film a little bit. Yeah. How how it came to be. The original idea came from this concept of, like, a door. There’s a door that you walk through at some point in your life, and, like, once you walk through that door, your life is never the same again after that.
I thought about it. I was like, you know what? The door for me is the door to the KTXT-FM Studios. Like, the first time I walked through that door and met, Chad Kopeck, actually, who’s in the film, who was the operations director at KTXT at the time, like, it was it literally changed my life. Like, everything that happened to me after that kind of stemmed from that moment.
I was there from 1993 to 95 or 96. I guess, early 96. Yeah. Okay. So you and I basically started at the same time.
I started in 1993 as well and finished up in December of 96. Yeah. And, I guess, probably we both started out as sub substitute DJs. Did you have to start on the sub list as well? Nope.
I started in the summer, so I had a shift right off the bat. The sub list. So KTXT was pretty popular among students, and we actually had a a good problem to have, which is we had more people that wanted to work there than they could actually fit on the air. And so a lot of times when you start, especially as a freshman, you were a substitute DJ. So, like, you got the calls at, like, 1 o’clock in the morning.
So and so didn’t show up. Do you wanna come do a shift? And, like, your, ability and willingness to get up and get out of bed and go do that shift was really gonna determine whether or not you’re ever gonna be, like, a permanent DJ at KTXT. Yeah. It was a rough way to start.
And my very first shift, in fact, was the night that, so at the time, the Texas Tech women’s basketball team was fantastic. They won the championship, in 94, I believe. And so they came home, and they had this huge party at Jones Stadium, the football stadium that was, like, yeah, like, 45,000, 50,000 people. Everybody wanted to be there. Nobody wanted to DJ, obviously, during that time.
Of course. And I got the call as a freshman, to come substitute at KTXT during that that celebration because I was the only one that answered the phone probably, and I was because I was probably at the bottom of the sub list. But that was my opening. That was my chance to, like, get in the door. And, man, I was I I doubt anybody was listening because everybody, again, was at that celebration.
But, yeah, that was my first shift. What was what was your first shift like? Right out of high school or maybe at the end of high school, I knew that I wanted to go into media. And at that time, all we had was radio, TV, and newspaper. There was a local entertainment newspaper in town.
You know, it was a wannabe westward, which we have here in the Denver area, or a wannabe Dallas Observer. And it covered the entertainment scene for Lubbock and Amarillo which was about 2 hours north of Lubbock. So I I hunted down the owner of this newspaper and he’s like, oh, yeah. Here. Here.
Here’s your first job. Go out and review all these bands and take pictures. Write an article, and I’ll put it in the paper. And I was like, sweet. And that’s what I did.
I went out and took pictures of all the local bands and the touring bands that came through town, and I got backstage access and everything. Well, of course, part of that was, like, talking to the radio station that played these bands, which the only station in town that played these bands was KTXT. So, that’s when I walked in the door and talked to James Morgan of all people who worked with Chad. And, you know, I was in there talking to him all the time. And at some point, he was like, hey.
Do you wanna be a DJ here? And I was like, do I wanna be a DJ? Of course. So, he put me on the schedule right then and there, and that’s where it took off. But going back to, like, how and why this phone was made, the door concept is beautiful.
It’s funny because you looked at it like I walked through the door and that’s when my life changed. Whereas, I think I looked at it posteriorly and was like, after my experience at KTXT, which led into a career in radio, TV, Internet, all that kind of stuff. I look at it like hindsight is 2020. And that’s when it came apparent to me like this moment was bigger than I thought it was at the time. And I do remember when I graduated in 96 like it was all done and over with and I think I missed KTXT more than any other college experience, and I wish that I would have done more.
I mean, we did a lot of stuff, but, man, after I got out of it, I was like, oh, man. We could have done this. We could have done that. Why didn’t we do this? You know?
Yeah. I think that’s a common, a very common thought because we were college kids. Yeah. You know? We were college kids given this incredible opportunity, and I just don’t I don’t think I don’t wanna say nobody understood, but, you know, we talked to, obviously, a lot of people while making the film.
There’s a very common thread of, you know, I didn’t realize what I had until much later or how unique that opportunity was or all the things we could have done. In fact, I think there’s a there’s a few moments like that that are that are actually in the film of of people talking about, like, big Steve Michaels puts it perfectly where he’s like, you know, coulda, shoulda, woulda, but, like, you’re a college kid. You don’t you know, you’re just flying by the seat of your pants. You don’t know what you’re doing. Like and that’s, I think a pretty universal, you know, feeling.
You just don’t know until you’re out. Like, wow. Yeah. I had this whole radio station, you know, and all these opportunities. And not that we didn’t make some great stuff and do great things, but, you never know in the moment.
You know, it’s always in hindsight, I think, that you realize. Yeah. I call it the vibe and tribe. Like, people ask me when we do the screenings, and I’m there for a talk back or something. You know, people will ask me, what’s your one takeaway?
What have you learned the most from this experience? Whether your time in college radio or helping you make the film and I call it the vibe and tribe. It’s like, there’s a vibe out there from people that were in the radio or listening to the radio and it’s a tribe. I can’t get over and I know you experienced this too. I can’t get over how many of the stories that we lived that every other station in the US was living too.
But without, you know, social media around, we didn’t even have the Internet, you know. All we had was like phone calls, the CMJ, going to conferences. Without that immediate feedback from your peers, you thought you were, like, the only one in the world having this amazing experience. Then you meet other people and you’re like, wait. You did that too?
Especially, I like Vibe and Tribe is a good way to put it. The camaraderie that people felt by meeting people at the station, being at the station, having those interactions with people who felt the same way about stuff, who were excited about music the way you were. A lot of people have put it, like, that was kind of their frat or that their sorority. They weren’t exact people. They weren’t sorority people, but they found that same kind of sense of belonging, at the radio station.
And I think that’s really cool that that was happening, not just at KTXT, but but literally everywhere. And the film touches on that a lot. I mean, even our own Stacy Thornton talks about coming from a small town, being a nobody, and landing in a place where she found herself. You know? And I think a lot of us had that experience to some degree.
And it could be from somebody that only had one shift, one semester, or it could be like lifers, like us, that did all 4 years every single semester. I mean, like my dream at that point would have been if I could have gone on and become a station adviser. But, yeah, the film is great. I’ve heard absolutely no bad news about it. It’s a great feel good movie.
The film really explores so much. It explores the music. It explores the culture. It explores, you know, what college was like. And and we focus on our time there in the eighties nineties, but it goes all the way back to the beginning like to 1911, 1912.
I just I don’t think you missed a mark at all. And I know part of the challenge is when you were putting the film together was how do we get all that together and weave it into a, comprehendible? Is that the right word? Yeah. Into a, entertaining, understandable, emotional, funny story, and I just think you did such a great job.
Oh, I’ve I really appreciate it. I was kind of preparing myself for a lot of blowback. You know, when you put something out, you’re gonna get, you know, you’re gonna get negativity sometimes. And I I think that’s just part of being, you know, someone who creates stuff and puts it out in the world. But it honestly, I haven’t felt that, and I’ve I’ve gotten a lot of such positive feedback.
It’s almost a little scary. I know. Right? Yeah. It was you know, we finished all the interviews, and I knew we had a lot of really great stuff.
And then just realizing, like, well, okay. Of course, I love this stuff because I was in college radio, and it’s all interesting to me. But how do I make that interesting to someone who maybe isn’t in college radio? How do I draw them into the story? How do we kind of give them some sort of, like, emotional connection to the story?
And I had help with that. You know, it wasn’t just me. Jillian Corsi was the story consultant who helped me really kinda refine what was just kind of this, like, string of interviews and string of things to, like, turn that into something that actually felt like a story. I think college radio people probably would have been fine watching, you know, something that was just a a set of interviews of college radio people. But, again, I think when you sit down and watch a movie, you wanna be taken on a journey.
And Yeah. I do think we achieved that, but I definitely wasn’t that I I need to give a lot of credit to the people that helped kinda shape the story. I’m curious what your favorite part of the film is. I don’t think I have a favorite part. The ending is really superb.
I don’t wanna give anything away. Again, I talked about vibe and tribe, but I think overall, like, in this media saturated world that we live in today, it’s obvious that the traditional forms of media, TV, radio, newspapers, especially magazines have definitely fallen by the wayside. I think it just really drives home that being part of something like this is not necessarily standing behind a mic and and, you know, spewing about a band that you just played or showing off how much your music knowledge is or anything like that. I think it’s more of a collective experience. I think Stacy talks a lot about that in the film about finding your tribe and finding yourself in that space.
You know, it’s like we were the original content creators. Like every kid today grows up and wants to be a content creator. Right? When my son who is now 16 was in 5th grade and they had all the 5th graders on stage because they were about to, you know, move on to middle school. They asked each one of the 5th graders what they wanted to be when they grew up.
And I’d say 90% of them said I wanna be a YouTube star. You know, I wanna be a content creator. I look at it in the fact that we were the original content creators and we were the original influencers. I mean, obviously, we had the media channel control and we were talking about what’s cool. And we were cool, you know.
I think that’s what I really just take away from the film. We really were influencers, though. Like, I don’t I don’t love that word, obviously, you know, like the idea of being an influencer. But, I do think, you know, particularly in the seventies and the eighties and and up through really till the very end of the nineties when the Internet starts to become, you know, a place where you can go and discover music and bands are really starting to use that technology. It was our generation that went through the transition from vinyl to CD.
Even when you and I are at KTXT, we transitioned from CD to digital. You know, we we digitized everything and everything played out of the computer at that point. And you and I talked about this previously how at the university we had access to this thing called the Internet and email. Like this is all early nineties. Right?
And so we were like looking up band information on this worldwide web thing and prodigy bulletin boards and finding information about the bands and the shows we’re putting together back then. We were just really fortunate to have gone through so many cultural milestones like we created our own music format, college rock became its own format. We were the launches of the alternative music scene or indie rock, you know, and we were grasping the technology at our fingertips and using that to our advantage, it was just an amazing time. And I think a lot of people don’t see that, that part of it. Like they like to concentrate on, oh, what happened behind the mic?
They like to concentrate on the shenanigans that took place or the backstage passes or bringing their creative vinyl up to the station and playing the music that they love. And that’s all great, but there’s so much more to it. And I just love that the film captures that. Oh, you know, there’s things that I didn’t know going in, which, like, Jennifer Waits, who’s the college radio historian who appears in the film, filled in a lot of details for me about early college radio that I didn’t know. So, you know, a lot of that was new information that I didn’t have going into it.
There were stories about, like, the news side of college radio, which most people don’t even really think about or appreciate, in terms of having, like, a, an independent and non corporate voice for students that can broadcast. And so we heard stories of people, bringing a member of the KKK on so that they could kind of show how despicable that was and have a big group of kids waiting for them to come out of the studio. You know? They were, like, yelling at people. Riot protest.
Yeah. Like, literally, there are stories about, you know, the Harvard protest in the sixties and how the WHRB, the station there was covering that when other media wasn’t covering it. There’s interviews with James Faust who was actually the station manager when I first started at KTXT talking about the infamous parties party in the projects at ktx or, at Texas Tech where the frats and the sororities had these parties where they were dressing up like slaves and and just the most awful, like, racist stuff. And in a town like Lubbock, Texas, the mainstream media isn’t really gonna really, go after Texas Tech, the largest employer in, like, in the entire, area. You know what I mean?
So, like, for student radio to be able to to have a an hour long show that really dove into that, and I remember we did updates as that story progressed. That’s a side of college radio that I don’t even think I appreciated even though some of that happened while I was there. I don’t think that I fully appreciated how important that was. Mhmm. And because I was never really on the news side of things, how many people got, great experience also from that, learning how to write copy, learning how to attack problem like that.
How do we how do we get the word out about something like this that’s a sensitive, controversial issue? You know, that that all is all part of college radio. You know, it’s all part of the story. And Stacy talks about that too. Stacy Thornton Baloo, she’s in the film.
She was at KTXT the same time as we were. She talks about that too and I think it’s one of her first times on the air. She had to break a a a story because she happened to be in the right place at the right time. And, you know, things can go wrong in those spaces too, and that’s what’s great about college radio. It’s a it’s a learning ground.
Whereas if things go wrong on air in college radio, you’re not gonna get fired like you would like in, you know, traditional media especially at that time. So, you know, things can go wrong too. Like, you know, in the film we talk about how big Steve got his big break to talk to the head coach of tech football who was like god in our hometown. Yeah. Did a great 30 minute interview with him, and I won’t spoil it.
But, yeah, things can go wrong when you least expect it. And that’s part of the experience is like how do you deal, how do you think on your feet. And Stacy turned that into a career, and you’ll have to watch the film to to hear that into this story. But There’s a certain degree of, like, natural talent that I think some people have for communicating on a mic in front of a camera or whatever, but don’t get the opportunity. And that’s where college radio opens the doors for so many people that otherwise would not have found that talent or realized they had that talent or been able to develop that talent in an actual real way because there’s you know, you can kinda theoretically think about, oh, how I would do it or whatever, but when you’re actually in a booth with your, you know, script or or your notes or whatever and you flip the switch and the honor light comes on, that is a totally different moment than being in your bedroom talking into, like, a hairbrush.
You know what I mean? Yeah. Into the mirror. Right. Yeah.
This is it’s real and it’s it’s palpable, when you’re in that situation. And then and that’s what’s cool about college radio to this day is that it gives kids that opportunity to have that on air light staring at you and realize there’s people, you know, waiting for you to talk and say something. That’s a really cool aspect, and and there are certain people that are very, very good at it. We were talking about how we when we were there, we were embracing new technology at the time, built, bulletin boards, the Internet, email, that kind of thing. Just to said back to like actually how we got the film made, well, again, here we are 30 years later.
We have a story to tell. We we’re learning all these experiences, these shared experiences, and we embrace technology again. So, you and I came together again after 30 something years because I’m rabid social media well, I shouldn’t say rabid because I don’t participate in all platforms, but I am a big consumer of social media content, I should say. Okay. And then you’re not.
So you were the exact opposite, but your wife is on social media here and there. And I think it was October of 2021 and our KTX alumni group on Facebook, your wife had posted, hey. If anybody’s wondering what Michael’s been up to these last few years, he’s got this idea. And me being, you know, a huge fan of KTX and the experience that it brought to me and so many others, I jumped right in. I think I emailed you immediately.
I was like, oh, hey. Let’s do this. You know? That was in October of 2021. And by February of 2022, I had quit my job and was doing a career shift, different story, and had time in my life and I just you know, you and I were like right back at it and said, let’s do this.
So very long story short, we basically launched a kick starter and got this movie funded from our fans. I reached out to like hundreds of college radio stations and their alum groups on Facebook and told them about our ideas. I reached out to some really big, entities. I guess you could call them that really feature, this time frame, the music of this time frame. The cruel world festival had just launched that year when we started the kick starter, so we got a lot of support from those fans.
Slicing up eyeballs is another one, which is cool because that’s a reference to a pixie song who are in the movie. And, Brooklyn Vegan, they all helped us promote the Kickstarter, and we ended up doing it. It was, like, one of the best days of my life, to be honest. So, yeah, you coming in at that time was it was critical for a couple reasons. 1, it kind of breed, like, a whole new shot of energy into the project.
Like, we’ve been at it for a while. You know, you start to just kinda flag with your excitement about a project when you’re in it. Not that we weren’t excited, but, you know, it’s hard to keep that momentum up throughout the entire thing. So we kinda got that new breath of fresh energy and then just the social media knowledge and what what I felt like we needed to be successful in the Kickstarter, and we were. It turns out that we that we that we made it, and I don’t think we would have if we hadn’t brought you in and had you be so involved with it.
And that allowed us to go to Athens, Georgia. That allowed us to go to Los Angeles and get some of the other interviews that really, I think, fill the film out, make it a very well rounded look at college radio, not you know, beyond KTXT, beyond kind of what we were able to shoot during that first set of interviews. And it it started bringing a lot more people into the fold because you really need a lot of support when you’re making a film just among people who are gonna tell people about it, who are gonna share it, who are, you know, gonna be your cheerleaders. And so I think your outreach helped bring a lot of people, right off the top of my head. I’m thinking people like Dede Thornton, who is kind of a a legendary college radio figure on the East Coast, particularly, and, maybe would never have connected with us if it hadn’t been for you being on social media and kind of putting it out there.
Those types of people getting involved helped us make connections, helped us do what we needed to do to to make it to the finish line. And so it was a really, just great timing and and a great, a good mix of skill sets. That’s what I’m trying to say. Right? Your skill set really filled in a blank in my skill sets.
You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. This hole in my skill sets, and you came in and filled that hole.
And that was got us all the way through, you know, production and into post production. And then we met a couple other people who did the same thing who came in kinda near the end and breathed in another fresh bolt of energy, filled in a couple other holes in our skill sets, and and allowed us to finish it. But that was really yeah. You came in at a very critical time. I think, you know, and that’s part of the reason why we decided to do this podcast too was because, like, we only had 75 minutes to tell this story.
But in all the research and the content gathering to make the film, we made so many brilliant, excellent, awesome potential connections for more stories to be told. And, you know, not everybody we talked to could be on film, wanted to be on film, were available, and we just kinda had to back burner those people. But now with the podcast, we can go anywhere. And so, we got a great lineup coming up. We’ve got about 5 already queued up and ready to go.
I’m just so excited to talk to the people that I’ve been making connections with. You know, the infamous George Gimarc. He’s got a great story to tell about how he brought music to the United States in the eighties. Just he’s just the goat. He is the goat.
You know, Didi and Bill, her husband, super influential for that part of town, part of their time. We’re gonna do a story on 1 hit wonders with our former music director from KTXT, Keith Porterfield. Again, just so many stories to tell. It’s amazing, like, how many people reached out to us once the ball got rolling. And once people kinda found out we were serious, we were capable, we really wanted to do this.
And now, of course, now that the film is out and people have seen it, we still get people talking about, oh, you know, you should have talked about our station, or, oh, man, our station has such a great story, or, oh, you know, or I was in a band and yeah. I was in a band. Yeah. There’s artists that that agreed to talk to us that we that we were never able to just connect with because we still had a very limited budget. You know, we couldn’t travel everywhere.
So these people right off the top of my head, I know Kristen Hirsch from Throwing Muses was so nice, answered, like, 8 or 9 different emails from me at different times, trying to figure out could we connect? Could we get her on camera? We never did, but I I feel sure that she’ll be willing to go on the podcast. So so, yeah, that’s it’s kind of a great way to kind of wrap up this first episode is the film is out. You can go see it right now.
You can go to www.35000 watts.com and download the film, to watch it. And it’s a great introduction to college radio. It’s a great, you know, high level overview of college radio. And now the podcast, this very podcast that you’re listening to right now, we want to kinda continue the story that you see in the film. There are hundreds of stations that each have, like, their own little individual stories.
There are thousands of people who have participated in college radio or were artists that were played on college radio. We wanna kinda tap into that, and we just we there’s no way you could do that even in you could make 10 films and not do that, but podcasting really gives you such a great venue to dive much, much, much deeper into all these little things that we discovered when we were making the film. And so that is is the point of 35,000 Watts, the podcast. That’s what we want to achieve, and we hope you’ll, come along on the journey with us. And, of course, you can find us at all the socials out there.
We’re on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and now TikTok. And as we said at KCXT, keep it locked to the left, and we’ll see you for the next episode on 35,000 Watts, the podcast.