Last night, my friend Dave and I channeled our inner Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.
Except we’re not kids anymore.
But we were just kids when we worked at 97X.
It was the station that played either weird music for weird kids or cool music for cool kids, depending on your perspective.
Dave and I have been doing a podcast about 97X since 2018. We’ve posted more than 120 episodes. That’s a lot of scheduling, recording, editing, posting and promoting.
But a couple of months ago, I floated the idea of doing a live event for the small-but-mighty crew of 97X faithful. We reached out to our friend and former 97X co-worker Julie Maxwell, who lives in Detroit but has a daughter living in Cincinnati, to see when she might be in town. Oct. 10th was a viable option. As fate would have it, another friend and former co-worker, Mike Taylor, also was going to be in town as well — from France!
Better yet, The Columbia – an old church that my friend Laura owns — was available that evening.
The fates were aligning. We HAD to do it.
So Dave and I cooked up the first-ever “97Xtravaganza.” A live podcast recording with Julie and Mike. Music trivia. Playing some old audio clips from the station. And just hanging out with old friends.
It should be noted that we had no idea how to actually record the podcast. Or how to set up the music trivia. And we had no idea if anyone other than Julie and Mike would actually show up.
But show up they did.
Better yet, they had a great time.
You can call us weird all you want. But I think it was cool that “the future of rock and roll” still means a lot to a lot of people, 22 years after it went off the airwaves.
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