coFFee eXpress )) blah blah blah

	what the hell is the coffee express, anyway? The Coffee Express combines live, on-air jam and DJ sessions with the sounds and words of on-air phone callers. It is an improvised, interactive attempt at broadcasting the zeitgeist. Or whatever. Listen to the shows.

when where who how
Broadcasts are every Thursday night, 1a.m. – 3a.m. (or Friday morning, depending on how you look at it). Albuquerque is in the Mountain time zone, which is 2 hours earlier than the US east coast and 1 hour later than the US west coast.

Thanks are hereby due to the staff and management of KUNM, the Radio Board of KUNM and all the tasty volunteers, pals, friends and schizoid paranoiacs who ended up making this what it is.....that being an officially sanctioned and approved radio program at KUNM that appears in the program schedule. Yay.

And please: support your public radio station. It really truly is a good thing. Not perfect, but good. And that can be a rare thing indeed.

visit KUNM.org go...

coffee express historical claptrap
There used to be this program director at KUNM. One time, after moving twice, and losing girlfriends and jobs and all that, I asked her (the program director) if I might audition for an overnight freeform slot that was opening at the station.

See, I used to do the satellite/weather breaks during NPR's Morning Edition. I had conned a guy named Lewi Longmire, a good musician friend of mind, to come up early, early on Friday dawns and play acoustic guitar behind my weather and public service breaks.

We picked up a strange following of office people. Strange weather, strange folks, I guess. We used to do stuff like surrreal Mozart trivia questions during Performance Today, giving away classical concert tickets and what not...Lynn Springer, then at the NMSO, was instrumental, really, in making us infamous...she thought we were cute and funny and she gave us stuff to give away. We always loved you, baby.

Off-mic we called our little weather scene The Coffee Express, because our radio train didn't leave the station without a lot of coffee. Get it? Leave the station?

Anyway, back to the program director. Lewi and I had been doing our emotional weather reports for a while, getting restless, and I had applied for this overnight Thursday shift. The last act this program director performed at the station before leaving for greener, brighter media horizons, was to give me the shift. She did this "against her own better judgment." She did NOT like us for reasons that are still hazy...

A few shows into the now overnight weekly affair, Lewi and my soul trooper Rob Johnson and a woman from Boulder and New York and the Stony Brook Press, named Karin Falcone, gathered at KUNM and started this THING. This miasma of sound and stuff that we threw together on the spot. It's an old idea, actually, we just didn't realize it at the time. But it sounded cool to us and the phone callers loved it. We kept the name, given that coffee is even more necessary for overnight shifts. So you can leave the station. Because you've got to have steam in the boiler. Get it? Leave the station? Anyway....

That was in the Autumn of 1991. We were much younger. When I listen to the tapes, I can hear it the voices -- so many cigarettes and loves and radio programs ago...

- cg, 2/98

OK -- flash forward a bunch of years. 99 years. Or something. A program proposal is fleshed out to make The Coffee Express an "official" program. The KUNM "program proposal" is actually a series of questions -- and answers -- that determine what a program is, what it is meant to be, and how it serves the KUNM Mission.

The process of getting a program proposal approved is not simple, nor short. The proposal is first reviewed by staff and such at the station, THEN forwarded to the staff/volunteer population at large, THEN forwarded to the Radio Board (an independent elected/appointed body) for debate. Then you wait and attend meetings and hope everybody likes your aircheck (tape of a broadcast). For the record, I chose the aircheck at random, blind, from a big black bag filled with the damn things. I also distributed Vol. 1 of the Coffee Express Compilation to Radio Board members.

The Board approved The Coffee Express as a "real" show in the Autumn of 99. The official format was shortened to 2 hours, every week. Yay. The show was added to the program guide (bigger yay). I want to personally thank in the biggest way: Roy Durfee, volunteer rep. on the Board and Andrew Stone, community rep. on the Board. I thank them for supporting the proposal so vehemently, for helping to keep the show in its Thursday night slot, and ESPECIALLY FOR BEING TOTAL PUBLIC MANIACS. Ha ha.

One note -- the approved proposal expires when the host departs, i.e., the show doesn't go on w/o me......if I quit, that's it.

- cg 5/01

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