Appendix C

Speech Before Final Performance from Indianapolis-based Band Wishy

Community radio for South-Central Indiana, WFHB, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Bloomington Community Radio Project! [Audience cheers.] Tonight is a celebration of WFHB past and present, that’s the hashtag, #WFHBPastAndPresent, that you should use on social media so we can see what a good time you’re having. I’ve been a music mix DJ at WFHB since the year it went on the air in 1993. [Audience cheers.] Thank you. It’s one of the greatest honors of my life to be here with you celebrating today, to celebrate a project that has meant so much to so many people. I want to personally thank the people who started this project, this opportunity to share good music and to share it with Bloomington.

The event we’re celebrating tonight took place about three months before the first ever episode of Saturday Night Live. SNL has been a national platform for comedy, for rising stars, and for music in the same way Bloomington has its own platform, its own institution, with a fifty-year-old origin story. All these years, WFHB has been providing a forum for news and opinion and celebrating and increasing the local cultural diversity. For me, WFHB is why Bloomington is great. It’s a platform like SNL, a local platform for music, news, public affairs, old folks, young folks, and people of every stripe.

Take, for example, Firehouse Sessions. They’re now being filmed and posted to WFHB’s YouTube channel thanks to No Guru Media who’s here tonight. [Audience cheers.] Let’s hear it. Firehouse Sessions are having a direct impact on the music scene here because touring bands are now being routed through Bloomington just to do a Firehouse Session. [Audience cheers.] Local Live, every Monday night, is Firehouse Sessions for local artists, one of the main priorities of the station from day one. Our oldest running live session show, Saturday’s Child, is still going strong every month.

Our news department produces the Daily Local News show. It just won three first-place awards and a second-place award at the Indiana Society for Professional Journalists. [Audience cheers.] Let’s hear it for them. BloomingOUT, Hola Bloomington, Bring it On, Eco Report, Hearabouts, the new Asian American public affairs show. KiteLine and Bring It On have both won awards from SPJ. We have a whole wall of news awards going back fifteen years at the station.

And talk about your weird music. You’ve got your jazz, your blues, your reggae, your music from all over the world, your noise, your Melodies Unasked For. Our bond with the Lotus Festival is pretty tight.

Youth Radio now has 27 kids volunteering to produce and perform shows. [Audience cheers.]

All these programs, all these experiences, all these community-strengthening ties were made possible by a couple of guys in conversation in a garage more than fifty years ago. Sounds a little bit like Apple Computer, but it’s describing WFHB. The vision they concocted, the quest they pursued, and the people they inspired to join them, you can see a representation of that here tonight. The station’s never been on better financial footing than it’s been in the past few years. The donation that Brian Kearney got from Cecile Waldron did something that killed far older and worthier community stations than ours: it eliminated rent. I visited KZUN in Lincoln, Nebraska, where they had just moved because they could not afford rent. It’s killed worthier stations than ours. But there were several times in the past thirty years that having access to the Firehouse free and clear is what made the difference between a current and a former radio station. Now, we’re growing an endowment. We’ve raised about $60,000. We’ve got more than $123,000 in the endowment fund. It’s really great.

But as we speak, the station’s viability is under threat. In the U.S. Senate right now is that bill to rescind, to actually take back money issued to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. [Audience boos.] They don’t even have the decency to just zero out next year’s budget. They’re trying to take back the money that was already allocated. The threat to CPB is a huge threat to the viability of budgets like WFHB’s and every non-commercial radio station in the country. Some of these, our shows that I just described, some of the station’s initiatives may have to go if the Senate passes that bill, which could be as early as next week. If you can, please call every Senator you can and tell them to not let this bill pass. Please. [Audience cheers.]

We’re here for you and because of you. We’re volunteer-powered, listener-supported community radio. WFHB is a light in the darkness, a port we have to make safe from the brewing storm. These are difficult times. We ask you to do what you can. But I don’t want to bring the show down.

Before I go on, can I just give thanks for one other thing: the fact that the venue where community radio in Bloomington was born is still here more than fifty years later. Let’s hear it for the Bluebird. [Audience cheers.] The guy who’s kept it alive for a lot of that time deserves some kudos as well. Let’s hear it for the Bluebird and Dave Kubiak! [Audience cheers.] Where’s Kube? Where’s Kube, the monosyllabic Dave Kubiak? Anyway, speaking of pillars of the community, he’s one.

It’s time for our final act tonight. Two members of this band first met in high school in Carmel. Late in 2022, they had a fateful session in La La Land with musician, producer, and former Bloomingtonian Ben Lumsdaine, who ended up engineering, mixing, and coproducing their album, hang on a sec… [Steve runs a few steps to the edge of the stage to pick up a vinyl copy of Wishy’s latest album; audience cheers.] …called Triple Seven, and the EPs that came from it, they recorded more songs out in LA and here in Bloomington, which received enthusiastic receptions and critical acclaim from Pitchfork, Stereogum, the New York Times, GQ, the [unclear; audience cheers.] They’re back home again in Indiana from their national tour with the band Momma. How could we better celebrate fifty years than with an act from around here in the venue where community radio was born? WFHB and the Bloomington Community Radio project are proud to present Wishy! [Audience cheers as Wishy comes on stage.]