A FAN’S NOTES

CKUA Spring Fundraising Drive

When you ask them, How much can we give? They only answer, More, more, more! – Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Fortunate Son”

Transmit the message to the receiver, hope for an answer some day – Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”

Sometimes, a big ask is genuine, from a desperate heart.

The radio in the Crooked 9 is like the one in “Roadrunner” by the Modern Lovers, on for a stretch. Ann and I tend to tune in for two or three hours each morning while we enjoy our coffees and newspaper sections. Our default FM frequency setting is CKUA, Alberta’s public radio station, which has been broadcasting since 1927. Our AM band alternative is CBC Radio One. Canadian readers of this blog who pay attention to actual news (a legitimate source, unbiased, just facts, context and information) will note that the “Mother Corp.” was graced with a very plump $42-million plum in this week’s federal budget – no complaints here except that maybe buying more rights to more idiotic American game shows for the television arm is cultural heresy, or just lazy – I digress.

CKUA is a legacy institution, a heritage institution that predates the formation of the CBC. It contributes to Alberta’s cultural life and, crucially, promotes and chronicles the province’s arts and culture scene in real time. That’s a major mandate and a self-imposed one at that. There is nothing else quite like CKUA in Alberta, maybe even all of Canada. Listeners are free to tune in to anything out there on the airwaves. If “Brown Sugar” is commercial-corporate radio, CKUA is “Moonlight Mile” and “Sway”. Its programming is essentially formatless. The menu of shows and the genres its hosts concentrate on is extensive: jazz, funk, blues, country, classical, choral, world beat, reggae, rap and all their fantastical hybrids. 

The odds of CKUA surviving long enough to celebrate its centennial are looking long. Skin of its teeth but not fly by night, the station survives mainly on donations from its audience of nearly half a million people, only a fraction of whom actually chip in. Government grants are miniscule. Advertising revenue, mainly because there’s very little, is minimal. Ann and I are regular donors.

Money’s too tight to mention; things are tough all over: The ability to contemplate a donation of any size after your own needs and obligations have been seen to is something of a gift in itself. There are some 80,000 registered charities in Canada on top of other tax deductible giving options – together they almost all add up to the number of paint swatches at Home Depot. Choosing isn’t easy. I figure God doesn’t need my money, so He/She/They/It is out. I’ve never donated to a political party because I look at the shallow talent pool and figure pond scum doesn’t need feeding. Ecology, medical research and treatments, educational institutions, food banks, street ministries, youth athletics …

To me, a society with a sterile cultural life defined and exemplified by the books it bans and Disney+ substituting for soma really is a Brave New World dystopia. Admittedly, CKUA has been precious from time to time, flawed. Old songs whose lyrics may be perceived as insensitive by evolving contemporary standards have been introduced with trigger warnings. "Coloured” was bleeped from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”. And, so help me God, Ann and I once heard an utterly wretched, breathy, Diana Krall-inspired, airport Holiday Inn cocktail lounge happy hour light jazz version of “After the Gold Rush” as sung by (we imagined) an anorexic waif. Sometimes, you know, you have to twist the input knob on the tuner and put AC/DC in the CD player. On the other hand, thank you CKUA for introducing us to Eddie 9V and Shaela Miller. Overall, Ann and I as listeners have been winners, chart toppers by virtue of sitting in our kitchen.

Albertans need arts and culture in all of their forms: high, low and pop. Like CKUA’s programming, we don’t have to like or appreciate all of it, but it’s got to be available, even just to dismiss, sneer at. The province (the country and the world) is a big and magically diverse place, sometimes too big to see until something like CKUA supplies a proper lens.

CKUA’s spring fundraising drive is underway now. For more comprehensive information about the current tenuous state of affairs at this venerable public radio station and its programming schedule visit www.ckua.com where you can also tune in and listen from virtually anywhere on the globe.                          

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project (as heard on CKUA) or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.