November 21, 2004

• Meet Jim Kloss

  He’s a blogger who joined Xanga when he already had a thriving blog
  going, just so he could leave comments on my site.  Back a couple
  of years ago when he was just starting his webcast thing and I was
  blogging my biker-years memoirs, he was reading my daily blogs to his
  listeners. 

  He had found SuSu with his daily Google search
  for “Talkeetna” (done so he’d have local color to offer his listeners) after I had taken some pics of the 4th of July parade
  there.  He already knew Greyfox from the roadside stand, and it
  took him a while to put us together.  Now, Jim and his lady Esther
  are in the news.

  I ran into Jim one day on the street in Talkeetna, and had to laugh
  because we were treating each other like celebrities, all, “Wow!, it’s
  really you.”  I’ve tried listening to his show, but with my slow
  dialup connection it’s interrupted a lot.  Sometimes I chat a bit,
  but it has been a while.  Jim, if you see this, it was great
  getting an update out of ADN.

  Radio in the raw

  Talkeetna webcasters build a small but worldwide audience

  

  

  By JOSH NIVA
  Anchorage Daily News
  

  (Published: November 21, 2004)

  Esther Golton fills in for Jim Kloss on Whole Wheat Radio while he heads for the outhouse. “We couldn’t plan (broadcasts) if we wanted to,” Kloss says. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News) Whole Wheat Radio’s play list includes songs from CDs that musicians across the country send to Talkeetna. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News) Golton and Kloss run Whole Wheat Radio out of their 12-by-12-foot cabin in Talkeetna. The station is Web-based and requires no antennas. The building to the left is an unfinished house and studio, where they plan to produce live music for broadcast. ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News) Kloss broadcasts live over the Web during his daily morning show and watches the Web site’s chat room, where listeners make their presence known. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News) Jim Kloss climbs the ladder to the loft of his Talkeetna cabin, a bedroom that shares space with the little Whole Wheat Radio studio in which he does a live webcast at 11 a.m. daily. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News) Whole Wheat Radio’s Esther Golton interviews Peter Belanger, a Talkeetna visitor who runs a performing arts co-op in Fall River, Mass. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News) Golton prepares lunch for workers building a new house and studio on her and Kloss’ property and for friends who have stopped by to chat. (Photo by Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News) Click on photo to enlarge

  
  

  
  TALKEETNA — Jim Kloss is mid-rave in the early
  moments of his weekday morning talk show, “Rant-N-Raving Muffin,” when
  his co-host and life partner, Esther Golton, halts his rambling.

  “We’ve got to empty the slop bucket!” Golton says into her microphone.

  A few visitors have joined Golton on the ground floor of Whole Wheat
  Radio’s studio, and so has a mild odor. Kloss, who goes by the on-air
  handle Jimbob, grumbles, reels in his rave and pulls off his
  headphones. He climbs down a ladder from the upper studio, which also
  happens to be the bedroom loft of the couple’s cramped 12-by-12-foot
  cabin.

  Golton interviews guests as Kloss high-steps around household
  items and a jungle of mike stands, cables and folding chairs on the
  ground floor. Reaching under the kitchen sink, he grabs a bucket handle
  and stomps out the door with a moan.

  “Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” Golton says with a laugh.

  Wheatheads — the station’s regular listeners — join Golton in piling
  on Kloss, but he doesn’t hear them when he slides his headphones back
  on. That’s because Whole Wheat Radio doesn’t have listener phone lines.
  The station doesn’t have any antennas, play lists or even an AM or FM
  frequency.

  Listeners communicate with Golton, 38, and Kloss, 48, via chat room.
  WWR is broadcast over the World Wide Web from this little cabin in a
  quiet, wooded area a few minutes from downtown Talkeetna.

  The station doesn’t have running water or indoor plumbing, but it does
  have a loyal, worldwide audience for its format of independent music
  and independent thought.

  “Commercial radio is just a wasteland that’s not meeting the needs of
  people, really,” explained Rod MacDonald, a singer-songwriter from
  Florida who started tuning in to WWR a year ago and toured Alaska this
  summer. “What amazes me when I travel around is what really good music
  is being made and how little of it I can find on the radio. Stations
  like Whole Wheat Radio are giving people a chance to hear a much wider
  range of music.”

  NOTHING CANNED

  August marked the second anniversary of Whole Wheat Radio’s live launch.

  Kloss opened WWR — originally a canned broadcast known as Radio Free
  Talkeetna — playing music from his own collection, mostly classic rock
  like The Who along with some James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. It was
  also a forum for the opinionated Kloss.

  “It was the freedom to say what I wanted to say and, of course, a love
  of music,” says Kloss. “But I couldn’t believe people would tune in and
  listen.”

  Few did, initially. Kloss quickly tired of prerecorded radio, dumped
  his mainstream approach and went indie — with the music, with the
  format, with the Web site, www.wholewheatradio.org.

  The current musical format focuses on the singer-songwriter vein in
  genres like folk, jazz, blues and bluegrass, while also highlighting
  Alaska artists. There’s also a little pop and country. Once Kloss
  settled on this format, people started tuning in.

  Today, WWR hovers around its 60-listener limit (10 dial-up and 50
  high-speed lines are available). This happens frequently during the
  “Rant-N-Raving Muffin” show, the station’s only daily program hosted by
  humans. Most other between-song filler is provided by the station’s 30
  “EJ” personalities, computer programs created by Kloss to select music
  from the station’s library of 42,000 songs and which use electronic
  voices to read copy.

  The first time the station reached its listener limit, then 50, it crashed.

  “All right! Fifty! It was a record day,” Golton says, smiling. “And then the site went blah!”

  Kloss recently expanded the listener lines to 60, though it was a pricey move financially and psychologically.

  “We’re very conservative, fiscally and everything else,” he says. “And
  I don’t want this to become a big thing that I lay in bed and worry
  about.”

  And they do worry.

  “Every gadget we’ve added back into our lives has been a heartbreak,”
  says Golton, pulling pita pizzas out of a toaster oven while preparing
  lunch one day this summer.

  Now the couple, who moved to Alaska for a quieter life, have this to
  ponder: They’ve built a cabin just to house their radio station.

  There’s more… it’s a multi-page story in today’s Anchorage Daily News, and you can read the rest there for a limited time only.

  • 3:32 pm
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