The Midnight Special

It is funny how little turns can make a big impact on direction. In 1984 my wife and I decided to buy a new television and sign up for cable after years of fighting rabbit ears. The installer asked if he should hook the cable up to our FM receiver as well. He said the local stations might be clearer plus there were a few out of town stations that came in on the satellite. (This was a little known service and when Time-Warner dropped it later they said that they had never had FM radio available. It was not listed in the program guide. Weird?)

We quickly found WFMT out of Chicago. WFMT is a classical station but they have a weekly three hour aberration they call “The Midnight Special” named after the old Leadbelly song. The Midnight Special is described as three hours of folk, farce, show tunes, satire, madness, and escape. The Midnight Special host, Rich Warren, plays songs by little known or local artists that are self-produced or on small labels. Some are from live recordings at concerts or local clubs. I loved it.

I began taping the show on Saturday night so I could listen to it during the day while working. After a while I began making what I called a Midnight Special Highlight Tape of some of my favorite songs. Over the next ten or fifteen years I accumulated about thirty hours of highlight tapes. We hardly ever shared this wonderful music with friends because it seemed that few of the people we knew shared our eclectic taste in music.

I began to realize that it wasn’t fair to the artist to listen to their music for free, so I began to seek out my favorites and buy their CDs. This was no small task before the internet. My wife and even had a “Midnight Special Weekend” where we drove to Chicago and patronized all the show’s sponsors and went to some of the clubs mentioned on the air. A record store in the loop, I believe it was Tower Records, even had a bin just for Midnight Special artists.

Because of the Midnight Special, I heard about “The Old Town School of Folk Music,” as well as places like ”The Earl of Old Town,” and “Somebody Else’s Troubles.” I think I probably first heard about the Kerrville, Texas Music Festival on the Midnight Special. I have since had the privilege of going to the Old Town School of Folk Music, the Kerrville Festival and others as well. It was through this exposure that my musical taste grew wide and deep.

When it was time to open my own music venue, “Homer’s Coffee House,” because of my trips to Chicago’s Lincoln Avenue, I had a pretty good idea of how to showcase local singer/songwriters and bands to a discriminating audience. When I decided to start writing songs myself, the Chicago “superstars” like Steve Goodman and John Prine were my guides.

WFMT and its long time host, Rich Warren, are now on XM satellite radio and can be heard over the internet. But I often wonder how my life would have been different had that cable installer not suggested that I hook the TV cable to my FM receiver.