Dahl: Building podcast dynasty from the ground, er, basement up

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: In his weekly column, which appears today in the Chicago Tribune, Steve Dahl writes about his new podcast adventures, comparing it to his early radio dream beginnings: : : .................... : Building podcast dynasty from the ground, er, basement up : Steve Dahl : September 10, 2009 : You might have read in Tuesday's Tribune that I have embarked upon a new broadcasting journey. I am now podcasting from my basement. It's sort of full circle for me. I originally started out playing radio in my bedroom when I was a kid. Now, there's an Internet to hook myself up to. : KRAT, as I called my radio station in my bedroom, consisted of a Sears Silvertone stereo turntable with green felt on it for "slip-cueing," which helps time songs, and a microphone fashioned out of a bar of soap. : Just kidding about the bar of soap. : I can't remember what the microphone was made out of. Maybe it was even a banana. I didn't have access to any real equipment back then, and I was only 13 or 14. There was no driving down to Grayson's Tunetown to pick up something like a real microphone. Plus, I wasn't really plugged into anything. Sometimes I would call the station KSRD after my initials. If I were feeling especially shock-jockish, I would give my fake radio station the call letters KRAP. That's the rapier-sharp edge that I still possess to this day. : Had I grown up east of the Mississippi, where only a handful of stations have call letters beginning with K, I would have gone with WRAP, and perhaps been responsible for the invention of a brand-new type of urban rhyming music or a delightful new way to eat a sandwich inside of a fresh flour tortilla. Podcasting is a bit of a misnomer, because one doesn't really need an iPod or any other MP3 device to listen. Most podcasts also stream from a Web site. In my case, it would be my Web site. You can also download podcasts from iTunes and arrange to have them sent to you on a daily basis. I love radio, but it's getting harder and harder for people to make time to listen in their cars or at work during these demanding and fragmented times. Yes, this week, I'm pushing the fresh podcast. We can prepare it however you like. : The nerd in me had a lot of fun putting my basement studio together. Yes, that's the very same nerd who played radio in his bedroom and started a radio club at his high school without any equipment. The Flintridge Broadcasters were a group of about five or six prep-school chums, misled by me into thinking that we had the resources and the wherewithal to put together a closed-circuit radio station on campus. Everybody bought into it. The school even gave us a clubhouse. I ordered a bunch of egg crates for sound-proofing and left before I was discovered a la Professor Harold Hill in "The Music Man." : As of Wednesday afternoon, we were the top comedy podcast on iTunes for my new home-schooled broadcasting venture. I told Phil Rosenthal in the Tribune that I was hoping to have at least 5,000 a day and anything after that would be considered gravy. I'm a guy who used to put on a radio show in his bedroom for his own amusement. I know how it feels to be broadcasting to no one. This time, I have the listeners and the actual equipment. I am way ahead of my usual self-administrated broadcast game. Now, if I only had some turntables that I could cover with green felt.

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