I Brought My Old Column Pod-Canon Out of Retirement Solely to Sing the Praises of 108.9 The Hawk!
I’ve written here extensively about the dreary adult ritual of checking out the line-up for a major festival and not recognizing a single goddamn name. There’s something depressing as well as inevitable about this moment.
The older you get, the less time you generally have for the kind of passionate music fandom you might have indulged in during your passionate, curious youth.
Adult life is full of exhausting, soul-crushing responsibilities. Work and family replace late nights at clubs checking out a much buzzed about new act. New music becomes something we’re reluctantly but thoroughly willing to leave to kids with all the energy and passion in the world.
That’s the lazy majesty of classic rock radio. It is, by definition, a world that pretty much anyone who listens at all to pop music will be able to recognize immediately and thoroughly because classic rock radio only plays songs that are not just hits but absolute smashes that everyone knows, whether they like them or not.
There’s consequently something soothing and flattering about being in a realm where everything is familiar and has been vetted as an all-time hit by the masses.
Instead of confronting the seemingly impossible challenge of keeping up to date with new music classic rock invites us to look back forever at a past it romanticizes aggressively.
It tells us that just by being alive for a period of decades we’ve already heard of the music we will ever need to hear and that we can happily spend the rest of our lives listening to the music that was meaningful to us when we were fourteen years old.
All of which is a very wordy, long-winded way of saying that, this being 2023, I don’t actually listen to the radio at all. I certainly don’t listen to classic rock radio I am the perfect demographic for 108.9 The Hawk, a classic rock podcast co-hosted by Jason Gore and Geoff Garlock.
Gore has one of those sonorous voices that makes you feel like you’ve been listening to it all your life. If you’re going to parody the impossibly rich, fertile subject of classic rock radio it sure helps if you have the chops to pull off the straight version and Gore would not sound out of place on any classic rock radio station in the world.
In a sense I have been listening to Gore my whole life because he is an essential part of the independent incarnation of The Best Show and I listened to the WFMU version for decade dating back to the end of the last millennium.
The irresistible conceit of 108.9 The Hawk is that it is an oldies station in Val Verde, California, a town overrun by rock stars of a certain age. It’s a city built on rock and roll and consequently a dystopia as well as a utopia.
The Mayor is David Lee Roth and the town is filled with businesses owned and operated by rock stars. This opens a wonderfully stupid vein of pun and wordplay-based humor.
One of the things I love about 108.9 The Hawk is that no idea seems to have been thrown out for being too silly, like John Mellencamp’s Santa Camps or a Big and Tall store owned by the bassist for Mr. Big.
Gore and Geoff Garlock play themselves as well as the station’s other disc jockeys, most notably consummate insider Whisp Turlington. Gore based Turlington’s voice on Alec Baldwin. That makes sense, since Baldwin similarly has the seemingly paradoxical quality of being friends with everyday famous despite being uniquely unlikable. He’s the smarmy voice of a well-fed and overcompensated establishment. Gore also voices Mikki Mackmack, a beatific creature of pure rock based on Rodney Bingenheimer. If glam rock were to become sentient, it would be Bingenheimer. The same is true of hair metal and Mackmack, who devolves, or evolves, depending on your perspective, into a mutated hawk man.
Val Verde is to 108.9 The Hawk what Newbridge is to The Best Show, Melonville is to SCTV and Springfield is to The Simpsons. It’s not just the town where the action takes place. It’s a comic universe onto itself with a dense tapestry of in-jokes, running gags, references and recurring characters and themes.
You don’t have to listen to all of the podcast’s catalog in order to enjoy it but one of its great strengths lies in its world-building. As with many geeky, obsessive endeavors, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. The more deeply invested you are in the goings on in Val Verde, the more pleasurable the experience will be.
On Hawk 108.9 they joke sometimes about alienating with specificity but the opposite is true as well. You don’t just attract with specificity; you win cultists for life.
At The Onion we used to have something called The One Percent Rule. The One Percent Rule holds that if you make a joke and it flies over the heads of 99 percent of the audience then the one percent that does get it will fill a special connection with you.
For me, 108.9 The Hawk epitomizes the One Percent Rule. It’s full of random-ass bullshit I thought only I knew or cared about, like the right-wing Twitter feed and strong Conservative options of Gary Graham, the C-list action star of Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox and the television adaptation of Alien Nation.
I though only I and a select assortment of convention goers remembered Graham, let alone knew about his political leanings but 108.9 The Hawk seems to have a weird portal into my subconscious.
I have made a career out of subjecting myself to the strange, unfortunate and deeply unpleasant yet it has never even occurred to me to listen to Johnny Depp play guitar.
It’s enough for me to know that he loves playing that instrument as much as he loves scarves and hats and accents and squandering his extraordinary talent and the public’s goodwill. Heck, it’s more than enough.
I literally never have to waste a second of my precious time left on earth to listening to Depp man-handle the electric guitar but I’m glad that someone is keeping up with it.
I love that the hosts of 108.9 The Hawk have strong, frequently expressed opinions about the guitarist for Dogstar, Hollywood Vampires and that collaborative album with Jeff Beck that somehow managed to seem sadder than Beck’s horrible death from Bacterial Meningitis the same year.
Gore is of course a big shot at The Best Show and Garlock hosts a podcast devoted to the late, dearly lamented Cannon schlock factory of the 1980s. So if you were to engineer a show to appeal directly to me, it would probably look and sound a lot like 108.9 The Hawk. It’d have an identical guest roster as well, as 108.9 The Hawk has featured a who’s who of funny people I want to hear on podcasts, including Jo Firestone, Paul Scheer (who made me very happy by name-dropping Steven Seagal’s The Way of the Shadow Wolves), Jake Fogelnest, Anthony Atamanuik, Jon Daly, D.C Pierson, Jon Gabrus, Griffin Newman, Brett Davis, Will Hines, Tom Scharpling, Julie Klausner and Kristen Bartlett, Gore’s wife and a very accomplished writer and performer with credits like Saturday Night Live and Full Frontal With Samantha Bee.
The comfy, lazy appeal of classic rock radio is that it belongs to everyone who has ever listened to music or existed in society. So it seems faintly ironic that much of the reason I love 108.9 The Hawk it feels like it was created specifically for me and my sensibility but I am eminently willing to share it with the world. If you enjoy this website there is a roughly one hundred percent chance you’ll like 108.9 The Hawk as well. It’s may not be The Best Show but it’s a second best show. I mean that as the very highest of praise.
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