Past Programs 2011

Our first LIVE Broadcast of 2011

JOAN GUSSOW, author of Growing, Older: a Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables, in which the author writes about everything from garden pests and national food policy, to zucchini and butterflies

LINDA SCHLOSSBERG, award-winning writer with her debut novel Life in Miniature, a wholly original coming-of-age story.

TOM RACHMAN, author of The Imperfectionists, his highly acclaimed debut novel about a struggling international newspaper in Rome

DAVID VANN, former National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Wallace Stegner Fellow, John L'Hereux Fellow, with his new novel Caribou Island

WILL BROKAW of Brokaw Nursery, on California-grown subtropical fruits

Music by OR, THE WHALE, a band that will rock you, make you dance, and maybe even inspire you to contribute to their amazing vocal pyrotechnics—voices everywhere, indeed.

THE REAL MIKE GREENSILL

In the Port Commission Room on the second floor of the San Francisco Ferry Building

RESERVATIONS: for your 2 hours of slow-food organic radio with only the freshest conversation, music and play: 415-664-9500, or TICKETWEB.

Whoa, you can be there again!  January 26, 2006. 

presented LIVE at the now defunct Empire Plush Room in still extant York Hotel.  ( Back LIVE 2011 at the Ferry Building January 22nd)

MONEY is the theme today, and 

DAVE BARRY, humorist and columnist, has something to say about the subject in his new book Money Secrets...

LIZ PERLE, author of Money: A Memoir, also Editor-in-Chief of Common Sense Media

MATTHEW and TERCES ENGELHART, authors, The Abounding River, owners of Cafe Gratitude

THE COTTARS, amazing young CELTIC musicians from Cape Breton

CHARLIE OWEN, San Francisco's best-kept-secret soul singer

and the ever-splendid MIKE GREENSILL, investing in the house piano.

Our Anniversary Show - Today - a live-ish special mixed with some highlights from those formative years.  We pulled together just a few hilarious and moving moments with a few of the 10,000 guests since Sedge Thomson's West Coast Live first broadcast January 8, 1994 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco. West Coast Live succeeded his successful West Coast Weekend, which began in October 1984, following a year of Breakfast Jam he began in September 1983, both produced live. Yikes, 27 years of live radio!

The theme today turns out to be Voices -- voices still here, some gone, voices produced through other forms -- of instruments, history, emotions.  We start with the first :30 prior to the first broadcast from the Cowell Theater, before we went live to air, and the opening moments from January 8, 1994, with DIANE HIDY at the piano.  You are there!  

In the First Hour we begin with a conversation with the inimitable JULIA CHILD about food and eating and love, from 11/16/1996 when she was 84, doing her best Meryl Streep impersonation. We reveal her favorite hors d'oeuvre. 

From 10/221994, TERRY JONES of MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS expounds of falsettos, and how comedy is made in Life of Brian. What fun we can have in a live, spontaneous show with a lively audience!

Later, on 11/25/2006 at the Plush Room, LAURIE ANDERSON and the Tuvan Throat Singers CHIRGILCHAN came in and we persuaded the TUVANs to teach the renowned a capella group THE BOBS how to throat-sing.  First you imitate a Harley-Davidson....

MIKE GREENSILL plays the brief interval break, 

then the 2nd Act begins with THE STRING CHEESE INCIDENT from 8/31/1996 as they were on their way to acclaim 

From November 11, 1995, as we celebrated the reopening of the Legion of Honor Museum, STUART CANIN demos with a Bach fugue the Guarneri Del Gesu violin Jashcha Heifitz played and donated to the museum.  And he recreates the beginning of the FRED ALLEN - JACK BENNY feud of 1936 with the :45 Bee.

STUDS TERKEL, the late, great Chicagoan waxes on the horrors of solo violin music, except for STUART CANIN, JASCHA HEIFETZ, and FRITZ KREISLER and how his mother always wanted him to play like MARVIN, his upstairs neighbor.  Then we here about the importance of stories that make political movements human and personal.

MIKE GREENSILL and WESLA WHITFIELD updated the 1952 LOUIS JORDAN jazz classic as Greensill for President for Nov. 1, 2008, a story of political adventures that are the same, but different, and still the source for great lyrics.

And we close with a high-energy song from the 6/8/1996 show with TAJ MAHAL joining with JIM CAMPILONGO and the 10 GALLON CATS for a festive fishing and libation number.  We had to retrieve TAJ from the end of the Cowell Theater pier, where he'd gone to hang out that beautiful morning with the Russian fisherman using cuttlefish and cut fish as bait and spark plugs for weights.

The closing credits from that day features DIANE HIDY rocking out with her classical verve 

RESERVATIONS for the Live Broadcast at the Ferry Building in San Francisco: for your 2 hours of slow-food organic radio with only the freshest conversation, music and play: 415-664-9500, or TICKETWEB.  Also facebook.

Gentle Frolic and New Year highlights for this special that made it way through ice and snow and sunshine and time and space to be with you as we commence 2011.

Originally broadcast January 3, 1998 from The Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco.

OMAR SOSA and JOHN SANTOS, featuring music from their latest recordings Nfume - For the Unseen and Omar Omar.

Monologist SPALDING GRAY. Seven years ago, Spalding went elsewhere.  What stories he told. Here he talks about The Slippery Slope. Poignant then, and especially now. He says stories are a form of reincarnation.

Slack guitar music from GEORGE KUO, MARTIN PAHINUI, DENNIS KAMAKHI, and DAVID KAMAKAHI.

KEVIN KELLY, editor of "Wired" (in 1998). Here talking about technology as we knew it in 1998 and in Out of Control.  His new book, 2011, is What Technology Wants. What a time-trip.

Travel tips from CARL AND KARL, timeless, chanelling on Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Winters, and George Carlin.

Music from piano player MIKE GREENSILL who's partied all night to be with you today.