Produced by Mike “Big Ugly” Beck, programmed by Nora O’Connor, engineered by Jeff Deer, and hosted by the one and only Cathy Smitko (a Chicago-based actress whose voice was a dead ringer for the lady who did the announcing chores for the USA Network’s “Night Flight”), Guide Wire Radio first aired in October of 1990. We were carried on about 30 or so college radio stations around the United States and the program featured only the music of I.M.N. members. As the station list grew, it became very obvious that producing the program in Chicago (where Jeff and Kathy were) while programming and distributing it some 300+ miles south in Carbondale (where Mike, Nora and I were located) was an untenable situation. To solve this problem, physical production of the program was moved to Noteworthy Studios in Carbondale with Alan Matthews taking over the engineering chores, Keith Tuxhorn replacing Cathy as the show’s host, and the inimitable Chris Perry providing weekly “Artist Profile” segments. The original logo (a sort of talking condenser microphone) was replaced by Max the Guide Wire bulldog (Max, because the show was being underwritten by Maxell Corporation - a bulldog, because... well, no one really knows).

    Meanwhile back at the ranch, circulation had grown to 50,000 copies per issue, the fulfillment service was carrying hundreds of independent releases from around the globe, Guide Wire was being featured on more than 150 college radio stations in the United States and Canada, and the staff members were beginning to get on each other’s nerves. Everybody felt as if they were on a “mission from God”, to quote the Blues Brothers. The I.M.N. was going head-to-head with the “Big Six” record labels and getting a lot of favorable press and attention for it. Of course, that’s when it all started heading South...

    It has been said that “no good deed goes unpunished” and this was certainly the case with the Independent Music Network. In a classic case of growing too big too fast, overextended and undercapitalized, the I.M.N. soon started to collapse under its own weight. As one of the corporations major creditors and shareholders, I acquired the rights to continue production of Guide Wire Radio. I had been intimately involved in the production and distribution of the show since its inception and felt that it was the one area of the crumbling I.M.N. monolith that had a chance of surviving on its own. Maxell seemed pleased with this arrangement and so Guide Wire Radio continued on.

    Under the new regime, Guide Wire developed into a much more focused program. Production was moved to DSP, Ltd. (my production facility) and I took over all the engineering chores employing our (primitive by today’s standards, but state-of-the-art in 1992) computer-based digital editing system. As it turns out we were one of the first radio programs to be produced entirely in the digital domain - a fact which was apparently not lost on our underwriter (who at that time was primarily a manufacturer of magnetic tape). Complete creative control of the program was assigned to former engineer Alan Matthews with Keith Tuxhorn continuing as the host. Last, but not least, Al Raila was appointed general manager of the program. No longer limited to featuring IMN members, we more tightly focused the show on the alternative rock format and opened it up to include artists from independent record labels like K, SubPop, TAANG!, Shimmy Disk, Bar/None, Razor & Tie, Amphetamine Reptile, etc. along with the truly independent releases. Our one criteria - we had to have it first. Guide Wire’s focus was breaking new material, and so if a particular release had already charted higher than #75 in the CMJ (College Music Journal), it just didnt get on the show. Perhaps the most significant change we made to Guide Wire was the adoption of a new point of view: “100% attitude - 0% fashion”. Everything about the show took on an irreverent and almost arrogant tone, which made us all the more popular with the audience we were targeting.

    In January of 1994, we had a solid station list, were receiving new releases at a rate of 5-10 a day, and were developing programs in other genres. Then the hammer fell... The company who had been Guide Wires underwriter since almost the beginning, Maxell Corporation, suddenly decided that independent labels and alternative rock radio programming were “contrary to their corporate posture” and did not renew their contract. Al immediately launched a full scale campaign for a new underwriter, but unfortunately word had already spread through the advertising community that we had been “dumped” by Maxell and the ad weasels stopped returning our phone calls. We continued to produce Guide Wire out of our own pockets (all the while searching for an alternative means of funding the program as well as our other projects), but the damage had already been done. DSP, Ltd. had become a pariah with the advertising agencies. In December of 1994 we shipped the last episode of Guide Wire Radio (#1413) and had Max the bulldog “put to sleep”.

    I, of course, counted the whole experience as a personal failure. DSP’s finances were in a shambles (I ran the show out of pocket far too long), my marriage was under considerable stress, and worst of all I had convinced myself that absolutely no one had ever been listening. Believe me, when you sink your life and a lot of your cash into a radio program, “no one listening” is a BAD thing.

    As it turns out, I was wrong...

    I had always had a few people sporadically contact me about Guide Wire over the years. Some of the bumper bits from the show were posted on my personal website and occasionally I would receive an e-mail from someone who remembered us. It really started to hit home that there was indeed “somebody out there” when I finally got around to registering the domain name “dspltd.com” and moved my personal website there. My stats reports showed a whole bunch of people listening to and downloading the audio files from my personal website (don’t bother - they’re not there anymore). About this time I also started receiving e-mails from people wondering if I might be so kind as to make them copies of particular episodes they remembered, wondering why we stopped production, wondering if we were going to resume production - basically, just wondering. I guess the real capper for me came when during the course of a meeting with some advertising wonks, one of them used the line: “100% attitude, 0% fashion”. My head began to spin around like Linda Blair on crank, of course. Just where had this guy heard that line before?! When kicked… ummm… questioned, the guy admitted that he stole the line from a radio program he used to listen to in college.

    Wow! There was someone out there after all. Who’d a thunk it?

    The problem still remained of how to distribute the show. I thought for about 2.5 seconds before deciding that since the renewed interest had been primarily from the Internet, the only place for the show to run was on the Internet. And since DSP has been moving more and more into the multimedia arena over the years, I decided that the combination of Shockwave^® (and more recently, RealAudio^®) was the only really good way to pull off what I had in mind.