DFSXRadio.com Celebrates Five Years of Worldwide Dementia (February 3, 2005)

It was February 3, 2000, and an ad was placed in Billboard magazine by live365.com advertising about its streaming service that lets people create their own radio stations from their own music collections.

It was also the year that Clear Channel first owned over 1/10th of the nation's 12,000 commercial radio stations after its merger with AM/FM. It was also the year where cookie-cutter teen pop bands were flooding the airwaves while mature listeners got stuck with a stagnant diet of cookie-cutter mentality programming concepts that have long grown stale such as classic rock and pop nostalgia.

Radio in San Diego in the year 2000 also had inept music directors working the commercial radio stations working without a clue on what San Diego wanted to hear:

Electronica, comedy, and AAA programming.

Fortunately, in the year 1999, thousands of radio stations began programming these and other interesting formats through live365.com, where listeners can get their fix of whatever music genres they demand to hear whether local radio wanted them to be heard or not.

This was when broadband was in its infancy, people were downloading songs from Napster for free, and dial-up internet through the telephone wires were the rule.

In San Diego and elsewhere, a huge appetite for dementia went unsatisfied until several comedy and novelty radio stations sprung up powered by live365.com playing music made famous by more adventurous Top 40 music directors in the 50s through the 70s, and still being introduced and custodianed by Dr. Demento in 2005.

San Diego got its first Internet-based all-dementia radio station on February 3, 2000, when David Tanny had the balls to launch his own radio station modestly called DFSX, standing at first for Dave's Fun Stuff eXtreme Radio, but many others interpreted it as Da Funky Song eXcitement, while some clueless critics referred to it as Dumbass F--kin' S--thole eXcre---t! Whatever that case, dfsxradio.com, whose website was once hosted as part of davesfunstuff.com, stands on its own with its own domain four years later on March 15, 2004.

Says programming wizard Tanny, "DFSX was created to fill a niche not being served by local radio stations as well as Internet stations. There wasn't a single radio station playing the kind of music history made famous by Dr. Demento anywhere on the dial or by Internet on a regular basis.

"Comedy and novelty music is more important than ever in this day and age, especially in the post September 11 terrorist attack era. People want relief from the likes of the moronic conservative talkers, simple-minded humorless adult formats, and teeny bopper skaterat and rap music. They want to be amused, to think, to share with their friends, and to literally escape Corporate Radio Hell, especially in San Diego where uneducated music directors don't bother to seek out comedy and funny music to program on their formats."

On San Diego radio in 2000, Tanny laments: "91X was totally screwed up by that dictator music director who thinks we only want to hear the likes of nu-metal and soft acoustic, and nothing else, not even funny music. Channel 933 became bland with teen pop clones. Star's quality went south. K-Best and KGB are obsolete. There just wasn't anything for me to listen to in San Diego, and today, radio has gotten only marginally better with 94.9 muscling in with alternative rock, but hip hop and soft pop guitar songs dominating radio today has taken a toll on an average listener's patience, with nary a dance or comedy song to be heard today in any given city today."

Live365.com as well as other independent radio stations (both terrestrial and internet-only) have had more online listeners since 2000, thanks in part to the expansion of broadband, allowing more reliable and better quality streaming of the stations. DFSXRadio.com, in the last five years of its existance, has broken many bands, sometimes before Dr. Demento, on its radio stream; DFSX has also played deep cuts from many hundreds of comedy albums from acts such as the Henry Phillips, Worm Quartet, Throwing Toasters, Raymond and Scum, Tony Goldmark, Sudden Death, Carla Ulbrich, Jeff Foxworthy, Cletus T. Judd, Ken Turetzky, Cab City Combo, Eric Schwartz (both of them!), Bob and Tom, and even the programmer himself, David Tanny.

In 2003, DFSXRadio launched regular specialty programs, beginning with the flagship program "I Still Get Demented" named after a radio show in San Diego called "I Still Q in My Car" hosted by John Fox and Phil Flowers. Tanny says about the name, "I wanted a name that makes a statement to the commercial music directors when they tell me that we don't want to hear comedy and novelty music known as dementia on the radio. I tell them in their face that I still get demented on radio stations online as well as through song swaps between a network of friends. It also is a tribute to a radio station back in the 60s and 70s I used to listen to, KCBQ 1170, playing top 40 songs mixed in with selected cuts from rock albums heard on the progressive rock stations on the then-fledgling FM radio band. DFSXRadio plays the demented song hits of today as well as the past, plus where available, deep album cuts from many familiar songs known in the dementia music genre."

"I Still Get Demented", now in its third year, showcases new and classic recordings, features old episodes of Whimsical Will's Demented News and The O.B. Ranger created and voiced by another KCBQ alumini, Gary Allyn, with his partner Neil Ross doing the voice of Indian and other characters. It also features blocks of comedy songs sharing the same subject, a chain of songs linked by one thing in common, and sometimes entire shows built around a single subject.

"Star Trek" gets a full three-hour treatment on February 22, while the annual Valentine's Day love song supersized shows air on February 14 and 15. In the past, entire shows around "Star Wars", "Cats", and almost a full show about "Johnny", set to air February 7, were produced. The "Johnny" show is also a part-tribute to the king of late night, Johnny Carson, who passed away on Jan 23. "ISGD" airs Mondays and Tuesdays at 5pm and 8pm Pacific, or 8pm and 11pm Eastern, on dfsxradio.com

Other new shows have made their debut, including "The DFSX Time Machine", "The DFSX Lab", and pilots for failed series. The newest three shows air on Thursday nights as part of its "Must Hear Thursday Night lineup, starting with "The Best of Dave's Gone By" hosted by Dave Leifkowitz, followed by "The Dementia Top 20" where listeners get to vote on their favorite songs, plus "The Demented Resurrection Zone" to cap off the evening.

DFSXRadio.com started out streaming on 24kbps, as it still is today to accomodate dial-up users, but he's been hammering at live365.com about adding multiple baud-rate streams for no additional charge for years to feed the demands of broadband listeners. "I believe that live365.com can easily and without much effort allow listeners to choose a streaming rate that they can accomodate, from 8kbps for the worst dial-up connections, to 128k for best music quality," says Tanny. "I would launch multiple versions of the same station over three stations, but cost and time considerations are just too much for one person to handle."

One thing that changed with dfsxradio in 2004 was the quality of the frequency at 11khz. In March, after a breakneck pace of reripping the MP3s used to program the station, a new 22khz mono version of dfsx launched at the same time its new dfsxradio.com website did on March 15, after a three-day stunt of programming all Macarena songs and parodies. Why March 15? Tanny noted that it wasn't just the Ides of March when Julius Ceasar got stabbed to death by Brutus, but it was also the 27th anniversary of the debut of two TV shows with a number in the title: "Three's Company", and "Eight is Enough," when combined together add up to 27 letters between the both of them!

While corporate radio continues to churn out humorless clones of musicians that don't contribute anything original as far as material is concerned, Internet radio, now paired off by XM and Sirius satellite radio, plus music downloads and iPods, have formed a powerful competetive block against the declining influence of terrestrial corporate radio. Many of which may incorporate an occasional demented or funny song every now and then, some specializing in one form of comedy entirely. DFSXRadio.com, playing the comedy, novelty, nostalgia, humor, funny, and all the other weird stuff collectively known under the umbrella title of the genre of dementia, is among the competetors taking time away from the terrestrial broadcasters.

Comedy music and stuff can be sent to David Tanny, PO Box 19569, San Diego, CA 92159-0569. To listen to dfsx, simply visit dfsxradio.com