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Deaconlight at Error.FM
This one is very personal for me. When I was in high school and college in the late ’70s and early ’80s, DD Thornton’s Deaconlight show on Wake Forest college radio station WFDD, in Winston-Salem, N.C., introduced me to more new music than any person I knew — except maybe my hometown friends Joe Edmonds and Richard Johnson, the two musically enlightened souls who had turned me on to Deaconlight.
I was a teenage hippie southern boy who liked the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead. DD played stuff like Lou Reed, the Nice and Todd Rundgren, and then later, with the first rumblings of punk and new wave, a whole host of names I’d only read about in Creem magazine: Elvis Costello, Devo, the Residents, the Ramones, Television, Stiff Little Fingers, XTC… and on and on. I didn’t like all of it at first, but I was always intrigued and I grew to love most of the music DD exposed me to. I remember the sound of her voice to this day: cool, sexy, smart. I’d be driving my green Toyota Corolla from my hometown of Asheboro to the “big city” of Greensboro, listening to DD on Deaconlight. She was my first radio crush.
Fast-forward nearly three decades later: I find out Deaconlight is back — but this time online. I write a blathering fan letter expressing my long-time crush on DD Thornton. Come to find out, she was the one responsible for getting the old show’s history and archives online and getting the new Deaconlight onto ErrorFM, and she’s the one who read my letter. DD and I re-connected — or connected, for the first time in person — and bonded over our shared love of rock & roll. Since then, I’ve co-hosted the new Deconlight show with her and I plan to do it again… and again, and again.
What’s this have to do with you? Well, when you’re in the mood for some totally free-form, ’70s-style FM radio fun — or, as DD likes to call it, “classic and current contemporary non-schlock-rock metropolitan music” — check out Deaconlight online every day at noon EST (9 a.m. Pacific; 5 p.m. London). DD doesn’t play by anybody’s rules — not radio programmers’, not rock critics’, no rules but her own. You might like what she plays one minute and cringe the next. But it’s DD’s show, it’s always unpredictable and it’s always interesting. You will hear something you weren’t expecting. |
