Revrock: A Listener's Notes

Written by Kieran Owen

I first arrived in Windsor October 2017. I found it isolating, a little strange and far too cold. The public transport was terrible. The urban was sprawled. And bloody hell did I mention it was cold? Like the wind was impossibly cold. Penetrating, inescapable. I would read the temperature on my phone-screen in celsius but the bitterness I felt in my bones would ask me 'Are you sure that’s not 1 degree fahrenheit? This can’t be right mate. None of this is right.'

As the months and years passed, comforts, quirks and comrades were acquired that now make this place feel more like a home. One of them is a weekly radio show that’s been broadcasting long before I arrived here. I remember clearly the first time I heard it, sitting in my then girlfriend’s car, driving up University Avenue towards the Ambassador Bridge (unknown to me then that this was very close to the station it was broadcasting from). Flicking through the radio dial aimlessly I heard something I recognised (DURR-NURR, DUNN DUNN, DURR-NURR) 'Hey, leave that on!'

Bob Dylan once said that a great thing about rock ‘n’ roll is you can hear 1 second out of a passing car and know who it is. Well this was The Jam’s ‘A’ Bomb on Wardour Street’ and it doesn’t get more rock based on that criteria. A chugging, primitive guitar riff throughout. The entire song is nearly just two chords, a feat so dumb that only a smart person like Paul Weller could pull it off. I hadn’t heard it since adolescence and it ruled to hear it there and then.

After that excitement, two voices followed. They were friendly and yet sort of subdued. Irreverent but informative. Sometimes they overlapped and talked like they were in opposition with each other. Yet ultimately they had a rapport that said they had known each other for years and had probably been doing this gig for years. They were a perfect pairing. This was Adam and David and the show was Revolution Rock on CJAM 99.1FM.

David Konstantino first aired Revolution Rock in the summer of 2004 when he was a university student. At the time there were punk and hardcore shows on the station, which broadcasts from a basement situated in the University of Windsor and can be heard on FM in both Windsor and Detroit. However David felt there wasn’t anything really playing music that represented the early incarnations and roots of the genre. The likes of the Ramones, Pistols, Clash, UK 78, post-punk, new wave or even the proto-punk of Iggy and the Stooges. The first song he played was "Search and Destroy" by the latter. He has a recording of that first show along with a 2 decade archive that spans both the digital and analogue. Tapes, dated and organised on shelves, hand-written playlists and bottomless hard drives. By David’s calculations there have been 1070 episodes of Rev Rock and he's missing around 5-10. As someone who has often tried and failed to keep a diary, I find self documentation like this both enviable and bewildering.

For the first 10 years David was the sole presenter of the show and stuck dutifully to his focus on pure punk. In a blog post from 2014 to mark the 500th episode, Dave recounts this period with tales of drunken studio invaders, furious techno fans calling in to tell him the music he plays sucks, as well as encounters with a presenter from the show before him, who would broadcast shirtless because it made him ‘perform better.’

After 10 years, Dave’s good friend Adam joined and the show became an amorphous beast. The definition of punk took a backseat. Rock was the remit, however rock was rightfully ascribed to be more of a feeling and an attitude. The playlists became more eclectic and varied. The artists played more diverse and less genre defined. There were Black History Month specials on soul, funk, R&B, dub, jazz and blues. Features on Miles Davies, the influence of reggae on punk.

During this period, the show became syndicated so it could be heard all across Canada. They also conducted well received interviews with the likes of Athens Post-punk outfit Pylon, members of the highly regarded Women from Calgary (Cindy Lee/Patrick Flegel), punk rock pioneer Richard Hell and Tommy Stinson of the Replacements, the latter of which picked them up a National Campus Radio Association award in the category Best Rock Show or similar. There were interviews with minority Canadian artists in the field of garage, retro-rock and psych like Bloodshot Bill and King Khan. As well as conversations with seminal and highly influential musicians like Colin Newman (Wire), Richard Lloyd (Television) and Tobin Sprout (Guided By Voices).

This Saturday will be the final installment of Revolution Rock. 1000+ episodes in and just over 20 years. Now I’m of the mindset that if you haven’t wrapped something up by around the, I don't know, let's say your 8th year doing it, then you might as well just keep doing it until you die. Adam and Dave seem to disagree for some reason. Fun fact, they both share the exact same birthday. Same day, same year. And to be around them, You’d swear they were brothers. (Adam is a few hours older, we’ve established).

So they’re moving on from Rev Rock, at least in its current format as a weekly show. Maybe there will be one-offs appearances and specials, who knows. There'll be an extended break before anything like that is decided. They had their fun and to be fair, so did I! I had the pleasure of appearing as a guest on the show multiple times. In these moments I got to appreciate the Adam and David dynamic up close. Adam is the facts guy, the music encyclopedia. He keeps track of anniversaries to celebrate, landmark record release dates etc. He likes themes, some form of structure. I recall playing a song off a compilation and when the time came to introduce it, I blanked, forgetting the original album it came from, Adam was ready to helpfully interject citing the album title and year off the top of his head. His knowledge of music and ability to chat with detail and passion about the songs he’s just played, illuminating where they sit in the story of the artist’s biography or providing context about the time and place they were written is journalistic and impressive. He’s off script, no prompts or notes, loquacious to the point that you could just be sitting at a bar, drinking with him and sharing a poutine.

My dad, listening to BBC radio back in the UK, would share a similar sentiment with me about the BBC 6 Music presenters Radcliffe and Maconie, regarding their expertise and knowledge. This has some truth but let’s not forget that shows like that come with teams of researchers, not to mention a producer never far from whispering in their ear. Adam and Dave did this voluntarily, no pay and little perks, aside from the odd free gig ticket here and there and a dedicated, weekly caller (who will remain unnamed) who would tell them both about his life before inviting them on camping trips and making requests that they play Taylor Swift.

David is also insightful but his approach is more free-wheeling. He’ll show up with a stack of CDs probably picked in the morning, to throw on, off the cuff, without too much thought about how they might sound together, ‘we could try it’ is one of his favourite phrases. Perhaps an exercise in keeping things exciting after so many years. He talks into the mic with zero affectation, in a relaxed manner to an extent that I’ve never really witnessed before. What you hear is completely him. After years of student radio, stints working within radio at the BBC and more recently guest appearances on CJAM, I still can’t shy away from putting on a bit of a ‘radio voice.’ Call it a Welsh penchant for performance, I don’t know. David, the CJAM veteran, is a natural.

So what’s next for the two of them? David makes short films and writes music. Adam writes fiction and makes music. There’s talk of an interview podcast and some sort of public access TV inspired platform. Perhaps they’ll revolutionise our public libraries from within. Maybe they’ll usurp the New Democratic Party, making it an electoral force not seen since the days of Jack Layton? Am I getting carried away? All I know is that I’m not gonna reminisce about the show too much yet and just look forward to their next projects. There’ll be repeats heard from the CJAM archive (God knows they’ve got plenty of them) and on those syndicated stations across Canada too. Maybe one day, years from now I’ll return to a car after a day at a beach in Cape Breton, looking forward to a beer and some dinner, with that feeling of calm that only swimming in the sea brings. Sitting on a beach towel over the car seat, I hear familiar voices speaking under the whoosh of the AC, ‘hey’ I say to my present company. ‘I know those guys!’

Or perhaps I’m in Alberta, on one of those long, straight roads that go further than the horizon. I hear Joe Strummer’s voice, I hear Ty Segall talking to a puppet, I hear the comically despondent drawl of Douglas Hart from The Jesus Mary and Chain, part of the sound collage which introduces each episode of Revolution Rock. The sun setting a shade of peach before me in the way it does in the Prairies. Then I’ll say to myself. ‘Well done Adam. Well done David.’