Conversation with Dave Raven

Blues Broadcaster and Podcast Pioneer

 

This article has been deemed unfit for publication by the editor and publisher at Blueswax. It seems to be not “bluesy” enough and they are unwilling to balls up to a “podcaster vs. labels/artists type piece” as “The labels all seem to be in agreement that podcasting is hurting them”

 

I, and my fellow “BLUES” podcasters take issue with that assumption. I will be hammering this erroneous opinion The Bandana Blues with Beardo & Spinner Podcast, stay tuned!!!

 

Dave Raven has been a fixture on the British Blues scene since the late 50’s as show producer,), sound tech, broadcaster, and roadie/tour manager for Steam Packet, no less, that featured vocalists Rod Stewart, Long John Baldry, and Julie Driscoll, as well as organist Brian Auger. I discovered Dave as a fellow blues podcaster earlier this year and am now a huge fan of his Raven N Blues on BFBS Radio 2, available as a podcast by loading this XML file in your podcatcher: http://www.bfbs2.com/rnb.xml

What is a podcatcher? See Podcasting 101 in issue #245 of Blueswax.

 

Beardo for Blueswax: Dave, I’m not making you miss Wimbledon, am I?

 

Dave Raven: No, no, I’m not that.... no, not at all. (laughter) Let me switch you to the desk. (Moving to the studio and adjusting recording levels)

 

The tech talk stopped right after I found out he was a Mac man and me a Bill Gates kinda guy, meaning he was beyond my ken. He explained why Mac is just simpler to use because all “the bits” are made by the same manufacturer as opposed to PCs that almost by design have compatibility problems due to the raft of companies making hardware with no standardization.

 

The conversation quickly switched to one of our favorite record companies of late, Northern Blues Records and their fantastic string of spot on recordings.

 

DR: Back when I started the podcast last November, somebody e-mailed me and said, “Are you sponsored by Northern Blues?”

 

BW: Spinner and I have had the same accusations lobbed at us, but they put out such great product, how can you ignore them?

 

DR: That’s right! With the combination of a record company here called Ace Records, which do some really fine compilations of older material, if I’m not careful some weekends it’s all Northern Blues, Alligator and Ace.

 

NW: About Ace, they repackage American stuff, right?

 

DR: What they do is go to the owners of the masters and do a deal for sometimes only U.K., sometimes only European and re-mastered. The research they do is absolutely marvelous.

 

BW: Ok, about Podcasting. I’m trying to get an article in before it completely changes..... agian! You know what I mean.

 

DR: Yes, it seems to have leveled off from the early days last fall when we just watched the exponential growth of podcasts. In the last few months it does seem to have quieted down a bit in the amount of new Podcasts.

 

BW: I have it at about 8,000.

 

DR: Yes, but that was 5,000 to 8,000 over a three or four month period where it went from 0 to 5,000 in a couple of months, it was quicker in the beginning.. And the number of listeners has steadied as well. I was seeing exponential growth a few months ago. A combination of more and more people learning about podcasting, and also people like yourself, Tony, and Mark & Ms. V. Each of us cross referencing our programs, but that has steadied down now too. The growth is there but not as big as it was a couple of months ago.

 

BW: Even with the desirable feature of time-shifting programming, much like TIVO for the internet, how do you find the time to actually sift through the glut of shows, then listen that you actually download?

 

DR: I’m looking at my iTunes now and I have about 15 programs that I haven’t listened to. Your program (Bandana Blues with Beardo & Spinner), Tony’s (The Roadhouse) and Austin Riffs get priority one, if you know what I mean, Adam (Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code) and Dawn & Drew get priority two, then down through the food chain. There are times I have to throw away a whole raft of Adam Curry. I just don’t have the time and it’s probably going to get worse because of the sheer demand.

 

BW: Are you as annoyed as I am with the amount of sound effects used in podcasts? In the states I thought we left that behind with AM radio in the sixties.

 

DR: Also they don’t get the levels right and if you are listening on ear buds it can be a pain. I enjoyed the raw sound early on, but if I have to reach for the gain control every few minutes I don’t have the time to listen. It’s ok to have the anarchy but you need standards in there somewhere.

 

BW: Let’s talk about the club scene back when we were both much younger.

 

DR: For an American it is probably a bit difficult to comprehend, and even your friend Spinner, I don’t know what it was like in Holland but here in The U.K. in the late fifties-early sixties, we only had two radio networks. They were run by the BBC and called the home service and the light program. The home service was all speech and the light, well just like it says, it was light entertainment but without pop music as they didn’t think it was relevant. The only pop music heard was the top twenty once a week for an hour, and that was it. We did have music from a country about the size of Philadelphia, Luxemburg. Radio Luxemburg broadcast throughout the whole of Europe in different languages. The shows, sponsored by record companies, were made in London and then posted to Luxemburg. One hour you would have Decca Records, then BBC and so on. That was how we heard American music. So for every kid back then we remember Radio Luxemburg fading in and out on AM. But that was still popular music.

 

 Every city where the blues started to develop was a port city, a harbor like Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle or London. It was basically the sailors bringing back records they had heard in America. The reason I got into the blues was I heard it in my local club and that is what all the local bands wanted to play. They didn’t want to play the sanitized white Pat Boone stuff. They wanted to play the raw stuff they heard first on the juke boxes in the clubs. Then when The American Folk and Blues Federation were bringing acts over as a sort of cultural exchange, some of the artists like Sonny Boy, John Lee and the like would do occasional club dates and that’s where I would see them. That was the beginning of the love affair.

 

BW: I remember reading about the Radio Luxemburg phenomenon when I was a kid. I really started re-thinking the British Blues Invasion’s origins after watching the first DVD of three volumes of The American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966 promoted by two German jazz enthusiasts, Horst Lippman and Fritz Rau. I imagined Bill Wyman and Jagger (among others) in the audience freaking out. What I wanted to know, was the blues played on the infamous Pirate Radio* stations I read so much about back in the sixties?

 

DR: Yes, that brings us up to 1964, that’s when the “pirates” kick in. With the beginning of the pirate stations, all the bands that came up 1963-1964, The Animals, The Stones, The Beatles were playing in clubs without recording contract, the stuff heard on national “pirate” radio. Their music wasn’t deemed to be popular then, if you follow the logic. When the recording contracts started it unleashed the floodgates and we had this tremendous boon and complete shift for popular music at about the same time the anglicized Everly Brother/Pat Boone stuff was just thrown away and replaced by music that had R&B or Blues tinge to it.

 

BW: Speaking of “pirate” radio, do you wear an eye patch now that you’re podcasting?

 

DR: (Laughing) Kind of.....It does have that same excitement about it, except it’s just bigger. I’m fighting to keep my profile low-ish because although I have approval of the majority of record labels I play; it’s still a little bit gray. Nothing is formalized and I don’t want to be too high above the parapet for RIAA (USA) or MCPS (UK).

 

BW: Do you really feel it can be copyright infringement when you virtually can’t hear this music anywhere else?

 

DR: There is legislation pending that would require low bandwidth and mono broadcasts. I can probably live with that. Probably no two tracks in a row from the same artist or album.

 

BW: The old internet standard I remember is no more than three songs by the same artist in any given hour.

 

DR: I’m not concerned about guys in hats knocking on my door at three in the morning. I don’t think any of the labels that you or I play from are ever going to take issue with what we are doing.

 

BW: Speaking of we, here is the XML to subscribe to Bandana Blues with Beardo & Spinner’s weekly podcast. http://feeds.feedburner.com/bandanablues

Beardo

 

At the time of this transcription much has changed, iTunes has even gotten into the podcast directory business along with quite a few others. Look for blues podcasts, as they continue to grow in number, at the podcast directory of your choice. Stay tuned for part two of Podcasting 101 in an upcoming issue Blueswax with a report on what the record companies are saying, and almost more importantly, what they aren’t saying.

 

 

Dave, on the houseboat:

 

 

 

 

* Offshore floating radio stations beyond the boundary of British Law that played a wide variety of music that up until then had no place on BBC owned stations. Rock and Roll, Blues, and Jazz found an eager audience. It was the genesis of The British Invasion.