[Thom] I’m Thom Kokenge, and I’m talking to Bill Morelock. And so why don’t you talk about a little bit, how you started with Northwest Public Broadcasting, how that came about?

[Bill] I was an undergraduate at Washington State. I went away for a couple of years and worked a lot of menial jobs. I shined shoes and cleaned toilets. And at 24, I thought, “Oh, I really have to do something responsible.” So I applied to graduate school.

[Thom] At Washington State University.

[Bill] Yeah, in the English department. And after a year, I wandered from Avery over to Murrow. And they needed bodies in radio. And so on Christmas Eve 1981, I did my first shift. Somebody needed to be filled in for. And the training amounted to, “Okay. Sit down. Do it.” For the next few years, I was a classical music announcer of sorts. I was able to be bad without many people noticing for several years until I finally got some sense of how to do this. But it was great. And then in 1987, they hired a new music director. I remember very vividly Arthur Cohen, who was my boss, played me the tapes of the people who had applied.

Bill Morelock (left) and Bob Christiansen (right) pose for a photo in the spring of 1994.

There was one in particular, I said, “Oh, I don’t want that guy. He sounds just this old school, very dignified kind of thing.” And Arthur said, “Well, his name’s Bob Christiansen and I really like him.” So Bob came and very quickly hit it off. And I discovered in him something that was new to me. You run into people who are wits, but sometimes they can use their wit for evil. And Bob’s wit was kind and benign. And we started doing a handoff promo between the morning shift, mine, and his afternoon shift. And we hatched an idea to do a two-man classical music show. We wanted to talk about classical music like two friends talking about baseball.

We own stuff in popular culture and in the sports landscape, if you’re into that, in a way that we don’t own it in classical music because it’s so towering with all these various classifications and levels of technical minutia that may or may not be important in a radio broadcast, but they’re there. And it’s intimidating because your listener might be expecting that analysis of a score. And we are not going to give you that. We’re going to give you stories about the composers or place the music in a historical timeframe, something to make it vivid. We tried it in, I guess, January of 1988, and we got absolutely no happy mail for three or four months. One I remember very clearly was a woman in Palouse. She likened us to two pre-adolescents out behind the barn, smoking cigarettes and telling dirty jokes. I actually grew a skin that day because I had a very thin skin.

And I think every person who does classical music broadcasting when they’re new understands that listeners are very particular, bordering on hostile if you make a certain mistake, and they will say, “You are representative of the downfall of Western civilization.” The comments are like that. It’s a very strange world. But I did realize that what we were doing, we were taking away a self-conscious consumption of culture for people because the sound of classical music broadcasting, you entered into this sanctum somehow. So we learned from that. 

Caricature sketch of Bob Christiansen and Bill Morelock.

We learned that when you try to do something different that you really want to do, you may have to feel these kinds of things and absorb them. And I think over time, people trusted us that we weren’t punks and we weren’t trying to destroy anything and that we loved the music. So it was just a different way of doing it. And it was satisfying to have somebody to bounce things off of.