Going over The Edge with Coyote J. Calhoun
By Glenny Brock
Time was, the Sunday worship service I favored most started around 10 p.m. and involved a bright-red jambox, two or three blank tapes (usually Maxells) and a Garfield phone handed down from my brother. Every Sunday night I listened to “The Edge,” the local radio program on which Coyote J. Calhoun was a high priest of the then-little-known sect called alternative music.\
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Last Monday night, as I was preparing to interview Coyote in advance of tonight’s Edgefest 2008. I sent an e-mail to my old friend J. Whitson, a fellow Edge devotee, and asked him to tell me what he remembered about his listening habits. He wrote:\
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I remember taping The Edge most every week and listening to it all week while I did homework.\’a0 I remember hearing “Mote” by Sonic Youth and then going down to Charlemagne the next day and buying Daydream Nation and thinking nothing was as good as “Mote” on it but it was still agreeable and then grew to love that whole album way better than Goo anyway.\’a0 I remember Sad Lovers and Giants and The Essence and getting their albums special ordered @ Lazer’s Edge.\’a0 I remember staying up late and how everything got progressively more bizarre.\
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But maybe my favorite Coyote J memory comes much later when I was in college and he got on 107.7.\’a0 I was riding around delivering pizzas one night and he went off about how no one should be calling up and requesting Bush or Candlebox or whatever other dogshit there was floating around at that time and how it was his show and it was for good music and if people want to hear that they should call a different DJ on a different night.\’a0 I didn’t hear Coyote on the air for months, if not years after that.\
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And when he came back, his show consisted of good music mixed with dogshit.\
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I laughed at J.’s recollections — so similar to my own. I’m eager for others to share their memories of “The Edge” or their thoughts on the story about Coyote J. that appeared in the most recent edition of the Weekly.



