Princeton Packet Review
Aural gratification
Weingart brings music 'You Can't Hear on the Radio'
By Alex Saville
Time Off Editor
Wednesday, February 18, 1998
John Weingart's voice is calm, measured, relaxed. It soothes. It's quite easy to forget you are listening to the radio when he speaks. If you are driving, his voice seems to come from the passenger seat. If you're at home, he sounds like a friend sitting on your couch, or at your kitchen table.
"I sort of like to pretend that there's a fireplace in the room and that's the closest I can come," he says later, describing why he turns the lights out during his weekly radio show, Music You Can't Hear on the Radio.
The 31/2-hour program - loosely centered on folk music, but including a multitude of interesting musical tangents as part of its regular fare - has been Mr. Weingart's regular Sunday-night routine for more than two decades. It's also the regular routine for hundreds of listeners and fans in central New Jersey-their metaphorical fireplace, a way to wind down the weekend and rest up for the coming work week.
The show is fairly unique among radio programs. For years it was the only place you would hear the musicians Mr. Weingart features. Today you might find similar elements on Philadelphia's WXPN, WFMU in South Orange, or in the dry wit and smooth voice of Garrison Keillor on public radio's Prairie Home Companion.
Central to Mr. Weingart's musical taste are Pete Seeger-his first musical hero-and folks like Mississippi John Hurt, Charlie Poole, '60s bluegrass musician John Herald and the Grateful Dead. At the root of what he likes is folk music, but the essence seems to hinge on musicians who are sincere, yet not overbearing.
Mr. Weingart, who owns a banjo but doesn't play, is kind of a listening purist, or maybe more aptly, a pure listener.
"I like performers who can be serious but who can also be funny," he says.
Pretty much anything goes on the show; Mr. Weingart can play what he wants. WPRB, although nominally a commercial radio station, is still a college radio station and allows great freedom for its DJs. So, unlike other commercial radio stations, the playlists at WPRB are not dictated by a program manager who is targeting a particular audience with demographics designed to bring in the most listeners for advertisers.
So, it's not uncommon to hear Mr. Weingart play Charlie Poole leading into a Hot Tuna song, then following it up with a Saturday Night Live skit.
"If I feel I've gone what might be considered far out on the limbs of my taste, then I try to come back to something more sort of mainstream-at least in the folk music world-for the sake of people listening and probably for the sake of myself as well," he says.
To the uninitiated listener, one of Mr. Weingart's sets (a group of songs played together without talking between them) might seem haphazard and disconnected. Even the genres of the songs played might seem unrelated.
This couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, sets on Music You Can't Hear on the Radio are more consciously planned than most radio programs. It's just that Mr. Weingart doesn't group songs by genre, but instead puts them together thematically. He thinks carefully about the sets of music he plays, linking sounds and styles as if the songs were pieces of a large, sonic jigsaw puzzle. It's the listeners who have to get used to listening to the program in a different way.
"I like to see what lessons music can offer about life, and find songs that weren't necessarily written with the 1990s in mind, but where they still have some application," he says. "Or where two songs played back to back look at the same problem or situation differently. That part probably gives me the most pleasure: Trying to group the stuff in a way where the whole is more than the sum of the parts. And knowing that that's true for some number of people listening.
"There's some people who listen real carefully and, as soon as I've played two songs in a row about something, will call and say, 'Have you thought of this other song?' I love that."
Sometimes the songs have even deeper meanings.
"There are things I will do in the show that are often really for the benefit of only a small number of people," Mr. Weingart says.
"We have friends who recently adopted a baby from Tibet, and so I played a bunch of songs for the baby a couple of weeks ago," he says. "They were listening and so were a couple of people who knew them. For them it was one thing, and for other people listening it was just a nice bunch of songs about adoption and babies.
"I love it if people are listening for any reason. But that's particularly fun if people are really listening to what I'm trying to do and trying to anticipate what's going to come next or why I would have played what I just played."
Mr. Weingart says he thinks of the show as "a coherent whole for me from beginning to end." This way of listening to music and songs and how their themes resonate with life comes naturally to him.
"That's the way I listen to the radio," he says. "For the most part, it's an unrewarding way to listen to most radio shows. Because you listen, but it's never clear to me why they're playing the two songs in a row that they chose to play-other than it's their featured album of the week."
It's because Mr. Weingart is such a consummate listener that Music You Can't Hear on the Radio is so much fun. He pays attention during his show to the way it sounds.
"I think about what I want to play and how I want to group things around, and I've certainly heard all the songs before the show, but I haven't heard how they'll sound together," he says. "So that's fun for me to hear it and hear how one song ends when the next one comes on. Mostly I like the way it works to go from one song to the next and the flow of ideas and music. Occasionally it doesn't work out as well as I had imagined, for one reason or another."
John Weingart's love of radio coincided with his love of folk music as a boy growing up in New York City.
"I was a Pete Seeger fan, and I used to seek out places to find Pete Seeger on the radio," he says. "When I was in junior high school, and then high school, for a while it was pretty hard; you would find all these little FM stations, which at the time felt pretty exotic for me to find."
He began listening to WBAI, the New York Pacifica radio network affiliate, as well as a number of college radio stations. He found these stations were more likely to play folk music, and most of their programming was different from commercial radio.
Like many radio disc jockeys, Mr. Weingart got his start at a college radio station. He went to college at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. One of the first things he did was check out the radio station. He ended up doing a couple of different folk music-oriented shows there.
In the early 1970s, he came to Princeton to study public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School. It seemed only natural to continue doing a radio show, so he began doing a morning folk show on WPRB.
Having received a master's degree in public affairs in 1975, Mr. Weingart went to work for at the Department of Environmental Protection in Trenton.
In February of 1976, Paul Robeson died. Mr. Weingart asked the management at WPRB if he could host a tribute show to honor the late actor and political activist. The station agreed. Then, after he did the show, the station asked if he would like to take over the entire Sunday evening slot, traditionally reserved for folk and blue grass music.
He took the job, merging the folk and bluegrass shows and loosening up the format. The only thing left was to come up with a name.
"I was trying to find a title for the show that wouldn't trap me into having to play any particular thing," he says. "And even though the bulk of my taste is what would generally be called folk music, I had found when doing a show on WPRB before, I'd occasionally run into ardent folk music fans who would complain, 'How could you have played Tom Lehrer (or something)? That's not folk music.' I wanted a name that didn't have folk music in it, and I thought this name was roughly what my show was, it was music you couldn't hear on the radio."
Now, at the beginning of his 25th year on WPRB, Mr. Weingart is still hosting Music You Can't Hear on the Radio.
"It doesn't in any way feel old to me. It feels funny at times to realize how long I've been doing it. But mostly it just feels like a treat to be able to keep doing it."
Doing the show week after week, year after year, does have drawbacks. Mr. Weingart's family-his wife, Deborah Spitalnik, and their 13-year-old daughter, Molly-don't have him around at the end of the weekend.
"I know the hardest thing for them is that Sunday night is a real nice night to do a radio show because it's a nice sort of family-reading-the-paper, hanging-out-at-home kind of time," he says. "There are people pretty much doing the same thing every Sunday and for whom the show become a habit, which I love. But for exactly the same reason it's been real hard for my wife and daughter to know that I'm not around most Sunday nights. So that part's been hard."
He now takes the summer months off, making it easier to spend time with his family. It also helps him listen to new music.
"I've come to like having a couple of months where I can sort of listen to music like a civilian, instead of always thinking about what song I'd play next," he says.
For the most part, his family is very supportive of his show.
"My wife tapes the show, and then listens to it on her way to work. So she's my number one listener," he says.
Mr. Weingart plans his show during the week. As the days' events unfold, he is reminded of particular songs and ideas. Whereas many people are reminded of specific events by particular songs-how many couples have "our song"?-for Mr. Weingart it is events that remind him of specific songs.
Mr. Weingart listens to new music while he's driving. He estimates he spends between one and three hours each week planning the show.
"What'll often happen is by Thursday night I'll sit down late at night and spend some time making little piles all over my den."
He groups the songs together thematically. On a recent show he played a whole set of music about floods and Noah's ark.
"Sunday morning I'll try to put them in some order that makes sense to me," he says.
Despite this preparation, the planning he does in advance is hardly set in stone.
"Almost as soon as I start the show I start messing with the order," he says. "I like having a plan ahead of time. I feel really insecure if I don't. But I really cherish being able to deviate from it.
"Sometimes I will say at the beginning of the show what I think I'm going to play that Sunday, but I always try to hedge because I'm never sure that I'm not going to go in a different direction."
"I used to be an assistant commissioner of the (New Jersey) Department of Environmental Protection. I had this very nice, prestigious, interesting job, where I was responsible for a whole bunch of programs and thousands of decisions each year. And I tried to do a good job but I always felt like there were so many things out of my control. One thing about the radio show is that it's all in my control. That I have a vision of what I want this to be, and I can bring it very close to that image, and each week it's another challenge to do that. And I realize, lately, it's a challenge to do that, to figure out what a perfect radio show is to me as a 49-year-old, as opposed to a 25-year-old, when I started doing it." Mr. Weingart is currently executive director of the New Jersey Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility Siting Board-entirely appropriate for someone with a master's degree in public affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School, but hardly the kind of government job most people would connect with a moonlighting disc jockey.
"I spoke to an environmental commission in a town about a year ago and afterward a woman came up to me and said, 'You know, there's a guy who does a radio show who has voice just like yours and his name is somewhat similar,'" he says laughing. "It just didn't compute to her. It just hadn't crossed her mind that it could be the same person."
Hosting a radio program consistently for so many years has enabled Mr. Weingart to meet many of the musicians whose recordings he plays. He also occasionally has them perform live on the program.
"I have very mixed feelings about having live music on the show," he says. "I like doing it because I get to hear some good live music, and I get to give some exposure to people who might not get it otherwise. But I also really like the solitude of just being down there by myself and just playing records."
Among the more widely known people who have performed on his show are Christine Lavin and Mary Chapin Carpenter.
"When Mary Chapin Carpenter was on my show we didn't have a mic stand, and so her guitarist held the microphone in front of her while she talked and then handed it to me and I held it while she sang," he says. "It was such a great image to me: It was only about three weeks later that she was on one of the national award shows where she was getting every honor possible-in front of an audience of millions-and remembering that three weeks earlier she'd been sitting in this grungy basement without a mic stand."
Mr. Weingart now also runs a concert series each year at the Prallsville Mill in Stockton.
"I just arrange concerts with performers who I've liked either in concert or on record," he says. "I've met a fair number of musical heroes that way."
But mostly, he likes to be alone, thinking about the music, weaving a subtext in the combinations of songs that resonates with his life and the lives of his listeners.
"In some ways it's a very solitary, spiritual process for me," he says. "I did a show last April-it would have been my father's 100th birthday. I did the whole show of songs about fathers. I read some poems my father had written, talked about him a bit. It was such a cathartic experience for me. I guess that's what other people get out of going to a cemetery."
It's these touches that set Music You Can't Hear on the Radio apart, that make it a process of conscious relaxation through music every Sunday evening, and that serve as a way to recharge Mr. Weingart and his listeners.
"I play Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech in its entirety every year on his birthday. Every time there are people who call up or e-mail and say they listened to it with their daughter or son and it was the first time their child had heard anything other than the line 'I have a dream,' and how much that meant to them. That's really a treat to be able to do that, and to be able to do that in the context of WPRB where I have complete freedom. In one way I wish I was doing it in some place where there were 10 million people listening, but on the other hand, to do it where whatever I want to play I can play."
And lovers of music you once couldn't hear on the radio know there's at least one place they can turn to on Sunday evening.
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