From ANDRAS JONES: I grew up on the campus at The Evergreen State College. My father was a founding faculty member and worked at Evergreen until his death in the mid 1990’s. When he became ill I moved from Los Angeles back to Olympia and have been based here ever since. For 10 years, from 1998 to 2008 I hosted Radio8Ball on KAOS, the community college station at Evergreen. The whole time I was doing the show, certain DJ’s took issue with Radio8Ball as being cheesy, too out there, and even potentially dangerous. One of these, John Ford, was put in the awkward position of giving Radio8Ball an audience choice award at The Olympia Music Awards in 2012, after spending years telling anyone who would listen that Radio8Ball was removed from the KAOS airwaves because the show was “unpopular”. Why was Radio8Ball removed from the KAOS airwaves? I’ve been trying to get someone from Evergreen or KAOS to address this question for over a decade now. What is clear is that my decision in 2008 to do the show without Tammy Tillinghast, who had been my co-host on R8B at KAOS since 2004, was the precipitating incident. She took it hard but her behavior towards me felt overly fixated and made me and some listeners uncomfortable. Since she already had a show on KAOS my decision to do the show on my own didn’t mean she was off the air, it simply meant that she wouldn’t be able to spend time with me on the air. I felt bad for Tammy; she’s good at illiciting sympathy, so I invited her to come on the show to say goodbye to the listeners and tell them where they could find her other show(s). This musical divination is from her farewell show, after which she waged a campaign of harassment that made KAOS and the campus I’d grown up on feel very inhospitable in ways that would disturb anyone but which had particular impact for me as a Jewish person – threatening and anonymous calls and e-mails, irate communications from fellow programmers who had heard from Tammy that I said negative things about them I never said, hateful graffiti about me, calls to my other employers telling them to fire me, vandalizing Radio8Ball materials at the station, and publishing a hundred page blog full of attacks and mis-characterizations about me designed to paint herself as a victim and encourage her supporters to join her campaign of harassment. When I reported this to the station management they said it wasn’t a station issue and proceeded to falsify evidence against me to justify removing KAOS from the airwaves without giving me the same courtesy I gave Tammy and allowing me to, at very least, say goodbye to the audience and let them know where they could find Radio8Ball. Instead listeners who called the station wondering where the show they’d been listening to for 10 years went, they were told the lie that I had “moved to Seattle”. To this day, I still run into people in Olympia who say they LOVED Radio8Ball on KAOS and have no idea why it ended. I don’t want to suggest that Evergreen has gone downhill because it allowed station management at KAOS and the abusive behavior of one DJ to run Radio8Ball off their airwaves but the college has taken some major hits since then with one controversy after another leading to a decrease in attendance. Just today Evergreen announced that they will no longer make the swimming pools at the college, which have long been a cherished community resource, available to the public “for budgetary reasons”. Maybe attacking and vilifying exciting art projects that are indigenous to Evergreen instead of celebrating and protecting them is one of the reasons the college has become a less desirable destination for the creative, challenging, inspired and even revolutionary students it once welcomed with open arms (and minds). I’m down to be a part of the re-birth and I think that involves addressing the troubling question I keep on asking “Why was Radio8Ball removed from the KAOS airwaves?”

POP ORACLE Song of The Day (January 16, 2019): DREAM DATE “Tour Songs”

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