Dr. Incognito

At WDBX since October 1999
DJ on ’80s HADES

Did you have a college station that you loved? A station where you could hear blues, disco, bluegrass, reggae, jazz and punk tunes back to back just because the DJs answered to no one? WDBX is that station, with a southern Illinois twist. It’s the coolest station in town, running on a shoestring budget and staffed by volunteer DJs who play music you won’t hear on the radio anywhere else. It’s the perennial underdog. It’s community. It’s freedom. It’s the American dream made real, throbbing away 24/7/365 at 91.1 megahertz in the middle of the heartland. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry…it will become a part of you. For Pete’s sake, how could you not love it?

’80s HADES started out as a GeoCities website in the late ’90s. After I arrived in Carbondale in August 1999, I stumbled upon a WDBX information table at an event at Turley Park. As a bona fide member of Generation X whose teenage years were smack dab in the middle of the ’80s, it had always been a dream of mine to share ’80s music with the peoples of the world. I filled out an application to create a show along those lines, and by October 1999, I was on the air. ’80s HADES has bounced around ever since, from Friday mornings to Friday afternoons to Tuesday evenings, where it now resides. The original goal of the show was to return the forgotten hits of the 1980s to the airwaves, but as the decades have passed and my music collection has grown, the show has become more eclectic, focusing on pop, rock, alternative, punk, postpunk and new wave, but stretching from country to reggae to blues to thrash.