Episode notes
The Sound of Young America: The Legacy Collection is an effort to highlight some of the older shows in our vast audio archive. We were pretty much podcasting before anyone actually listened to podcasts, so I’m guessing you haven’t heard these shows.
This week, it’s an hour-long visit with our friends Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster, of The Best Show on WFMU. The Best Show is a weekly three-hour decent into madness. Tom hosts, and a variety of oddballs — many real, some imagined — call in to discuss their problems, play on-air games and discuss their insular world. Tom is generally a genial host, but when provoked, he transforms into a despot, wielding his catchphrase, “GET OFF MY PHONE” at any and all offending parties.
TBSOWFMU is best known for Wurster’s calls. Jon assumes one of a variety of personae and calls Tom, often with a perfectly reasonable comment or response to a question or contest. Slowly, over the course of twenty or thirty minutes, things spin out of control. Often, Tom is left incredulously blubbering his dissent in response to a stream of bizarre proclomations on the other side of the phone.
This episode of The Sound of Young America features an interview with Jon & Tom as well as a selection of material from one of the compilation CDs they release on their label, Stereolaffs.
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Bullseye is a celebration of the best of arts and culture in public radio form. Host Jesse Thorn sifts the wheat from the chaff to bring you in-depth interviews with the most revered and revolutionary minds in our culture.
Bullseye has been featured in Time, The New York Times, GQ and McSweeney’s, which called it “the kind of show people listen to in a more perfect world.” Since April 2013, the show has been distributed by NPR.
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