We should be pinching ourselves every day that we pick up the phone now and Tom Waits wants to come be on the show. When you were a new show, was it hard to find decent guests?Ī. We really were one of the few that was doing this and we got a little resistance from public radio at the beginning, with people asking, “Who needs a popular music show on public radio?” But they didn’t understand what we were going to do, or that the music we were going to highlight was not getting played on commercial radio, and barely on public radio. When you launched The World Cafe, was there any other public radio show like it?Ī. Recently we sat down with Dye to talk about his hugely successful program, the state of radio and, of course, the music he loves. This month, the show will be honored with an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, given each year in recognition of outstanding print, broadcast and new media coverage of music. Now heard on nearly 200 stations nationwide, Dye’s program is one of the most influential music shows in radio, having hosted such high-profile artists as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Tom Waits and countless others. So while he knew the world-music show wouldn’t fly, Dye saw an opportunity: He scrapped the world music, kept the proposed show name and, in 1991, launched The World Cafe radio show. What they wanted to hear, coincidentally, was the very music that Dye himself had loved for years: Intelligent, grown-up, singer-songwriter-penned tunes that commercial radio wouldn’t dare spin. They would write things down like, ‘It all sounds like salsa.’ They just didn’t want to hear it.”

“It was way down at the bottom of the list. “They hated the world music,” Dye says, laughing. When Dye and his colleagues tested the world-music idea on a focus group of 100 public radio listeners, the idea fell flat.

We thought, ‘Oh, these intelligent public radio listeners, they’ll want to know about this music. “Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ had just come out. “World music was really big at that point,” says Dye. The program was supposed to be the first-ever public radio show about world music-and it was to be called “The World Cafe.” It was as a researcher.Īfter serving as a volunteer DJ at the station, Dye was finally given a full-time job in 1990, just after the station received a public radio grant to develop a new radio show. It got me back into rock.”ĭavid Dye’s first official job at WXPN wasn’t as a disc jockey. It was a real turning point for me to fall in love with that album. I love that period of Miles.”īruce Springsteen, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Miles Davis, Sorcerer (1967): “This is middle-period Miles. There’s a bit in nostalgia involved with that.” But it’s mostly a great summation of Marley’s sound.”īob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited (1965): “Just because it’s a classic album and I grew up with it. It’s just a fabulous disc.”īob Marley, Natty Dread (1974): “It’s just a great, understated reggae album with political themes. Hejira is incredible lyrically and she has some of the most amazing backing, with Jaco Pastorious on bass. Joni Mitchell, Hejira (1976): “I am honestly a singer-songwriter fan.

Simon the sorcerer reggae