John Hannibal

When I was but a wee lad, my Dad gave me a radio that he had built with his own two hands. Pretty cool, eh? It had an off-white composite shell, a coupling of old vacuum radio tubes and a lighted dial which hummed with electricity for several moments until the radio warmed up and could locate a signal.

Some nights it was tuned into M-105, “Home of Continuous Music.” Some nights it was WGCL. And when nights rolled around, it was over to Pete Franklin on WWWE, WHK, Kid Leo or Steve Church’s “Live Wire” on ‘MMS, or even CKLW, which mustered a signal out of Windsor, Ontario carrying the occasional Red Wings game.

I’m guessing that same radio would cause a three-alarm house fire were it plugged in today. And if it did still work, I can’t see burning up old radio tubes on 24 minutes of commercials an hour. But I have fond memories of that radio, discovering what Neil Peart referred to as “The Spirit” thereof and the medium’s innate ability to build unique, one-to-one relationships with an audience.

The thrill of discovering new music mixed with classic sounds of the past is alive and well in local Cleveland streaming audio “broadcaster” John Hannibal and his “Radio Hannibal” show, which you can find at http://www.live365.com. The mix is, as Hannibal himself describes it, “eclectic but not esoteric.”

There is a pop sensibility to Hannibal’s format; the station celebrates in the style of great Album Oriented Rock (AOR) stations of the past. Back in the day, AOR rock stations were simply undeniable, new and exciting. These days, most listeners—those who aren’t considered radioheads anyway—think AOR these days means “Stairway to Heaven,” “Free Bird” and “Money” every 45 minutes.

Cool Cleveland recently spoke to Hannibal about his little pirate-radio chunk of cyberspace and an iPod full of other topics, both radio- and Cleveland-related.

Cool Cleveland: What made you decide to start Radio Hannibal?

John Hannibal: Well, if you don’t count the Beatles in ’64 and my transistor radio as an influence, I’ve always been a music fanatic. It was great to get those stations at night with the skip on AM radio… and I guess “Radio Hannibal” was born out of that. But I also did college radio for a while at that “perfect time,” when CMJ was the “inside track” in a bunch of stapled together sheets of 8X11 papers. I remember our station manager questioning our $125 subscription!!

Later on, I found myself working in home audio and running a DJ business on the side doing weddings and events—which I realize has a really bad connotation these days. But that [side job] was born out of doing a lot of DJ-ing in Cleveland clubs back in the 80s. So needless to say, I have quite a love affair with music, radio and audio… and I had quite a [music] collection going, too. What little spare time I had was spent making “Radio Hannibal” mix tapes for friends; later on it became mix CDs. The idea was to get some of that music that just wasn’t getting around to other people to hear when radio went down the road of commercialism.

There’s a lot of that whole spirit in what I’m doing with “Radio Hannibal” today.

Tell me a little bit about the technology and the timeframe it takes to put together “Radio Hannibal” as it exists today.

Let’s just say I need to get a new computer sometime soon! (laughs) I’m still working out of Windows 98 and its bare-bones. Somewhere down the road, it will become a more hi-tech endeavor. Right now, I send out an email letting people know what’s on the show. Soon, I’ll have radiohannibal.com up and going.

My whole thing is to mix in the music and segues together and a lot of the disappearing art of radio magic and personality that has been lost over the years. It’s not “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” quite yet. (laughs) What I do—and this is rather archaic by today’s standards, but it works—I take a 2CD mixer and a mike and record a 74 minute show onto a MiniDisc in real-time. Then I take that MiniDisc, which I can edit on in case there’s a snag or a mistake, and record to my hard drive. Most of the time, I listen to that in real time as it records. Then I upload it to live365.com and put it on as a show.

Most people on live365 do it two different ways: they’re either live streaming, like the “Radio Paradise” guys… or they’re just posting one song after the other, creating a play list without any bumpers. I lean more toward the former.

So you’re not podcasting then? My next line of questioning was related to podcasters and the Library of Congress implementing royalty fees requiring Webcasters to pay labels when they play a song—

Podcasting is where I could get in trouble. Nothing on my show is ever in mp3 format. That’s where labels would get involved and say, “We’re gonna sue you because you’re taking commercial music and not paying the licensing fees for it.”

But aren’t you doing that now?

Well, I’m buying all of my music retail and not ripping it off of Kazaa or one of those places. And I’m promoting it as well… and you see, live streaming is in no way comparable to mp3 quality. It is done as one continuous piece, which makes it more difficult to strip anything of value out of it. It’s like pressing record on your radio cassette deck. They’ve got the show I’m doing and the music is certainly a part of that, but in the truest sense of the word, [listeners] can’t really add the music to their collection at the end of the day.

What determines what you play on your “Radio Hannibal” show?

Nothing, really. It’s a subjective thing. Like Duke Ellington used to say, “There’s two types of music: there’s good music and there’s bad music.” I will say there’s a lot of reading and a lot of buying [music], but I don’t have the time to wade through everything there is out there anymore, so a lot of it is looking to the cream that rises to the top. I’m just into playing good music.

This is just how I would program a radio station. There are a lot of people out there who are probably doing the same thing with their iPods—that is, really loading them with what they want to hear and share with others… you know, there are a lot of people who are hearing Death Cab For Cutie now for the first time and digging it; their longtime fans are saying “sellout.” And that’s the same thing I thought about R.E.M. at the time they started [getting bigger]. But I’m not above playing something getting popular or in danger of becoming popular.

Do you see yourself as a “radio entrepreneur” or “agent provocateur?”

An entrepreneur, ‘cause it’s a viable risk and a pipe dream at the same time.

Media junkies and pundits say listening to online audio is up, but most of them say streaming music has yet to produce a profitable business. With that in mind, is it profitable, or is it a labor of love alone?

It’s a labor of love that might always be a challenge to make profitable in the short term. But I’m doing what I love to do and if it opens some minds and ears then that’s a great thing. The more people out there using computers and looking for alternatives, the more reasons there will be for streaming audio and podcasts.

The media has often dismissed blogs similarly as being “beneath contempt.” But that’s starting to change lately. Does the radio industry view podcasts and streaming audio similarly? And will that change?

I’m not sure that the industry has even really fully conceived of the streaming audio and podcasts on the Internet yet. There’s awareness. But right now, the technology to get streaming audio out there en masse is a long ways off. Think about how much server space and bandwidth you need to accommodate a huge amount of listeners. When bandwidth is increased and all high-speed Internet moves to wireless [technology] and you can listen to anything you want, anywhere you want… well, then the sky will literally be the limit.

And you thought being under the covers with the AM radio was cool! (laughs)

The focus is on satellite at the moment for [the radio industry] and that’s already getting corrupted and corporate. Internet radio will be bigger than satellite, from an impact perspective. And it will happen sooner than later. Clear Channel already has a huge interest and stake in what’s on satellite radio right now—

And the argument can be made that satellite radio is already wrecked. It’s still relatively new and shiny to subscribers, but there’s no magic. In fact, it already seems mundane, numbing and predictable. Is that a byproduct of the media conglomeration and advertising revenue issues?

Recent stats put satellite subscribers at 40-50 million before XM and Sirius can put even a dent in the terrestrial radio listening public. If they populate satellite radio with the same commercial angles, it won’t be long before people are looking for something new again. It could happen very quickly…. The commercial broadcasters [on satellite] are so panicky—especially as it relates to format—that they don’t know where to go. What’s out there sounds a lot like iPods on shuffle.

Has there been a death knell in “terrestrial radio” from your perspective?

Well, during the new wave movement, radio programmers sort of lost the script (laughs). Stations became a place where record companies said “Hey, here’s a place where we can sell a lot of our stuff!” And I remember that’s when I stopped listening to WMMS and remembering just how great it was to be involved in college radio at that time. And when you think about what college radio has done in the past and continues to do these days, there’s still so much road to travel. College radio is still so under the radar and eclectic most of the time.

I don’t think the death knell has sounded for terrestrial radio yet, mostly because of what I love so much about it—the geographic nature of it. That’s what keeps a lot of what is happening with Internet radio exciting, too. There are people out there in geographic pockets, putting their spin on what’s out there. It’s still real. And it will be a long while before that aspect of it dies, if it ever does.

Interview and Photo by Peter Chakerian peterATcoolcleveland.com

 (:divend:)