Blues Rock: WGN Radio 720 AM's Steve & Johnnie present Life After Dark

While I was a student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, I had a short stint as one of the DJs on the campus station, WNUR, as part of the eclectic overnight show called Freeform. Freeform DJs usually got one 2-hour slot with the freedom to play anything you wanted—as long as it fit within in the standard FCC guidelines. I toyed with children’s songs, soundscapes, Christian music shows, and combinations of things I found in my parents’ record collection and the local 10 cent bins.

When I got back to my dorm room at 3:00 AM, it was time to get back to sleep, to try to recover a few lost hours before my first class in the morning. In those dark, quiet hours, crawling back into bed, is when I discovered one of the last great, local overnight radio programs in the nation. In between all of the satellite programming and the reruns on other talk radio stations coming through the AM band, there was WGN Radio 720 AM with Steve King and Johnnie Putman. This team has been on the overnight shift for nearly 20 years giving listeners a blend of humor, local chat, news, and MUSIC.

Steve and Johnnie are huge music fans, and since hearing their show for that first time back in 1992, I’ve often caught their discussions about music, their interviews, and their live in-studio performances by many different artists. I had a tendency to wake up once or twice a night, and so there’s been plenty of chances (even after I quit WNUR) to wake up and listen to Steve and Johnnie. While I was in St. Louis at the seminary, if the weather was right, I could hear them talk to BR5-49. When we moved up to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, I rejoiced that you can get WGN all day (Northwestern football/basketball games AND Steve and Johnnie).


In 2000, Steve and Johnnie released a collection of those in-studio performances. I love these CDs put out by radio stations and shows, because the intimate recordings are very different than studio recordings or concert recordings. Life After Dark is a compilation that lands in the Blues Rock section, because Steve and Johnnie are blues fans with many of their guests coming out of that tradition and sound.

Some of my favorite tracks on Life After Dark are:
--->“Better Off with the Blues” by Delbert McClinton, a perfect lead off track of early morning blues, Delbert’s harmonica, and guitar from Gary Nicholson.
--->Susan Tedeschi gives a moving solo rendition of “Angel from Montgomery,” a John Prine song covered on her first album.
--->Antje is a singer-songwriter with a captivating voice which on “Simply Being Cleopatra” creeps around with a tentative guitar matching this song about being noticed but also believing in yourself as a woman.

The CD also has some poignant tracks. Matthew and Gunar Nelson offer a rendition of their father’s “Garden Party.” Known as Nelson as the twins rose to popularity in the 90’s, this pairing seemed to miss much of their potential. Taking their father, Rick Nelson’s song here, though, their voices blend and show much more depth. The last track on the CD contains their telling the story about the song.

There’s also Rick Danko, formerly of the Band, performing “Twilight.” One week after being on the Steve and Johnnie show, Danko died. Obviously Danko didn’t know he’d die, but listening now to his singing, with harmony from cohort Aaron “Professor Louie” Hurwitz, somehow looks forward to the death that would come. “Twilight is the loneliest time of day,” indeed.

However, my favorite track has to be Preston Reed’s guitar instrumental, “Ladies Night.” Fortunately the liner notes are very clear that it is just Reed playing one guitar. This is acoustic guitar driven to great lengths, amazing strumming and picking, percussive beats from the body of the guitar, and a speed that just leaves others to shame. Leo Kottke gets tremendous sounds out of guitars; Peter Mayer accompanies himself on guitar-body-percussion; but Preston Reed puts all of that together in this track.

Here from the liner notes is what the in-studio reaction was: “It was only about one chorus into his first song when we looked through the glass into the newsroom to see the news staff, engineers, secretaries and anyone else who could fit in, pressing their faces up against the glass to see if we had a band of midgets hidden under the control board helping to make all that music.”

Thanks to Steve King and Johnnie Putman for continuing the tradition of local talk radio while also breathing life into it with their appreciation for great music. If you’re east of the Rockies, give your radio a shot at hearing their show from 11:00 PM-5:00 AM Central time; AM radios love to grab those distant signals at night. If you can’t pick it up, listen online at www.wgnradio.com

Life After Dark is available online from Nation Records.