Local Blues Legend Larry McCray Tries New Shift as Weekly Radio D.J.

By Scott Baker

     

Larry McCray's got a brand new gig.

For the past three months, McCray has been heard spinning the blues every Monday night for surrounding area listeners of Owosso's WJSZ 92.5 FM, The Castle.

The independent channel has been known from mixing it up between everything from classic Jeff Beck to Echo and the Bunnymen, R.E.M. and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Nirvana and Depeche Mode. They even feature a highly rated Latin/American music program, Revolution Musica, every Sunday night from 6-10 p.m.

With the help of blues fan and Magnolia Records hand Evan Beach, McCray landed a slot from 8-11 p.m. every Monday evening, spinning every decade of the blues on his own Hog House Blues Show.

"I always had an interest in doing something like this, it's just a matter of finding a place that was willing to give someone an opportunity,"  said McCray during a show interview a few weeks back.  "I feel privileged for the fact that I'm just a vehicle. I mean it's a great thing to get an opportunity to educate and promote the music that I love and to be able to choose and pick and kind of almost shape the outcome of the situation to my liking, to my own personal taste. I know that that's very much a privilege."

From the early days of Robert Johnson to the current fuse of Bernard Allison, McCray aims to take the listener on a ride for three hours, spanning each decade and seaming them into one.

"There's a lot of blues programs in the area, but I think in terms of the style and the intensity that we represent and the freedom that they allow us to have here at the station, it's what makes this program special. Because it's all for taste, it's not, 'You've got to play so many Robert Johnson tunes,’ or 'You must play so many Ledbelly's, you know. They let us play what we want to play and

I choose what I think are the best artists to represent where the music is today."
"I do take time during each week of the show to try to give a little history on the subject of the blues, but it's not a history program. And  therefore I try to link both generations. I try to link the old, where it's been and where it's come to today. I try to link it all together."

With the help of The Castle's night DJ Bart Sadler, McCray is free to pick and choose his palate without having to twiddle any knobs.
"Bart is the engineer," stated McCray.  "I couldn't even try to get on it if it wasn't for Bart--me and the Bartman. I rely on his know-how in terms of being a professional DJ."
 

Beach, a longtime friend and fan of McCray, along with McCray's manager Paul Koch, have been working to branch the show to other stations from Lansing to Saginaw.

"Evan Beach was primarily the one instrumental in setting it all up,"  said McCray. "I don't know how he made the contacts or what prompted him to do so, but he contacted the people here. He's been a friend for close to about 20 years now I guess, so we've known each other quite a while. It is a good opportunity for me and maybe I could have been slightly instrumental in helping get the door open to get the people to listen to him and see what he had to say."

Living in Merrill, Beach wanted to start up a something new for himself and decided to join forces with Koch's Magnolia Entertainment.

"Basically it's just knowing Paul, knowing Larry, (it was a) new change in life," said Beach. "A good time to pick up something new. I'm a body man.  I straighten car and truck frames, but I'm trying to put some serious distance between me and that, because I've been doing that 28 years, you know. I've always loved music big time, it's just if I can't play it on a guitar, I can at least get someone to play it on the radio."

Beach is just happy to be along for the ride every Monday.

"The first night we had Billy Bones and Bonedaddy's and then they brought down one of their buddies, The Rib Rustler,"  laughed Beach.  "So we had a little Bar-B-Q cook off. They had their cookers right down on the street. Last week a couple guys brought up a bunch of chicken wings and a bunch of good hot stuff, so it's a lot of fun. We got guys who have turned it into a little contest: Who can feed Larry this week?"

Getting Budweiser to jump on-board and help sponsor the show has helped McCray pick the stations ratings up. They take requests during the show as well.

"We are promoting the Budweiser (Blues) Series in Kalamazoo (State Theatre) and doing some things at the Frankenmuth Brewery," said McCray.
 Sadler says that being an independent channel has kept him restriction free and open to every style of music over the years.

"I've  been at this radio station for about seven years," said Sadler. "I did a blues show about five years ago, six years ago when we did the Jambalaya's (Blues venue) thing. We'd do the blues show from here and we'd have a guy out at Jambalaya's doing interviews and stuff and sometimes we'd play stuff from them live. But mostly I do the rock thing Monday through Friday. We do classic rock, we do alternative, we do everything. We don't have play lists or anything, we're pretty much free form rock."

"I like to call it B-sides, because everybody knows the A-sides, but there's a lot of great B-sides that never got played,"  added McCray on his love of the independence of the channel.

"I mean people take for granted that an artist may only have one statement in life, just play that tune, or that's his hit, but there's a lot of other good music that just gets overlooked, because of the fact that if you're being dictated to what to play, they want you to play the popular tunes. I think this way it gives the people a much broader look at the artist as an individual, what their whole catalog is about."

McCray had no problem dishing out the blues his first week on the air, spinning his musical heroes and his peers.

"I went straight up the middle with Albert King, Albert Collins, Freddie King, all my traditional favorites of electric blues," laughed McCray.  "So the first program was really easy and I thought very good. In the weeks to come, it's always been hard to keep rotating music and to not play the same songs every week on your program. So six weeks into it, that's kind of what my scramble is now -  to keep playing different music, to keep playing good music and to rotate the artists. I've been playing (James) Cotton, the Kinsey's, and some Donny Hartman from Dick Wagner's old band The Frost.

Even with the new job, McCray has to occasionally let people know about his day job as well.
"I'm guilty of doing that," he quipped. "I've been playing a couple of tunes of mine here and there, but I try not to turn it into a Larry show.

"I don't want to be to self-serving."

home  |  out/about  |  events  |   personal  |  store  |  classified  |  real estate  |   forums  |  archives  |  contact
© 2005 Review Magazine.  All rights reserved.