"Sal, is That You?"

This site is dedicated to the Salivating Ear, his listeners, fans, followers, heirs and imposters. Those of you who know, know. The Ear started broadcasting out of Shreveport, LA in 1959, playing a puzzling-yet-thrilling mix of country, calypso, R&B, primitive rock-n-roll and modal jazz. He vanished inexplicably in 1962, yet resurfaced later in the decade in Berkeley, CA, where his "counter-counter-cultural" pirate radio program presaged contemporary mash-ups by a good three decades. Prog-folk mumbling ran into the Andrews Sisters into Bettye LaVette. It didn't matter (or it did, it would've if anyone were listening,) so long as the music was almost-good or simply outstanding, and given at any rate to provoke something other in its absent listener than complacent head-nodding. The Ear was a sporadic yet stubborn presence on Northern California radio into the mid-80s, cropping up to distract us from our graduate studies and Reaganite dolor with side two of "Play Along With The Ventures" aired in its entirety alongside Eno's "Discreet Music," Voivod, King Tubby and the rest until...he evaporated. For real this time. Perhaps it was something to do with an alleged radical past, or present (he adhered, quite vocally, to the ten-point platform of John Sinclair's White Panther Party long after said party had been disbanded) or perhaps it involved more personal dissipation, either way the Ear has been absent from the airwaves nearly twenty years. His spirit lives in every moment of radio silence, every flubbed intro and stumbling apology at the farthest left end of the dial. Even his once-forward-then-backwards-looking politics (point five: "free access to information media-free the technology from the greed creeps!") seem now to apprehend an eternal semi-relevance, a willingness to keep kicking not so much against the pricks as independently of them. As such, he is with us now more than ever. Neither nice nor necessary, we honor him all the same.