Later years found Smolin teaching high school English in the Los Angeles Unified School District (I hope to get at least a B+ on this paper). Though a lover of the written word, he had also been a fan of highly influential L.A. radio station KHJ as a youth, and still held a desire to be before a microphone. When he learned that public radio station KPFK needed someone to edit their program guide, he saw an opportunity for his wife -- and himself.  
     
 
 

  Mrs. Smolin began editing the guide, while Mr. Smolin would hang out at the station and meet with the hosts of his favorite radio show, The Music Never Stops. At the time the show was purely Grateful Dead concert tapes, Southern California's answer to The Grateful Dead Hour. Thanks to management changes and the rising and falling interest of the participants, Smolin eventually found himself being the show's MC over the 112,000 watt signal (the strongest radio signal West of the Mississippi). Then, in August of `95 as Deadheads lost their spiritual leader with the death of Jerry Garcia, Smolin's show found a new direction.
 
     
  "When Jerry Garcia died we did a lot of Garcia tributes. As that was going on, it dawned on me that this format is going to get very stale, and I didn't want to become a museum curator," Smolin reflects. "I'm not an archivist; that's not my nature. I have the ultimate respect for the guys who do that stuff, but I'm definitely a more pioneering kind of fella. I always like to be the one out there checking out what's new. I like to be out on the frontier." This eventually led the DJ to the genre known as "jam bands."  
     
 
 

  "Oh, it definitely caught my interest," the host says when asked if it caught his interest. "I was a big fan of the Grateful Dead, and jazz, too: anything that I was told was improvisational and exploratory, where you never knew what was going to happen and it was filled with surprises. So I started to check out the scene, such as it was in those days. There wasn't that much of a scene then." The scene grew, and he discovered East coast acts like moe., the Ominous Seapods and Widespread Panic. His listeners, however, were not initially ready for the ride. "There was a lot of hostility from a huge segment of my audience who really only wanted to hear the Grateful Dead."
 
     
  Within months the doubting Deadheads would witness the rewards Smolin's frontiersman instincts reaped. "There was enough of a positive response from, obviously, a younger segment of my listeners that the station stuck with it for a few more months. Sure enough when the ratings came out, such as they are for public radio, the listenership to my show had something like tripled! It also became apparent at the next fund drive. At the next fund drive in 1996 I brought in more money than that show had ever brought in."  
     
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