This special Leap Day podcast features another vintage interview from the Medialoper vaults. Recorded in 1987, this is one of the more unusual Jonathan Richman interviews you will ever hear.

How unusal? Well, I think it’s safe to say that this is probably the first and only time that Jonathan Richman was ever interviewed by a janitor. Of course, these days we call them maintenance engineers, but back in the Reagan era things weren’t quite so politically correct.

The janitor in question is one Big Jim Hunsicker. Big Jim was head custodian in the Speech Arts building at CSU Fresno — home of KFSR FM.

Back in the early 80’s the college radio revolution was just taking off, and running a station that played only your favorite bands was every music geek’s dream come true.

There was just one problem. While we were happy to have complete control over our little slice of the airwaves, we couldn’t always be relied on to wake up at 6 am to turn the transmitter on. Fortunately, Big Jim was watching over us. Whenever the morning DJ would oversleep (which happened A LOT), Big Jim would put down his broom, turn on the transmitter, read the official station sign-on, and cue up Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man (that was the official Big Jim theme song).

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This edition of Medialoper’s occasional podcast features an interview with the legendary blues singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Jay passed away in February of 2000, but I was fortunate enough to spend an afternoon with him back in October of 1987.

When I think back to that day, over twenty years ago, a few moments are indelibly etched in my memory. I remember standing in Jay’s kitchen, staring at the coffin propped up beside his refrigerator, and thinking “that’s Screamin’ Jay’s coffin!”.

Jay made quite a name for himself jumping out of that coffin and scaring the hell out of young, middle-class, white kids back in the mid-50’s when the whole Rock-and-Roll thing was just getting started.

As I was to find out, the coffin in Jay’s kitchen wasn’t THE coffin. Instead, it was one of many. For a guy like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, one coffin just won’t do. Jay had nearly a half dozen coffins squirreled away around the country, waiting to be deployed on a moments notice. Which is strange, considering that Jay claimed to have given up using the coffin as part of his act nearly 30 years prior to our meeting.

As it turns out, Screamin’ Jay was always willing to jump out of a coffin provided the price was right.

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A lot of hay was made yesterday about a wide-reaching survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. For example, one of the things that got serious play was that about half of the people out there still don’t live their lives around high-tech products.

Instead, I guess, they are living their lives around such mundane things as their jobs, their churches, their families and so forth. Then the survey broke down the actual users into sub-groups, and explained various things about the sub-groups. It was all very interesting and informative, and then I got to the very end . . .

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A year ago, perhaps the hottest thing on the internets were the podcasts of the Ricky Gervais show. And why not? The weird comic rhythms of Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington had already been honed for a few years on XFM radio, even while Ricky & Stephen were making comedic history with the original BBC The Office.

The overwhelming buzz, however, died down somewhat when the podcasts went from free to paid.

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One of our goals when we started Medialoper was to look at independent efforts to create cool content for the new media audience — and Rocketboom was a prime example of how two people with a a camera, a broadband connection, and a good idea can succeed where so many media giants had failed.

The concept was simple: present interesting news in a cool format. It worked. The daily broadcast reached a huge audience. And then…the bottom fell out. Host Amanda Congdon left the program and the back-and-forth “he said, she said” stories flew across the Internet. It doesn’t really matter if Amanda was pushed or she jumped, not in the long run. After she left, the great Rocketboom experiment continued with a new host.
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Obviously, I’m thankful for family, friends, health, employment. But forget all of that, because here is my list of the Medialoper-y things for which I’m thankful right now:

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As these things go, I’m a relative latecomer to the podcasts of The Ricky Gervais Show: I only got ’round to listening to them a couple of weeks ago. Better still, I came into it totally cold, not knowing what to expect, and I was instantly hooked on the mad ramblings of Karl Pilkington.  So much so, that as a matter of fact, I have no issues with paying for the podcasts of the second season.

It totally passes my Blackjack test:  do I anticipate getting more pleasure out of this than playing a single hand of Blackjack?  And in this case, the answer is a resounding “yes.” To be fair, Ricky was on Letterman last week, and explained that they are charging for this season to recoup the hosting and bandwidth costs for all of the downloads.

However, for those of you who don’t want to pay for your monkeynews, or you want to see to find out what the buzz is all about  prior to  paying — it looks like the Podcast Series  1 archive will also cost $5 to grab in one fell swoop — I’ve discovered a secret online stash of dozens of episodes of The Ricky Gervais Show.

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It seems like just yesterday that podcasts were free and plentiful, and the conventional wisdom was that there was no way to make money from audio blogging. The problem with conventional wisdom is that it frequently misses the obvious. Like the fact that audio broadcasts have been monetized with commercials for at least the past three centuries. Or the fact that Audible.com has been allowing users to buy downloadable audio programs for a quarter of a century. Is it really such a stretch to imagine someone might figure out how to make a profit from a podcast?

Conventional wisdom received a wake-up call yesterday when it was announced that the second season (do podcasts really have seasons?) of the Ricky Gervais show would be available on a subscription basis from Audible. My first reaction was one of complete and total outrage. I’ve come to expect my monkey news for free.

I’d hardly gotten over my outrage when I read about a second podcast going on sale. Earthcore, the serialized audio novel by Scott Sigler that was podcast throughout last summer at no cost is going on sale at iTunes. When I initially read about Earthcore last year I was intrigued by the concept, but I didn’t really have the time to invest in following a serialized story. Now, apparently, I’ll have to pay if I suddenly get the urge to listen to Earthcore.

Podcast pricing is a work in progress. The Gervais show seems a bit steep at $7 for a month of weekly half hour episodes. If the second season runs 12 episodes, that’s $21. About the same as what you’d pay for the DVD set of the first season of the Office UK. I’m guessing that even Gervais thinks the price might be high. The Audible website says you’ll get “at least four episodes (and possibly more, unless Karl’s innate denseness leaves Ricky and Steve permanently speechless)”. Oh, in that case I’ll take the free episode now and wait a month to see what I get for my 7 bucks.

Meanwhile, Earthcore seems to be a bargain at $9.99 — about half the price of a comparable unabridged audiobook on Audible.

I’m not suggesting that Gervais and co are greedy (although I do have my doubts about that mercenary Karl Pilkington), I think the initial pricing is really more a symptom of a very young medium where pricing standards have not yet sorted themselves out.

The ultimate question is whether charging for podcasts will become a trend.

I seriously doubt that it will. There are just too many podcasts, and the quality of most is too uneven to justify paying for a subscription. The Ricky Gervais show is an exception because he’s well known, and his team created an incredibly funny first run of shows. Earthcore is another exception because the market for audiobooks is already well established.

In other words, I think it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be asked to pay for Dawn and Drew or Soccergirl anytime soon.

Some students are taking advantage of professors who post their lectures online by not showing up to class, and taking notes from the clips. Man, had I been able to do this, it might have only taken me nine years to graduate.