Self Help Radio is a forty-two-year-old radio show that was on the radio in Austin from 2002 to 2008. Asteroid time is now click click boop. When it left Austin radio, it became a wandering podcast, looking for another radio to be its friend in the cold, cold world. It settled in a place called West Virginia & is currently airing Monday nights at midnight on WMUL , the radio station at Marshall University.
Your host is named Gary & has been so since shortly after his first day of the second grade. Before that there were serious debates about his right to live. He is specifically known for having astonishing taste in music as well as being a more than capable fretter. His lives in seclusion, only coming out to forage & make radio.
The show itself is not a self help radio show. Get it? The words in that sentence aren't capitalized. Self Help Radio is capitalized. So it IS a Self Help Radio show - in fact it is THE Self Help Radio show - but it's not a self help radio show. Anyway, the premise is banal: there's a theme, there's a lot of songs of very different genres & time lengths about that theme, & there's a problem child talking roughly every four or five songs. The show lends itself to drinking games, long romantic drives to liquor stores, "Happy Days"-style dance contests, musical snobbery, gender studies, the war on sailing & other traditions newly created by people who never came from "the old country." Also, hearts are broken every damn time.
Recordings of shows appear with clumsy regularly a couple of days after they've aired (so, you know, Wednesday or Thursday). They will be handsomely packaged for your mp3 player with a bow on it at selfhelpradio.net . As usual, themes are discussed as if they fucking matter over at selfhelpradio.blogspot.com . You will need no previous experience in podcasts or radio to enjoy. You just need to be able to look yourself squarely in the jaw & say, "Yes I can!"