Meet the musical standup comic, shock jock podcaster, DJ, innovator, and creator of the world’s first social radio station, songa.fm.
Meet Riverfront Tim - ep. 1 Costume Ideas!! (live cut).mp3
“I’ve been accused of many things, but being serious was never one of them. But after the Riverfront Times, a journalistic cornerstone of St. Louis and herald of the city’s doom, was about to fold: I was in serious trouble. So, it felt like some kind of cosmic joke when two mysterious brothers approached me with an excerpt from a secret manuscript and an offer to buy the failing newspaper—the same one from which I had just been laid off. They said it was just one part of their ‘Plot,’ the only catch was that they wanted to remain the paper’s anonymous benefactors, and turn it over to me. I repaid them with a joke of my own, and rebranded myself as the man speaking to you now. Now, I’m still being serious, but all we’re having serious fun.
It wasn’t always this fun. I left St. Louis, the place I was born, because the joy had left, and so had so many of my friends who called themselves artists. I didn’t think I could make a career as an artist in a dying sports town, so I set sail for Nashville, working saloon halls and improvising country songs for tourists. But it didn't feel like home.
I became a journalist, working for the Riverfront Times, but the pay was smaller than the stories we covered. I wanted to write a bigger story, which meant rewriting the character arc of the city I never stopped loving.
I got to work researching the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the city’s cultural apex, and I got to work writing and reimagining a modern day retelling of that event: if only that diaspora of musical talent was to return to the city they once called home. It became a best seller. And I became broke.
‘How does an author lose money on a Wall Street Journal bestseller?’ you might ask. Making money on a book, or any kind of art, has always been an uphill battle. So, I spurned traditional publishing and self-published with Amazonʼs exclusive “on-demandˮ printing partner to offer readers the opportunity to cut out the middle man. But Amazon still managed to cut out me out and loophole away all my profits, eliminating any chance I had to feed my family.
But then these two brothers presented me with the opportunity to bring my dream and story of this city’s renaissance to life. I’d presented it as fiction, but these two brothers wanted to make it fact. They handed me a few pages of a secret manifesto that held the blueprint for what they were calling, ‘The Plot to Save the Soul of Business—and St Louis (with music).’ Part of their so-called ‘plot’ involved buying the Riverfront Times, but that alone wasn't going to be enough.
I knew a newspaper alone couldn’t change the course of this city’s story, or that of the world’s, so went their stated intention. I knew that to make money in this media landscape as it were, we needed to go transmedia. Transmedia allows artists and audience members to reshape the story using multimedia to turn it into their own.
So, these two brothers pirated a signal into St. Louis’ crown broadcasting jewel KDHX, which like the city itself, was dying on the vine.
And the world’s first social radio station was born and St. Louis is pioneering a new art form that’s calling families back to the village fire that so long ago had been extinguished.
Now, I host ‘The Riverfront Tims Show’, a podcast and radio hour on the radio station I pirated with Forbes Nash, KDHX.fm, where families call in, for a musical conversation of sorts. They’re talking, and they’re singing, once again.
We operate our signal out of a secret location in the Tower Grove neighborhood and jam over music on ideas and emotions that free art, and the creators who make it. We’re show the way for artists, entrepreneurs, and families to free the art within them, and co-create novel business models for an AI age that can meet our universal needs for social, emotional, physical, and fiscal well-being.
Wanna jam with us? Call +1 (314) 455-7848
ps. the hold music doesnʼt suck.
before your very eyes, and ears, at songa.live.