The Bottomless Pit

Marshall Crenshaw is an American musician, singer and songwriter whose biggest hit was a cover. The song "Someday, Someway" hit in 1982— it was very Buddy Holly. The Eighties were a rough decade with terrible music production values —when even great bands released abominable, unforgivably bad records.  I try not to judge bands by what happened then... but he's done little of note since. .Except for a radio show he hosts called The Bottomless Pit at WFUV-FM. More here.

In 1989, Capitol Records let Crenshaw compile a collection of their country performers of the 1950s and 1960s called "Hillbilly Music...Thank God, Vol. 1." It's not a radio show but it showed possibly for the first time that Crenshaw wasn't just a power pop rube. He had some concept of editorial self-control. He followed it up with a book in 1994, Hollywood Rock: A Guide to Rock 'n' Roll in the Movies. Time was proving that Crenshaw wasn't just a musician, he was a music geek. His canonical obsession with pop: the Beatles, Zappa, Buddy Holly etc had led him down the great rabbit hole that makes the worlds finest DJs. By his own accounting he has over 6,000 recordings including everything from 78s to MP3s. More here.

In about 2004 he guested on Steve Earle's radio show on the Air America network. It gave him ideas. In 2005 he debuted on air at 98.1 WKZE-FM.  The station is out of Salisbury, CT but broadcasts to the New York Hudson Valley area. The class A station also operates a translator W290BZ on 105.9 FM to really home in on Kingston, NY. The AAA station was eccentric enough to let Crenshaw program him own playlist. His 1 hour Saturday program running from 9:00 - 10:00 PM eventually became a 2-hour program. He stayed with WKZE until about 2010.

In 2011 he moved to WFUV, the 46,000 watt New York City powerhouse AAA station.  And there he remains even today. He is still on Saturday nights at 10:00 PM and he's still free to play a full hour of Frank Zappa if he wants to.