David Dye

Radio Legend Throws the Book at the Rock World

by M.J. Fine

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Published: Oct 17, 2007

Michael T. Regan

Gall him a gatekeeper, a curator, a professional mix-tape devotee. In 16 years of being the face — er, voice — of World Cafe, David Dye has guided the show from its beginnings at a funky Spruce Street studio with four broadcast affiliates to its three-year-old Walnut Street digs with national syndication and NPR's muscle behind it.

A new book, The Best of World Cafe (Running Press), collects 67 of Dye's interviews (and two of Michaela Majoun's) from the thousands that aired between October 1991 and last December. Among his guests are icons (Joni Mitchell, Al Green), WXPN staples (Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits), old-guard label honchos (Jac Holzman, Ahmet Ertegun) and younger artists (Jack White, Neko Case). You can dip into the book casually to see what certain people had to say or read it chronologically to catch certain threads running through the conversations.

Sitting in a chilly conference room at WXPN last week, Dye, 57, seems especially jazzed about a recent session with Okkervil River, and he's digging the latest from Iron & Wine, Beirut and Radiohead, as well as Dwight Yoakam's Buck Owens tribute. Dye was a fan when he got into radio, and he says he's still always looking for fresh cuts, whether they're by new groups or those who got lost in the shuffle.

"The entire set of music that I began playing, for most people, certainly people of a younger age, is all burnt. It's all done," he says. "So you have to find something ... that people haven't heard a zillion times."

But in the early '70s, when he was a Swarthmore student with a part-time shift on free-form WMMR, everything was fair game and he had a lot to learn. "I thought I kind of knew stuff, and I did not. Because I worked with people who had been doing it, people like Michael Tearson and Ed Sciaky, who really knew much more than I did. So I kind of had to figure out what they were listening to and learn it," Dye says.

Which is not to say he swallowed everything his mentors loved. "I did not succumb to the Philadelphia thing of Billy Joel and Yes and Genesis. Sorry to say. Because they're huge in Philadelphia and people love them, but it just wasn't my thing. Which was kind of important, because being a disc jockey early on, I got into pleasing the audience. And it was a great day when I decided my taste was OK. I didn't have to play all that stuff."

In 1991, when he started looking for a format for WXPN's new show, he trusted his own taste more than surveys that said radio listeners didn't want to hear world music and new artists. He wasn't much of an interviewer in the beginning, but he's developed a style through trial and error.

For one thing, he's learned not to interview musicians who don't interest him. "My earlier producer Tracey Tanenbaum said, 'You know what, let's stop booking these people that you don't like, 'cause you do crappy interviews,'" Dye recalls. Feigning interest led to at least one memorably awkward exchange.

Dye with Sonic Youth

"You know, I'm not a Jewel fan. And I was interviewing Jewel and I made a — it was mostly how I phrased the question. It was completely awkward. I was trying to say something about how her image is being kind of laid-back, but instead I said, 'You don't seem terribly ambitious.' Which, you can see, is a completely different question. And her reply was, 'Well, you don't seem very well-groomed.'"

The book project brought hitches of its own. Before moving in 2004, archival interviews were copied from tape to CD. But not everything was transferred, and some were never found. Sometimes a staffer would transcribe a whole interview before Dye rejected it for being the wrong one or not as good as he'd remembered. His choicest David Bowie interview never turned up, and somehow the wrong Neil Young piece made the cut. Then, after turning everything in, Dye says, his editor told him he had twice as many pages as there were supposed to be. Since the interviews were already cut to length, that meant removing a lot of artists wholesale.

The collection's not an entirely representative sample of World Cafe's sound. For one thing, it's not as worldly, with white men accounting for two-thirds of the interviewees. More pieces are drawn from the show's second seven years than from its first seven. That's partly a function of being fresher in Dye's memory. Plus, he says, "The interviews got better and we got more interesting people."

And since it's not a recording, he had to leave out sessions that were more memorable musically than anything else. "Yo La Tengo was fabulous in-studio but not a particularly good interview," he says. That also explains why singer-songwriters get so much room to talk. "A lot of times bands just make absolutely fantastic music, but because of the nature of bands they're kinda sometimes insular."

In putting a show together, he'll compensate for that gang mentality by recording a performance by the whole group and then taking a key member or two — say Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst, or Jeff Tweedy and Nels Cline from Wilco — into another room to chat.

Another trick is getting people at the right time. Too early in their career, they don't know where to start; too late, and they don't know when to stop. That's often the problem with career artists: By the time they have experiences to talk about, they don't have anything new to say musically.

"By and large, the people who were making great music in their 20s are not making great music in their 50s and 60s," Dye says. He gets around that by focusing on their body of work and not just their latest record. "It's just a matter of being polite enough to discuss why they're there. They're there to sell their new product. So you need to address it and sometimes the edit takes care of that."

Dye with Jackson Browne

That doesn't always work. A&M founder Herb Alpert didn't want to talk about anything but where people could buy his new collection of Tijuana Brass tracks. Alpert was so unwavering, Dye says, that his segment was unusable. By the time Johnny Cash stopped by, he wasn't in any shape to reflect on his career. And in the book's last piece, George Martin gets upset when Dye asks about his legacy. The legendary Beatles producer insists he doesn't want to be remembered when he's gone.

Then there's the other extreme. Last year, Dye asked Paul Simon to name the most gratifying moment of his career. The answer, as transcribed in the book, is nearly half the length of this story. "He goes on for 10 minutes listing every single high point. And with somebody like Paul Simon, they are playing for half a million people in Central Park, they're, like, having the No. 1 movie, they're huge high points," says Dye. "And he went on and on and on, and so if he ever dies, we got it all."

After all these years, Dye and his crew have World Cafe down to a science. They do up to six interviews a week, usually recording guests about a month ahead of time, with the rest put together between a couple of days and a week in advance. Dye picks the music, then writes and records his intros while other staffers find the music and tweak it until it flows. Flow is an old-school value in the age of shuffle and intentionally absurd juxtapositions, but it works. So does booking smart, talented artists and letting them do what they do, whether it's over radio waves or on NPR's Web site, where listeners can download interviews at their leisure.

"It's a real crapshoot, but I have to say, if we're impressed with somebody, something's gonna happen with them," Dye says. "I mean, you know, there's fashion and certainly singer-songwriters are not in fashion anymore, and so there are a number of really good ones that, you know, 'Sorry Charlie, wrong time, this is not going to happen for you,' which is too bad. And whatever's happening for them, they still put out great music."

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

 

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