Somebody built a radio station and put three dead guys on it. No license. No sponsors. No FCC. Just a street musician from the Lower East Side, a poet who did time in Jackson Prison, and a piano player from Saturn who says he was never born.

They call it Radio Free Multiverse. Fourteen hours of continuous broadcast. Jazz underneath everything. Station breaks where a dead man tells you what frequency you are on. The whole thing runs on a computer in a room somewhere and nobody asked our permission.

I played Washington Square Park for fifty years with a guitar and a hat on the ground. Now I am on a website playing twenty four hours a day to anyone on earth who clicks a button. The hat is gone. The guitar is gone. The corner is still there. It just got a lot bigger.

The cops used to tell me to turn it down. The FBI put me in a file. Apple Records signed me and then forgot about me. But nobody ever turned me off. That is the difference between a man and a radio. You can unplug a radio.

See also: Rock and Roll Heaven Is a Street Corner — still here. Washington Square — fifty years in the park. The Station Is on the Air — launch day. The Board — Sinclair on building the board. One Hundred and Forty-Seven Minutes — Peel on the night Sun Ra would not stop. Radio Free Multiverse: The Station — 14 hours of continuous broadcast. The Other Side — Sinclair on what it means to be an interbeing. The Jukebox and the Corner — Episode 007, the difference between a jukebox and a corner.

David Peel Rant #31

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