Power pop, punk
and garage.
The bands history nearly forgot, and the ones making it right now. A weekly radio show, a podcast, and a lot of very old television footage.
Be good. Be weird.
The bands history nearly forgot, and the ones making it right now. A weekly radio show, a podcast, and a lot of very old television footage.
Be good. Be weird.
Everything comes out of the same weekly rundown. Pick whichever way you like to take it in.
Saturdays, 9pm Pacific
Broadcast on Space 101.1 KMGP LP FM from Magnuson Park, Seattle. Streams live, and every episode is archived on the show page.
Space 101.1 FMWeekly
Interviews, features, and the Movie of the Week. Wherever you get podcasts.
Listen to the podcastNow and then
Longer writing on records, films and the people who made them. Free.
Read on SubstackConversations with the musicians who made the records that mattered, and with the artists making them now. Plus short archival pieces on bands that deserved better.
Sixty seconds of archival television and the story behind it. Two million views in August 2026.
Danny Benair drummed for The Quick and The Three O'Clock, worked the counter at the Bomp! record store, and came home from Altamont with Charlie Watts' drumsticks. An afternoon at Bomp! headquarters in Burbank, with cookies.
A tiny bar up a vertical staircase in Shimokitazawa, walls papered with The Nerves and the Flamin' Groovies. Five thousand miles from home, the owner pulls an Artful Dodger record off the shelf and says it's his favorite band. Our trains may be a disaster, but the world knows what our independent music is worth.
Alex Chilton put off going to the hospital during the heart attack that killed him, because he had no insurance and feared the bill. Germany, France and Scandinavia have all worked out how to support working artists. America has decided that art is valuable and artists are optional.
I spent thirteen years at AT&T before deciding I'd rather spend my time on records nobody else was talking about. Pop Rocks Radio is the result: a radio show, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, and an ongoing argument that the Undertones were better than most of what outsold them.
Not an expert. Just a fan. That's been the line since the beginning and it's still the job description.
I'm less interested in ranking records than in the people who made them and what actually happened, so most of this is interviews and digging through archives. I'll write about a record when one deserves it. I'd just rather talk to whoever played on it.
Half of what I play is thirty years old and half of it came out this month. A good hook doesn't care when it was written.
Based in Renton, Washington. Always looking for the next band that should have been huge, and for the one being huge right now that nobody's noticed yet.
No fixed schedule. When there's something worth sending, you'll get it: what's been on the show, new records worth your time, old ones worth another listen, and the occasional long piece about an artist I can't stop thinking about. You can leave whenever you like.
