Fans of Christopher Lydon must be as giddy as such an intellectual group can be, anticipating Lydon's return to the airwaves with the debut of "Open Source," Monday at 7 p.m. on WGBH (FM 89.7). You may remember the polysyllabic ululations that arose when Lydon left WBUR's "The Connection" four years ago. Entire neighborhoods around the Fresh Pond Whole Foods barricaded themselves behind piles of flaming Volvo tires and rioted tastefully, lamenting the loss of what many considered the most intelligent voice in radio.
In local media circles, however, the talk was of the ginormous paycheck Lydon walked away from in his dispute over ownership of "The Connection." For a while, "Chris Lydon money" was a reliable punchline in local newsrooms, especially on payday. But now the downfall of Lydon's WBUR nemesis, Jane Christo, and his return with producer Mary McGrath in "Open Source" may rewrite the ending.
The best version of the whole saga is Dan Kennedy's, here.
While he wandered in the wilderness, Lydon became quite the nethead. Those familiar with the recent dispute over the origins of podcasting will enjoy this excerpt from Lydon's "Open Source" blog:
"Dave (Winer) says the first podcast in human history was the interview I recorded with him July, 2003 and posted on Bob Doyle’s server at skyBuilders.com. It was the stream of subsequent RSS-fed interviews on my blog that landed in Adam Curry’s iPod in Europe and fired the imagination that launched iPodder."
Not one to hide his light under a bushel, Lydon. But give him credit for trying to push the media to the next great thing, whatever that may be. He may actually be a visionary, despite the hubris.
"Open Source" describes itself as "a live hour on the radio that sounds like a live day on the web. We’ll
be working with bloggers and podcasters and featuring ideas posted and
recorded to our own blog; the idea is to capture the sound of
conversation on the web, share it with a radio audience and then invite
that audience back to the web to contribute."
Questions still hover around the relationship between "Open Source" co-producers WGBH and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. As Kennedy reports, student radio activists at the university are less than thrilled with an impending Lydon invasion. And Public Radio International has so far syndicated the show to only two stations besides WGBH, in Seattle and Salt Lake City. But there's always the net.
Around here, the only lamentations are that we'll lose the first hour of WGBH's excellent jazz show, "Eric in the Evening."
