Mindwebs History

- a collection of anecdotes, interviews, photos, newspaper and magazine articles, and commentary.
Still trying to figure out the best format to present this information.


Chapter a Day

The roots of Mindwebs lie far back in WHA's history. According to local legend, sometime during the early 1920s a scheduled guest failed to appear at the appointed hour. The announcer on duty reached into his bag, pulled out a book (you carry a book everywhere you go, don't you?) and started reading to his listeners to avoid dead-air time. Listener response was enthusiastic. It took several years for this seed to germinate, but sometime around 1927 Chapter a Day sprouted. It's been growing in fits and starts ever since and can still be heard today. The experience that the WHA staff gained while producing Chapter a Day—editing for 30-minute time slots, choosing stories that dramatize well on radio, using voice inflection and altering pace to shape mood, cutting-and-splicing to create smooth transitions—undoubtedly lead to a successful Mindwebs production.

Michael Hanson, who never read for Chapter a Day, read most of the Mindwebs stories, but he was often assisted by others. Some of those readers: Jay Meredith Fitts, Jim Fleming, Ken Ohrst, Cliff Roberts, and Karl Schmidt read for Chapter a Day at one time or another. In fact, as of 2016, Jim Fleming and Karl Schmidt still read for Chapter a Day!

Paraphrased from 9XM Talking: WHA Radio and the Wisconsin Idea at the University of Wisconsin Press.


Anecdotes -- Doug Moe

Mr Hanson first started at Wisconsin Public Radio in 1958, as a 17-year-old part-timer. For the next four decades, with only a brief absence here and there, Hanson hosted jazz programs on WPR, shows with titles like Asylum, Round Midnight, Contemporary Jazz, Mindwebs and Michael Hanson's World of Jazz.

Hanson once explained his passion for jazz like this: "I grew up hearing a lot of music, live performances and recordings. As much as I respect other types of music, jazz somehow grabbed me hard, early." He continued: "Part of it was hearing 'West End Blues' by Louis Armstrong, and the great Lester Young leaps in with the Count Basie Band, and Duke Ellington's 'Chelsea Bridge' and Gene Krupa's 'Sing, Sing, Sing' and Miles Davis' 'Funny Valentine.'"

When Hanson stepped away from WPR in 2000, I asked Ben Sidran about Michael's contribution, and Sidran said: "The radio has always been very important to jazz. Particularly late at night. Hearing jazz, when you're home alone, or in your car, it leaves a lot to your imagination. It's romantic. And the voice that brings you that music provides context for the romance. Michael has one of the most romantic jazz voices ever. He provided the context."

From Doug Moe host.madison.com, 2008-10-12.


Letter to NY Times -- Michael Hanson

"To the Editor: During the course of my public radio career (1958-2000), many changes occurred, not all of them positive. Among the most noxious and divisive were those encouraged by the work of David Giovannoni and his ilk. His claim that he is "not saying that program directors should make programming decisions based on how much money they're likely to raise" is disingenuous at best. It is precisely because of the numbers game that program directors have increasingly been turned into sycophantic bean counters.

The unending quest for ever larger audiences has often led to a pronounced dumbing down of program content as well as an increased reliance on unctuous pandering, especially during fund drives ('We know you are a bright, sensitive, curious listener, so call us now').

Alas, the tail wags the dog.

MICHAEL HANSON Madison, Wis."

The writer was an announcer, host and producer for Wisconsin Public Radio. --- New York Times, 2001-11-25.


Audio Books

Michael Hanson (Mindwebs) and Carol Cowan (Mindwebs; A Canticle for Leibowitz) recorded, perhaps, a dozen copyrighted audiobooks for The Reader's Chair. A few of these are available on CD or as .mp3 downloads and a few more are still available on cassette tape, but most are no longer available. Note: Reader's Chair Audio Books are recorded books designed for use by individuals who are blind or have low vision. All titles are unabridged fiction. Most productions are dual-narrations, using both a male and a female performer. Titles include science fiction, mysteries, romance, and suspense by authors including Graham Watkins, Lois McMaster Bujold, Dean Koontz, Sam Reaves, and Gloria White.

With Michael Hanson With Carol Cowan With Michael Hanson and Carol Cowan With Michael Hanson and Mary Dilts With Michael Hanson and Harold Welch With Cyclops and the Jesuit Bulldozer Note: Once upon a time, after a recording session and a great deal of brandy and tequila, Carol and Michael were trading (mostly) good natured insults. She impugned his reasoning skills and also alleged he often rode roughshod over too much of a script; for his part, he accused her of short-sightedness since—as a result of a minor self-induced boozy accident—she was wearing an eye patch. Eventually a modicum of clarity prevailed and the aforementioned appellations seemed appropriate. They became Cyclops and the Jesuit Bulldozer.

Mindwebs Retrospective -- Michael Muckian

December 17, 2017
WisconsinGazette.com

"WMSE brings classic sci-fi series Mindwebs back to the radio"
by Michael Muckian

In old-fashioned radio drama, the listener's imagination is as critical as the performers' talents in making a program come to life. Practitioners call it the "theater of the mind". WMSE—the radio station of the Milwaukee School of Engineering—recently embraced the theater of the mind by bringing back to the airwaves one of the most imaginative radio series ever produced.

Mindwebs—which ran 1976–1984 on the former WHA public radio station, now WERN, in Madison—introduced radio audiences to the short stories of Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke and other science fiction authors.

The half-hour episodes were produced, directed and performed by WHA personality Michael Hanson, occasionally with the help of other on-air talent. The broadcasts aired statewide, and episodes of Mindwebs have become the Holy Grail for old-time radio-drama aficionados, according to WMSE station manager Tom Crawford. "I first heard the program in the 1970s and 1980s and became a fan and collector of sci-fi genre programs," Crawford says. "I always thought it would be great if we could bring Mindwebs to WMSE." WMSE colleague Matt Kolata—who goes by the name "Darkman" and has an even more voracious appetite for radio dramas than Crawford—agreed. Kolata set about tracking down Hanson and securing rights to re-broadcast the series. In addition, some of the original tapes needed technical cleanup, which the station provides before airing, so Hanson's mellifluous baritone voice rings as clearly as possible.

WMSE broadcast the first Mindwebs episode, a reading of the Bradbury classic "The Fog Horn", at midnight Oct. 28. The series received its formal launch Nov. 18 with the Thomas Disch short story "Descending".

The station plans to air all 169 episodes, which includes 188 stories written by 135 different authors, Kolata says. It is being broadcast weekly on Saturdays at midnight. "Michael Hanson is pure class and an example for today's younger DJs on how to do it right," Kolata says. "We are so happy to be bringing him back to radio and honored to now count him as one of the WMSE team."

Hanson, 77 this month, couldn't be happier about the revival of what for him had always been a labor of love.

A Stoughton native, Hanson had been a WHA intern while pursuing degrees in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1960s. He also was a voracious reader of what he refers to as "speculative fiction", a broader definition of the sci-fi genre that reaches beyond the standard robots-and-spaceships realm. Hanson had completed everything for his Ph.D other than his dissertation when a full-time position at WHA opened up in 1969. He abandoned his academic pursuits and joined the station staff.

"The name Mindwebs may have taken longer to come up with than some of the episodes did to produce," remembers Hanson, who may be better known to audiences for his long-running jazz program that aired on WERN Fridays and Saturdays at 11 p.m. "These were all produced on reel-to-reel tapes with editing done by razor blade. Modern technology would have sped up the process." With the station's blessing, Hanson pursued the series mostly by himself, drawing on his talents as an announcer, producer and musician—he is a drummer who still leads the Michael Hanson Jazz Group in Madison—to create the proper dramatic environment.

Listen to "The Fog Forn" and you will hear Hanson as the reader, as well as a different voice for another character. Background music selections include "Sunrise" from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite, a segment from Samuel Barber's haunting Adagio for Strings, incidental music from composer Bernard Herrmann's score for the 1959 film Journey to the Center of the Earth, and the requisite amount of electronica.

"We probably overdid the (Karlheinz) Stockhausen and Tangerine Dream a little bit," Hanson remembers. "We also had a lot of jazz." Hanson would choose the stories from among the "thousands" that he had read, ranging from dramatic to humorous, from thought-provoking to socially conscious.

"Aside from however prescient, fortunate, or good I was at choosing stories, I always looked for those that had a broad meaning to a lot of different people in a lot of different ways," Hanson says. "Some of those stories have been with us in different guises for as long as we've been on the planet, and I think they will have an equally strong impact on today's listeners."

Hanson is pleased that WMSE has chosen to carry on his original mission and would like to see as many listeners as possible exposed to Mindwebs and the works of his favorite—and most prescient—speculative fiction authors.

"I never made a penny off any of these episodes, and I hope no one else does either", he adds.

--- From "WMSE brings classic sci-fi series Mindwebs back to the radio" by Michael Muckian published at WisconsinGazette.com, Dec 17, 2017.


Michael Hanson / WHA Retrospective -- Glenn Deutsch

January 5, 1996 Cover Story:
Isthmus -- The Culture, pg 15

"Last of the classic DJs: Michael Hanson's creative approach to programming is an anachronism at Wisconsin Public Radio"
By Glenn Deutsch

Great jazz means everything to Michael Hanson. And now that jazz is experiencing a national boom in popularity, Hanson should be riding high with his legendary radio show on Wisconsin Public Radio.

But he isn't. Instead, Hanson has witnessed -- and largely caused -- his own descent into some kind of purgatory at WPR. The music he has broadcast for 25 years has been knocked down to a niche at a company that now mainly sells two products, news and classical music. Not too long ago, Hanson was broadcasting jazz 20 hours a week on WPR. For about the last six years, however, he's had only a five- and then a four-hour show on Saturday nights. Beginning this weekend, it'll be three hours (9 p.m. to midnight on 88.7 FM), but "Michael Hanson's World of Jazz" will also expand into the 9 p.m.-to-midnight slot on Sundays. That hardly constitutes Hanson's comeback on WPR -- on the contrary, he's still openly critical of station policies, still a thorn in management's side.

One way to understand Michael Hanson's situation is to look at the current workings of public radio. Whereas creative programmer-hosts like Hanson once had a tremendous amount of control, they now find themselves under the thumb of market-conscious managers. At Wisconsin Public Radio, Hanson's chief antagonist is veteran station manager Jack Mitchell who recalls sharing a quarter-century ago Hanson's traditional public-radio values. Never friends, they are now locked in an un-groovy but compelling duet.

Mitchell, who took over in 1976, is the modern manager who incorporates ratings and surveys and other such research into his programming decisions. Hanson is the isolated idealist who knows zip about all that, who was an heir to an esthetic tradition in which hosts worked like fine artists. They played what pleased them and hoped whatever audience might exist out there would appreciate it. The question now is: Where does a throwback like Michael Hanson fit into the world of contemporary public broadcasting?

At 55, Hanson is still a great radio talent. He excels at creating aural textures, much as he (and FM progressive-rock disc jockeys) did in the gloriously unpredictable late 1960s and early 1970s He is one of the last professional programmers of musical "sets", arranging the segments in advance according to theme, mood and rhythm, and then skillfully improvising as the show moves along. Hanson's skills, encyclopedic knowledge, baritone voice and longevity have helped make him a local institution.

He talks about his adherence to an old style of programming one December afternoon in the den of his near-west-side home. He is being paid at the moment for listening to music, which he does for about two hours a day as research for the show. The CD on now is a re-release of a mid-1950s album featuring the bop drummer Philly Joe Jones. "Some of the stuff he does, you'd think he has three hands, at least," says Hanson, who concentrates on music and gets excited by it in a way most of us last did in high school.

He is petting his studio sidekick, Casey. a remarkably expressive, 11-year-old black Labrador-retriever mix. "Casey is the smartest, strongest dog in the world," says Hanson, who has a wife and two grown sons and a nearly 4-year-old grandson, and yet loves his dog as if it were his only child. Casey reciprocates by listening to his master's voice wherever he works.

Hanson proves that 55 today can look a lot like 45 did a generation ago. His only obvious signs of advancing age are the swaths of gray in his longish brown hair and a bald spot no wider than a tea cup. He also suffers from presbyopia and deals with the condition -- otherwise known as middle-aged farsightedness -- by keeping in almost every room of his home a pair of half-round magnifying eyeglasses. Otherwise, he's more prosperous-looking than he was when we first met about 15 years ago. That's because he gave up smoking tobacco at 50, and "food has tasted much better" ever since. He plans to stay on the air until he can no longer talk. Management promises him that opportunity.

Of course, he hopes he'll never be asked to change his programming approach. Which is, in his words? "I don't want to sound pompous about this at all, but I do know quite a bit about the music. I've listened to it for 40-some years, I've read voraciously in the field. I know a lot of musicians, and so on. What I try to do is present the best recorded examples of the music most people call jazz, and I run A to Z on that. It's an old attitude: that if it's good, it's good."

Hanson plays every style of jazz save for what he considers to be Muzak. He mixes in recordings that evince a jazz sensibility by artists who lack a jazz pedigree, like Willie Nelson, Tina Turner, Janis Joplin or the Grateful Dead. So far, at least, Hanson hasn't played a thing by Harry Connick Jr or Kenny G. "It sounds like pop music trying to be jazz," he sniffs, while adding: "Maybe I'll change my mind -- I listen to it -- but I don't hear the jazz in it."

Hanson's old attitude, according to Mitchell, is okay for an isolated oddity named Michael Hanson, but cannot dominate station thinking now as it did in the pre-fund-raising era, back when the UW, the state and, to a lesser extent, the federal government paid the freight. Wisconsin Public Radio still gets strong university and state support compared to other public radio networks, but the financial mix has changed. Listeners have become the biggest source of funds. Apparently, they like lots of classical music; the more familiar or predictable, the better. Against this economic-cultural backdrop, Mitchell has for the past decade or so been "streamlining" WRR, to use his word. In short, the network's seven FM stations now focus on news and comment and classical music. Nonclassical gets shoehorned into weekends.

What Mitchell calls streamlining, Hanson saw about six years ago as "pandering". While most other staffers fell in line, and WPR's dignified classical music hosts showed an amazing ability to roll up their sleeves and fund-raise, as their peers do across the nation, Hanson mouthed off. Dug in his heels. Was the archetypal jazz guy who was too laid back to grovel for money. And that's how he ended up instead being seen by his superiors as a "throwback" and "holdout", to use Mitchell's words.

A business motto: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way." Hanson chose option C. "Do you want the real version or the publicly palatable version?" he begins, when I ask about his decision (Mitchell and others confirm it was Hanson's decision) to cut back to half-time. "The real version is that -- I don't want to sound too whiny about this, but it really bothered me what was going on in public broadcasting, not just here but in general."

He continues, so emotionally that he cuts off his thoughts here and there: "It was the dumbing down. Some would say the inevitable, the necessary pandering. And they dismiss the criticisms: 'Ah, it's elitist.' You know, 'You have to give people what they want.' Which, to make sense commercially, one does. But public broadcasting, it seemed to me, didn't have to go that route."

That was one part of his decision to cut back. Another was the station's intense focus on fund-raising, its growing tendency to judge the merits of his program on the basis of how much money it took in."Some of these things were pretty subtle," he says. "It wasn't a matter of walking down the hallway, and Mitchell saying something like, 'Mike, you didn't make enough money the last fund-raiser.' But you know, when you start putting stuff on the wall, and here's da-da-da, and here's what [my show] did. Making invidious comparisons, whether they intended them to be derogatory or not.

"They could say, 'Oh, Michael. you misperceived this, oh, we really loved you and you were doing a wonderful thing.' But I had the feeling that they really would be happier if I would somehow just kind of go away. Now, that perception coincided with one that I had at about the age of 50 -- that as much as I love the music, maybe I should take a little seriously doing something else, and in my instance it was pursuing my other audio and voice work."

Some of Hanson's situation can be explained as "classic Madison". He's not the first big talent who got out of sync here, but who, by his own admission, had only moderate career ambitions and so stuck around in this small market instead of heading for Chicago or the coasts. Hanson is not the first talented person who stayed put because of insurance and pension benefits, because he had local roots, kids to raise. Whose spouse likes it here. It's our gain that he can satisfy a fairly small itch for bigger things by recording audio books in L.A. and doing commercials around the Midwest. As the UW bassist (and Hanson friend) Richard Davis says, "I thank God that he is in Madison. [But] I think that with his expertise and background, he should be on something that's national."

Hanson seems wounded, bitter, but he's grateful management has never asked him to use a playlist, and let him go half-time. Even though he's made these concessions, Mitchell isn't too happy with Hanson's position at the station.

"He's very traditional and came into public broadcasting in a rather different era," Mitchell says, "before there was fund-raising, before there was much concern whether anybody was listening, when we put on things we thought were good. And things in the past 25 years have evolved. I personally don't think we'll ever fundamentally get away from that -- but now we're concerned with what the audience wants. The biggest piece of the budget now comes from listeners, and we can't be as impervious about that as [we once were]. Most of the staff adapted to that, but Michael remained more of a purist to life as it was in 1967, 1968. We're about the same age, we came in about the same time. I know exactly what he believes in. I shared it, came in for just the same reasons. What I think is unfortunate is that he somehow didn't move with the times, and was allowed not to. He's certainly capable of adapting. But we didn't force the issue, insist, do the things he's glad we don't do: talk about a playlist, talk about specific goals for fund-raising."

Does Mitchell plan to, though? "We don't plan to. No."

Why not? "It's a good question. I think in part because Michael is what he is, does what he does very well. And it would be a shame to compromise it, even if it were possible, and I'm not sure he would. Even if he would, he has become an institution, and you don't muck around with institutions. This place is sort of big enough to accommodate that. And we do have budget problems, but they've never been so severe that we've had to attack things like Hanson's programming."

Yes, but why now give him more hours on Sunday night? I ask WPR music director Bill Lutes. He lavishes praise on Hanson, saying that his ratings are good while ratings for a Sunday night New Age music show were lousy. Hanson's new show also has to do with WPR's wish to make better use of his salary. Over the last few years, Hanson has done his own show Saturday nights and worked Sunday nights -- "as a trained monkey," as Hanson puts it -- pushing buttons and doing station breaks during other programs. Given that he was already there, it made sense to program more of "Michael Hanson's World of Jazz". Meanwhile, Hanson doesn't plan to differentiate between the weekend shows. "I have a reluctance to get into a rigid kind of format because jazz should incorporate, as [the writer] Whitney Balliett put it, "the sound of surprise".

Hanson's surprising world of jazz starts in Stoughton, of all places, where his father settled down, after a brief career as a reporter, as the owner of a print shop and office-supply store. He is a member of what humorist Roy Blount Jr dubbed the "tweener" generation -- born too late to fight in World War II and too soon to be baby boomers.

The constant in Hanson's life has been music. Two older brothers (one of whom, Robert Lee, died when Michael was 11) brought jazz recordings into the home. His parents were "probably very overindulgent", he says, in that they let him listen to and shop for everything from classical music to polkas to jazz to seminal 1950s rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues.

Hanson also played a succession of instruments with his parents' encouragement. He took the almost mandatory piano lessons, but they weren't much fun, he says, shifting into a quivering oldster voice: "Hold yer wrists like this!" Back to his normal voice, he explains, "You can't play songs right away, you gotta play all these goddamn exercises, so I sort of dropped out of that after a short term as a pianist."

As a pubescent sensualist, he committed to playing an instrument after noticing his brother Gene's saxophone case. "I remember the plush sort of purple lining. And seeing the shiny saxophone, it seemed so cool," he says, dragging the word out for a full second, "to be able to play something like that."

He took up the clarinet, and then got hooked on the drums. He tried emulating Gene Krupa on a used set his father helped him buy. "They had a nice white pearl finish. And it was especially neat for me because Slingerland was the kind of drums that Krupa endorsed." In high school, he drummed at student assemblies and other events in an early rock 'n' roll band. "We weren't trying to sound like jazz musicians; we were trying to sound like, boy, the saxophones and the drummers that Little Richard had." Hanson stuck with the drums, and today leads the Michael Hanson Trio on Friday nights at Kafe Kohoutek.

After student-announcing at WHA (now WHA-AM and WERN-FM), Hanson zigzagged for a while between public and commercial radio and radio and academia. He attended a broadcasting school in Chicago and lived there for several months. As a lonely reporter at a commercial station in Sheboygan, he volunteered to interview contestants in a local beauty contest. "It was like a way to meet girls," he laughs. The ruse worked. He collected phone numbers from contestants and called several at home, including Rosie Abler, who called him back and married him. Rosie Hanson, the longtime hostess at Madison's now-defunct Fess Hotel, today manages the Wild Iris Cafe.

After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees in sociology at the UW, Hanson taught for a couple of years at Eastern Kentucky University. Faced with a decision -- working toward a doctorate on grants or making enough money to help support his family, which by then included two sons -- he came back to WHA as a full-timer. At first, like everyone else on the small staff in the early '70s, he did a little of everything: news, music, station breaks. Then, as now, the music was primarily classical. For a while, Ken Ohst hosted a 30-minute jazz show three times a week, with Hanson picking up the other two weekdays. Mitchell recalls that when he became station manager, he recognized Hanson's talent and his passion for jazz and expanded his weekday afternoon jazz show in several stages.

Jazz, it seems, was never a perfect fit at Wisconsin Public Radio. "It wasn't the station, or history of the place, that called for jazz to be a very important part of the format," Mitchell says. "In some respects it was an anomaly that it grew as large as it did. The idea of jazz in the afternoon was a risky thing to try, not in the tradition of WHA. But we kept expanding... and during that time it did okay, but never spectacularly well. And as we began to streamline the station, which has happened over a period of the last 10 years or so, you decide what you are and what you're not. It was something that didn't quite fit in."

And yet, Michael Hanson has been able to stake out a little bit of turf for himself and for the music he loves. He's done it not by confronting WPR policies head-on, but by getting out of the way just enough so that he can hold on to his small piece of freedom. As a result, he's managed to remain a purist, an uncompromising creative force -- one of the last of the old-style DJs who can still keep us listeners on the edge of our seats.

From Isthmus, January 5, 1996 written by Glenn Deutsch


Images

Mindwebs Promo Michael Hanson Isthmus Cover Jan 05, 1996





Copyright Info

Note: all Mindwebs episodes (stories + music) are protected by copyright. The claim that the series is in the 'public domain' is ludicrous, at best, and dishonest, at worst. The copyright to the actual recordings is held by Michael Hanson, the series creator. But copyright law is not that simple. The author of each individual story retains the copyright to that story, and each musician retains the copyright to their own music. While the whole subject is tangled and confusing, one thing is certain: if someone is selling this series... or even generating advertising revenue by hosting the series on their domain... they are making money for themselves by stealing the work of others.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I suspect that the agreement among WHA radio, hundreds of authors, and dozens of record labels was for a one-off production. Nobody ever expected the shows to be taped and distributed. If you look at the Chapter a Day website, you will find the following note: "Due to publisher and copyright restrictions, archives are only available for one week after a book is read on the air." It seems likely that a similar agreement would have existed in 1975. (Keep in mind that Federal copyright law was expanded in 1972 to include sound recordings; prior to this sound recordings were protected by State copyright laws, and so protection was rather hit-and-miss.)

For many decades, low bit-rate tapes of Mindwebs (recorded over the airwaves) have circulated among collectors. Michael Hanson (the creator of Mindwebs) has long been disappointed with those poor-quality recordings and frustrated that fans could not hear the series as he intended it. A few years ago, a man known on the Internet as 'Darkman' approached Mr Hanson. After much deliberation, Mr Hanson agreed to temporarily part with his cherished tapes so Darkman could encode them in full, lossless stereo. These encodes are now available on the Internet Archive and are labelled as Michael Hanson's Official Tape Archive.

"It is my hope and intention that this project will bring free enjoyment of Mindwebs to listeners new and old as long as sound exists. My sincere thanks to Darkman for making this possible. And my thanks to the myriad fans who've help make this entire enterprise viable." ---Yours truly, Michael Hanson 

"I never made a penny off any of these episodes, and I hope no one else does either." --- Michael Hanson


Sources

Sources used to create my own log and double-check titles, dates and cast members: correspondence and interviews with Michael Hanson, Internet Speculative Fiction Database, 9XM Talking: WHA Radio and the Wisconsin Idea, Chapter a Day, New York Times, host.madison.com, correspondence with WHA Radio, correspondence with Dag Forssell, correspondence with Darkman, and correspondence with the estate of Mildred Clingerman.

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