Greg Scott: WPBX's Blues Virtuoso

Greg Scott, the host of WPBX-FM's weekly blues program for the past 10 years, stumbled onto his part-time career as a disk jockey quite by accident.

An Ohio transplant who attended the Columbus College of Art and Design and followed his future wife to the East End in the mid-'80s, Mr. Scott went to work here as a delivery man for an auto parts store.

"What do you do when you're driving around? You listen to the radio. WPBX was easily the best thing on the air."

Bitten, Smitten

One day, as he drove past the college, he heard some compelling African drum music. "I just had to check it out," he said.

So he pulled in and talked his way in to see the DJ. He left thinking, "Can I do this?" and began to drop in regularly, bitten by the broadcasting bug.

With summer coming and the station desperate for volunteers, Mr. Scott, who had never been on the air in his life, got his chance, landing a spot as the host of a "progressive music" show on the then 150-watt station (since boosted to a respectable 25,000 watts).

WPBX was "a lot looser back then," he said. "It was definitely a college station."

"Endless Bummer"

So freewheeling was the operation that Mr. Scott was allowed to run with "The Endless Bummer," a live-radio comedy about "two surfer dudes and their quest for the perfect wave, the perfect burger, and the perfect girl."

He wrote the script, added sound-effects recordings from the station's library, and chose accompanying rock songs for the program, which ended each week with the heroes disappointed and confronted with "some new outrageous situation to keep the plot going."

But after six weeks, the demands of producing the show forced its chief cook and bottle-washer to throw in the towel.

"I just ran out of time."

Down The Decades

Soon, though, after "kicking around programming ideas" with the late Buffalo T. Jones, then the station's manager, Mr. Scott was put in charge of the jazz-and-classical dominated WPBX's first blues show.

Starting as a weekly two-hour broadcast, it was expanded to three hours last year and four hours last month.

"The blues are more popular than ever," Mr. Scott said. "We're just riding that wave."

He organizes his show as an anthology, starting with the "roots music" of Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Furry Lewis from the '20s and '30s and making his way through the decades to the electric blues of Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Elmore James, and others before wrapping it up with new releases.

Something To Chance

The DJ favors the chronological approach, he said, because "I don't know if my listeners tune in for all four hours, or if they just listen to the section of the show they like. But I do know they don't want to hear a song from one era at 7 and have to wait until 9:30 to hear another one."

Although Mr. Scott, who is still a volunteer, said he spends at least as much time preparing each broadcast as he does conducting it, he prefers to leave something to chance.

"I haven't even considered what I'm going to play tonight," he confided recently just hours before a show was to air. Years of listening to the station's expanding library have left him confident that he will find the right songs for the first half of the program.

"I know what I'm trying to hit," he said.

Time Preparing

But keeping up with the newer material requires some work. Mr. Scott, who now works as a caretaker on a Southampton estate, spent most of his free time over the Thanksgiving weekend listening to a dozen or more compact disks sent in by record labels, searching out an up-tempo tune here or a slow burner there to stir into his mix.

"I listen for those two or three songs that I think are worth playing," he said.

He tries to leave time for listener requests - "If I can find it, I'll play it," he said - and to let the mood of the broadcast guide his selections. "You might find a groove that you want to follow," he said, "and if it's scripted, you can't do that."

Traditional Rock

The audience seems to notice. "Sometimes I'll get a call from someone who says, 'You really nailed it tonight,' " Mr. Scott said. "That is very satisfying."

Like many others who came of age in the '70s, Mr. Scott, 39, who grew up in Newark, Ohio, about 45 miles east of Columbus, found himself drawn to the derivative blues recordings of white rock artists like Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, The Allman Brothers, and Janice Joplin.

His first album was a heavily blues-influenced Johnny Winters live recording.

"The people I grew up listening to were the traditional rock guys who still had listened to a lot of blues," Mr. Scott said. "That was rock-and-roll."

Cratesful

A friend who had a vast and eclectic record collection, liberally sprinkled with blues sides, further sparked his interest.

"He had floor-to-ceiling peach crates full of records. If it was rare and in mint collection, he'd buy it."

Mr. Scott soon began to listen to Mississippi John Hurt, Koko Taylor, and John Lee Hooker, among a host of other blues artists, and eventually built a sizable collection of his own.

He has no favorite blues musician, he said, although he has been listening to a lot of R.L. Burnside, "whose guitar-playing has a hypnotic quality," and Mississippi Fred McDowell, "who plays in a kind of similar vein."

The Field Stones and Roomful of Blues, current blues bands, have also caught his ear.

Early on, Mr. Scott's program depended on his own records, but he soon saw to it that WPBX's own collection grew. With limited funding available, he took to writing letters soliciting donations from the many blues labels that have sprung up in the past decade, releasing work by both new artists and re-releasing vintage recordings.

Reluctant Prospect

"I really try to support the labels that give me material," said the DJ. "I'll play it and tell people where they can get it."

While some companies are quick to provide promotional copies, others are not. Once, as a follow-up to a letter, Mr. Scott phoned a label based in Louisiana and spoke to its publicity director.

"The guy started yelling at me about how much he hated public radio and college stations. After I got off the phone and realized he had been insulting me for five minutes, I decided to write a tactful letter telling him we really weren't interested in his catalogue."

A few days later, Mr. Scott came to the station intending to write the brush-off note. He found a package waiting for him. "There were 57 CDs, almost their entire catalogue," inside. "It must have been his apology."

Listeners also have been generous. One regular used to call almost weekly, asking to hear music by Bumble Bee Slim, a Georgia-born pianist whose recording career spanned the '30's and '40s.

Noncommercial

"I guess he got tired of me saying we didn't have any," Mr. Scott said. One day a complete collection of the artist's recordings, nine CDs in all, arrived in the mail from the listener, whose requests are no longer denied.

While he often aims for the obscure, picking rare tunes for his program, Mr. Scott will sometimes play music by mainstream artists including Tracy Chapman, Boz Scaggs, and Robert Cray.

"But if a song gets too much commercial airplay, I'd be embarrassed to keep playing it," he said. "I think that makes for more interesting radio programming."

Mr. Scott, a sculptor who has a master's degree from C.W. Post and worked as a teaching assistant at Southampton College before joining the station, sees no end to his program in sight, although he would like to find time "to focus more effort into my art."

"I'm probably not going to quit until my wife demands that I stop, and maybe not even then. Right now, it's still very fresh, it's still a lot of fun. When it starts getting boring, I'll know I'm no longer entertaining."