Michael Thurston got the idea for Off The Beaten Track during the summer of 1975. He was working at a commercial, adult contemporary Top 40 station. Michael would turn 22 that summer, and let’s just say as thrilled as he was to be in broadcasting, working a combination Account Executive (spelled salesman in English)/Announcer position, he found the constraints of formats and micro-focused playlists boring with a capital B. He had come, after all, from college radio, where restraints on playlists were, “Pay attention to what George Carlin said - from his infamous, SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN NEVER SAY...”. Got it! Our only restraint, no naughty FCC words. Graduating into commercial radio had been a rude awakening.
So, Michael pitched management on the idea of taking two selected artists from their format and creating a one hour showcase, once weekly, that featured selected tracks from their most recent albums. The name Off The Beaten Track was part pun, part cynical joke...the hits the station was playing would be the “beaten tracks,” played ad nauseam until they were beaten into your brain; hence, playing tracks from albums “downstream” from the hit would be “off the beaten track.” Management responded the way management always responds...“You think you can sell it?”
This version of the show started airing in the fall of 1975 on the one station where Michael worked. Turns out they had two stations with the same format...why not send a copy to the other station and sell the program twice? The masters were made on reel to reel, in house at the radio station. Make a dub, send it out. Done. The seed of syndication resonated. Why not more stations? But the formula for Off The Beaten Track was not quite complete.
From the first broadcast, Michael started publishing playlists for Off The Beaten Track to send to record companies and publicists to demonstrate any materials they could send would be considered for future broadcasts (and it was an ingenious way to build a significant record collection on the cheap! Shhh! Don’t tell anyone!). Since high school, Michael had written a new records review column called Music Thing for a local newspaper. He had worked labels and publicists for the earlier venture, too. In fact, for a time, Music Thing was syndicated to various newspapers around New England. Hmmmm...sound familiar? After Off The Beaten Track had been airing for three or four months, the phone rang. It was Columbia Records on the line, they had a new album coming out from an artist named Tom Jans entitled The Eyes Of An Only Child. They were going to send a copy for consideration and wanted to know, “do you do interviews?”
HUH?OH!WHA? “Oh yeah, of course we do interviews!” Total lie. But the explosion inside Michael’s head could probably be heard down the telephone line at Columbia Records in New York. The missing piece of the Off The Beaten Track puzzle had called him on the phone! Just now! Interviews! DUH!
So, technically, Tom Jans was the first guest featured on Off The Beaten Track. Michael doesn’t think that show still exists in the archives, but it might be buried somewhere. So, maybe someday. As Michael remembers it, the interview content was pretty good. The two had some common ground, both being “an only child”, with that theme resonating throughout Tom's Columbia album and providing some fodder for the conversation they had, via telephone, that day. The technical quality, however, wasn’t very good. The phone line was noisy and scratchy - keep in mind this was late 1975. In the editing process, boosting Tom’s audio level for clarity also meant boosting all that noise. Mixing was done in a basic radio station production room, so studio toys to diminish those telephone line anomalies were non-existent. Only the most die-hard Tom Jans fan would have tolerated the audio quality to hear what he had to say. But, the mold had been cast.
During the first half of 1976, Michael put together his own studio in the house he was renting, left the radio station, and formed a small advertising agency that included a production unit for Off The Beaten Track. Phone interviews were largely abandoned unless it was logistically impractical to obtain an artist any other way. Michael started hitting the road equipped with a 3M Wollensak reel to reel, visiting venues throughout New England and Eastern New York to interview artists on tour. Boston, Providence, Hartford, Northampton, New Haven, Saratoga, Albany and sometimes Portland, Maine or various other Connecticut locations. Once in a while, someone would actually be performing in Vermont!!! Wow! Seemed like a hometown gig, even though it was usually at a college or in Burlington.
In the late 1970’s, Manfred Mann killed the Wollensak one night in Boston, downstairs in the dressing room at The Orpheum. Part of the electrical system in that building was a 220 volt system with the same plug design as a 110 volt system (that has since been changed...uh, thank you!), and unbeknownst to Manfred, he plugged the old 110 volt reel to reel into a 220 volt outlet. BOOM! The flash...the smoke...the smell...the panic! Had Bruce Springsteen not written Blinded By The Light, Manfred Mann might easily have gotten the inspiration for his hit on this very night! Luckily, Manfred Mann also salvaged the night. He always traveled with a cassette recorder, so he offered that, instead!...and, he gifted Michael the cassette tape! So, thank you, Manfred!
The trusty old Wollensak was replaced with two ReVox A-77 cage-mount professional reel to reels. Those recorders became the official Off The Beaten Track interview machines and were used for the duration of show. Michael still has them and one still functions! That ReVox is 49 years old as of this writing! Most interviewers were on the road with their little Sony Walkmans or a cassette recorder that weighed a few ounces. Not Michael! He always showed up with his 35+ pound ReVox A-77 with a mic bag and cables that weighed another 5 pounds! Handy, when you’re in midtown Manhattan trying to navigate Times Square across six lanes of traffic! (Perhaps such danger in Times Square is the reason it is now a pedestrian ONLY zone, and has been since 2009...blame it on the crazy pedestrian from Vermont with his ReVox in tow!)
So, with the format set, Off The Beaten Track evolved over the next decade plus. New York City was added as an interview destination, and that proved a critical decision. New York City offered additional venues, but more importantly, the offices of major record labels from around the world were located there. Doing interviews in those offices also brought record company publicists into a face to face relationship with Michael. Putting a face to a name has a power like no other. Doors opened, opportunities arose.
The show was produced in Michael’s home studio, cutting excerpts from the featured interview coupled with the appropriate musical selections to make the whole package make sense. One key guest to a show. The music/interview ratio was about 75%/25%, depending upon the guest and interview quality. The show was produced to approximately 50 minutes in length, allowing subscribing stations about 10 minutes of each hour for underwriting or advertising and local news and programming, where applicable. OBT, as it came to be known, was duplicated onto 2 - 7 inch reels of tape or a high bias audio cassette, at the discretion of the station, and was then shipped out to be aired. At its peak, OBT reached over 50 college, alternative and commercial radio stations across America.
At the end of its run, OBT fell victim to a changing environment at college and alternative radio. Programming was changing. Long-form documentaries were giving way to short-form drop ins. Program directors bought into a logic being promoted by consultants that listeners would not stay focused on long-form shows. Programming to a three minute attention span became the norm. A music director from a highly influential radio station once told Michael, “Oh, hey listen, I NEVER add more than a couple of new songs to my playlist in a given week because that’s as much as my audience can handle.” Michael’s immediate thought was, give your audience a little more credit than that! What you learn might surprise you. As much as Michael disagreed with this programming strategy, and as detrimental as he thought it was for both music and for broadcasting, he couldn’t ignore the headwinds. In addition, costs were going up, and a radio show that required a subscription fee was a luxury that many of the show’s subscribers just couldn’t afford. Subscription fees, likewise, had gone up only marginally over the duration of the show. Everything else had gone up at a much faster pace...the vehicles...the gas...the accommodations...the cost of maintaining a state of the art production studio...the cost of blank tape...the cost of telephone calls...the endless telephone calls...the writing was on the wall. After roughly 15 and a half years, the production schedule had also taken its toll. Michael had spent a lot of that time on the road, and the rest of that time in the studio. 60 to 70 hour work weeks were the norm. Many nights were three to four hours of sleep, if that. After all those nights, years and miles (a rough estimate of miles driven during this era was 937,930.) Michael kept a mileage log...the cumulative number is pretty close. Using 60 mph as the common denominator, even though a lot of the road time was spent in city traffic, traffic jams and situations less than ideal, that mileage translates into 15,632 hours in a car! Put another way, that’s 651 days, about 1 and 3/4 years, driving! When you’re in your 20s, the required energy to accomplish such a feat is abundant. When one hits 40, 40 starts to hit back! Stamina just isn’t what it used to be.
All these years later, Michael’s interviews remain. They are the treasured moments, the snapshots in time. Just as the magic of getting to perform in front of an audience was the reward for many of the artists he interviewed, that time Michael spent “ON” with an artist seated in front of him and tape on the ReVox rolling was his reward. All the peripheral nonsense just kind of fell away. The reward became greater than the cost.
In 2020, Michael began digitizing his interview collection. Some of the master tapes have aged well, some not so much. There were issues with some high-end brands of tape. Agfa-Gavaert, a German manufactured, back-coated mastering tape, a favorite choice for many recording studios in the 1980s, Michael’s included, ended up having a formulaic defect that, over time, caused it to take on moisture. The tapes would go “soft”, getting sticky and muddy. The cure: baking them in an oven to dry them out and restore their original fidelity. The issue: once these tapes were dried out, if they weren't transferred to digital within a couple of weeks of being baked, they would crumble and be lost forever. Dicey stuff.
These Off The Beaten Track Archives serve as the repository for the OBT collection of interviews. The process of digitizing continues. There are hundreds of interviews yet to go. They will be added here as time allows. Stop back often. Listen much. There’s a lot to hear.
Michael is quick to acknowledge the help of many people in the Off The Beaten Track universe. The subscribers, the record companies and the wonderful people who worked there; the publicists and road managers who were key in allowing Michael access to the artists, the clubs and venues that patiently dealt with the press, and the artists themselves for giving of their time to answer questions and tell their stories.
The last interview Michael conducted for Off The Beaten Track was with Mary Black in Northampton, Massachusetts. The noted Irish singer who is equally at home with traditional and modern works, whose most recent album at the time was No Frontiers, was the last artist to tell her story on Off The Beaten Track. It was the end of an era.
The Paradise in Boston deserves special acknowledgement. For a time in the 1980s, many who worked there treated Michael as a fellow employee, he was in their midst so often. When they saw him navigating the queue with his trusty ReVox, they’d wave him in and he would make his way up the stairs to the green room, largely avoiding the crowd. Service above and beyond, for sure. The Paradise supplied many great shows and great interviews: The Police, Ian Matthews, The Motels, Julia Fordham, John Hall, watching The Shirts in the company of Roger McGuinn, Ronin, NRBQ (with Jonathan Richman sitting in for Al Anderson during the interview when Al had to step away, along with Elliott Easton of The Cars just laughing hysterically and taking it all in), Jon Butcher, Mink DeVille, Todd Rundgren and so many more. Thank you, Paradise!
On the personal side, Michael also wishes to thank his family: his wife, Sandy, his three children, Missie, Tyler and Corrina for being patient and understanding why dad was on the road so much. Sandy did much to hold the office together and handle logistics for mapping out the many interview sojourns. Now that the children are grown adults, each with their own professional endeavors and each with children of their own, Michael can now say, this is where I was, this is what I was doing. I hope I was there enough for you. Another component in the conclusion of Off The Beaten Track was a desire to be off the road, out of a car, hearing the stories that were unfolding a little closer to home.
As much as Off The Beaten Track was embedded in Michael’s DNA, in so many ways, it was simply time to turn the page.
