| Q1. | So, what’s your name? |
| A1. | My name is Maxwell Williams. |
| Q2. | And, where are you from originally? |
| A2. | I’m originally from Vermont in America. |
| Q3. | Where did you go to university? |
| A3. | I went to university at Florida State University in the capital of Florida, Tallahassee, Florida. |
| Q4. | And what sort of things did you do in Florida? |
| A4. | Um (sigh), mostly a lot of hanging. Um… otherwise I had a part-time job at the radio station at Florida State University, uh… WVFS Tallahassee, um, which is V89, 89.7, all the way to the left on the FM dial. (Laughter) Uh… we are just, um, a college radio station, basically… independent from everything, we don’t have commercials or anything like that. |
| Q5. | OK, and you were a DJ on the station? |
| A5. | Yeah. I was an on-air announcer. |
| Q6. | Ok, and what did that entail? |
| A6. | Um, it entailed being in, uh… a fairly small radio booth, um, with a stack of four CD players, and two turntables, and some tape players and minidisc players, all kicking around and a big board right in front of me that I had to press a whole bunch of buttons on every time I went on the air… and uh… I would select the music from our enormous catalog of about, uh… I think we had somewhere near 15,000 CD’s by the time I left. And uh… we were constantly getting more CDs. I would go select music from the catalog, bring it, play it on the air, and uh… come on afterward and tell people what they’d been listening to. |
| Q7. | Was it an eclectic range of music that you played? |
| A7. | Absolutely. Um, we were considered one of the best radio stations in the United States by many small record labels… um, meaning that our music ranged from indie rock to electronic, to hard core metal music, to reggae music, but everything that we played was… is very independent, and uh, not played anywhere else really, just um… basically, the underground of the music scene. |
| Q8. | So did that make you a popular DJ? |
| A8. | Did it make me a popular DJ? Um… I don’t know. See, there’s… the thing here in Japan is that you have the “sempai” and the “kohai”, and… by the time I left I was pretty “sempai.” I don’t know what that means as far as listenership, but I had a really good time slot, it was on from 8 until 10 every Friday evening, and uh… I think… I think a lot of people listened to me, and it was… it was pretty fun. Uh… I got a lot of people calling up and telling me that… giving requests and telling me what I should play, and stuff like that. But… it’s good stuff. |
| Q9. | So, could you give me an example of a typical playlist for Friday evening? |
| A9. | Oh, jeez, uh… Friday evening… (Sigh) you kind of want to get the party started right, so there was… I probably play a lot of, uh… hip-hop music to start off… start off with. Maybe some Handsome Boy Modeling School. Um, maybe go into some Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, or Blackalicious. Um, but my personal musical tastes… I really, really like a genre of music called “Indie Pop,” which is a pretty obscure genre of music that, uh… pretty much survives around several smaller indie bands coming out of Britain and America. |
| Q10. | Did you see, um… a lot of these bands in live shows? |
| A10. | Yes. I, um… the town that I’m from… or the town that I went to school in, Tallahassee, is um, about 5 hours from Athens, Georgia, which is… sort of a musical Mecca for many Indie rock bands, so… It’s only 5 hours, so… they just go to Athens, and then probably drop down to Tallahassee, because it… and Tallahassee would end up being, like, the southern-most point on many of the tours, so… uh, we’d get a lot of the first shows and last shows, which ended up being really cool, so I got to see a lot of great bands, like Guided By Voices, and Modest Mouse, and really good bands in Tallahassee. |
| Q11. | Have you seen many more famous bands at all? |
| A11. | Um… jeez, back in… uh… back in high school, I think it was about 1998, I used to listen to a radio station called, uh… 99.9 The Buzz, and this was in Vermont… and uh… they had radio promotions, so I… I… one time I called in and I won tickets to see Radiohead, actually, in Montreal. That was a good time. I was… gosh, I was sixteen or seventeen at the time and, uh… when you go up to Canada from Vermont… the drinking age in the United States is 21, and drinking age in Canada is 18, but they don’t really check your ID, or anything like that, so… When I was 16, I drove up with my friend, up to the… Montreal… the Molson Center, which is where the Canadians play, the Montreal Canadians, their hockey team, and uh… we went up and we… we basically got really drunk for the first time, while watching Radiohead, so… that was a pretty fun experience. And they played some good songs, and uh… it was a great show. |
| A12. | Have you ever met any bands or ever got backstage or anything like that? |
| A12. | The band Guided By Voices is… probably one of the most respected bands in the Indie Rock scene… and uh, one day we were… we went to the Guided By Voices show, um, in Tallahassee, and my friend Aaron was with me, he’s a big, tall, funny guy with long, curly hair, and it’s all red and… kind of just a crazy dude. He just runs around and does crazy stuff, and uh… he… smokes a lot of pot, actually, and so… they were on stage playing the show, and as soon as they were done, my friend Aaron made the, uh… “international pot-smoking” sign, and their guitarist looked at him and said “yeah, ok, come on backstage with us,” so uh… we went back there and I ended up being able to hang out with Bob Pollard, who’s kind of like a hero of mine. Um… he let us drink a whole bunch of his Budweisers, and he was really wasted and was hitting on one of my friends, and it was really fun. |