Streaming station Oh, Hi Boston plays homegrown audio earlier and present, 24/7

He tossed the wreath close to Billy Beard’s neck even though Beard — the previous member of Face to Experience and drummer for Patty Griffin and Lori McKenna, amongst other individuals — was accomplishing mid-music.

Ruane, the most enthusiastic new music enthusiast Boston has at any time generated, passed on to the great rock club in the sky far more than a 10 years in the past. But Susan Kaup, who was there that night, wishes to maintain some of his spirit alive in the virtual entire world.

That’s wherever she not long ago introduced Oh, Hi Boston, an Online radio station that streams six many years of audio from in and all around Boston, 24 several hours a day. “Sooz,” as she’s universally known, thinks Boston justifies a entire-time station dedicated to its perpetually fertile songs scene. In the course of the pandemic, she released it.

At any supplied minute, a listener may possibly listen to Salem Wolves, the Chelsea Curve, or Waltham, not to mention hundreds of other homegrown bands devoid of neighborhood towns in their names. Twice each individual working day the station plans an hour of its signature feature, the “Decade Stroll” — “time-traveling” blocks of songs that rejoice just one track apiece from every single 10 years commencing with the ‘70s (the J. Geils Band, say) via the ‘80s (probably the Cavedogs or the Neighborhoods), ‘90s (Juliana Hatfield), and so on.

“Every town has a scene,” Kaup suggests. “But Boston is specific.”

She identified this out instantly on her arrival in the metropolis. It was the mid-1990s, and she was about to enter her senior 12 months of college or university in her household condition of Nebraska.

On the Web, then continue to in its infancy, she grew to become acquainted with a couple like-minded pupils in the Boston space. 1 of them was about to expend a semester learning abroad.

“I sublet her area in Porter Square, sight unseen,” Kaup remembers. “I was meant to go back again to Nebraska, but I did not.”

She immediately identified some favorite Boston bands at the time — Splashdown, Conversing to Animals, Growing Male. She’s still devoted to Mistle Thrush, who reunited in 2011 for a mini-pageant Kaup threw at the Center East, which she dubbed “Soozapalooza.”

A number of many years prior to that, Kaup was running a blog, and experimenting for the 1st time with Online broadcasting. To start with she called it Sooz Radio, then Exploit Boston.

But when Congress accredited a considerable fee hike for royalties on World wide web broadcasts, the business enterprise was no for a longer period feasible.

“At the time it was definitely a hobby,” Kaup suggests. “I was tinkering.”

When the pandemic came knocking, Kaup was functioning for a electronic marketing and advertising agency in Davis Sq.. The workers stayed out of the office one day to “practice” operating from household, she says, “and we in no way went back.”

A swift research exposed that the network on which she’d streamed her former stations even now existed. In truth, the authentic Live365 went bankrupt after the amount hike. The company relaunched in 2017.

Building month to month subscription payments, Kaup operates the station (at www.ohhelloboston.com) out of her Arlington condominium. The station is industrial-cost-free. She is looking for “sponsorships that make perception, hyperlocal.”

She uploads just about every tune herself, with curation aid from Michelle DiPaola (a.k.a. Lexi Kahn). Kaup claims at this issue the station attracts on a lot more than 100 several hours of songs, with extra included each week.

“I’m absolutely sure there’s a bazillion additional we can add,” she states. “I will never ever be caught up.” Not that she’s complaining.

Chatting to Animals completed next in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Rumble in 1990. They signed with Columbia Data but before long fell by the cracks. The team introduced their sole album in 1997, then disbanded.

Singer Juliana Nash returned to her indigenous New York and opened a bar in Brooklyn. Currently she lives in the Woodstock spot, in which she’s putting the ending touches on a new album, “Pennies in Time,” centered on unreleased songs she wrote with her aged band. Dumptruck’s Kevin Salem manufactured.

“The scene in Boston was so supportive in these times,” Nash states. She’s tickled that a person born immediately after her band broke up might materialize upon them on Oh, Good day Boston and turn out to be a new supporter.

“People like Sooz, their support is all we have remaining these days.”

Though there is no are living DJ all through standard programming, the station operates a regular stream of station I.D.s voiced by existing Boston musicians. Monday evenings feature a two-hour “New Audio Alert.” On Wednesdays local musician Rider McCoy hosts a roots reggae display, and the station devotes a few of several hours every single weekend to the hosts of “On the Town With Mikey Dee,” the extensive-operating method from Tufts University’s WMFO that carries on the legacy of an additional departed Boston new music-scene determine.

At current, Oh, Howdy Boston is pop- and rock-major.

“My earth is rock ‘n’ roll,” Kaup suggests. But she’s open up to growing to involve other designs of tunes, probably with much more specialty programming.

There is a good deal of room to maneuver. For now, she feels self-assured that area tunes followers of all ages will uncover something properly well worth a hi there.

“If you give it a probability for 5 or 10 minutes,” Kaup suggests, “you’ll hear a thing you’ve never read, but is most likely magnificent.”

E-mail James Sullivan at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.