Markly Morrison  00:17

All right, this is Markly Morrison for the Olympia Indie Music History Project talking with John Foster on February 11 2023. Hello John.

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John Foster  00:32

Hello, Markly.

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Markly Morrison  00:33

So will you introduce yourself  because I'm probably going to be largely taken out of this.

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John Foster  00:40

Okay, here I am. It's John Foster. I was the founder of the Lost Music Network and editor publisher of OP Magazine. I also worked for many years at KAOS radio.

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Markly Morrison  00:56

Great, now you moved to Olympia when, from where?

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John Foster  01:04

I grew up in Connecticut. I moved to Pittsfield Massachusetts after high school in 1974 and lived with my girlfriend at the time and wanted to get into radio. I applied at my favorite radio station, which offered me a job as a janitor. What I should have done is said “yeah! I'll do it and get my foot in the door”, but I did not. Instead, I ended up as a bellhop at the Hilton Hotel. She meanwhile, got an internship with this old hand, bookbinder, who did the rare books for Harvard University. And he suggested that she go to Switzerland and become a hand bookbinder and go to school to do that. And she did that. Leaving me in Pittsfield, Massachusetts as a bellhop. So I hitchhiked out to Olympia to see my friend Stephen Rabow, who introduced me to KAOS radio. I think the first day I was in Olympia, I was on KAOS. I think I played What's Going On by Marvin Gaye and talked on the radio for the first time, a huge thrill for me. And then he (Stephen Rabow) went off to Bolivia to study to become a doctor. And I found myself on the mean streets of Olympia. Basically, I just was kind of hitchhiking around, using Olympia as a base and learning about the West and so on. I eventually ended up back here, with no place to live and surprise, surprise, the federal government came to my rescue. They had a program called the CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act] program for young people who needed to get job experience. And you could get a job at any nonprofit that wanted you. So I went to the CETA counselor, and I said, “Would KAOS radio be a nonprofit?” And they said, “Yeah, that would work. They're part of the Evergreen State College. That's a nonprofit. So yeah. If they'll take you on, we'll pay you 40 hours a week to work there through the summer.” This was the summer of 1975. I went to whoever was there at the time said, “I'd like to work for you for the summer.” And they said “sure”. And so I became the music librarian, which was a one of those transformative life events when you realize that you really know nothing about music, and KAOS, even at the time, had an incredible library of music, much of it was not being heard because we were playing a lot of Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, you know, great stuff, but stuff that college kids knew. And it was at that point that I discovered Oh, you know, there's stuff like Cajun music and 'old timey' music, avant garde jazz, things that no one was airing anywhere, practically anywhere in the country. You know, I started looking into that and then realizing there are all these little record companies doing that making records before CDs and before mp3's before all that anyway. So as part of my job I started writing to some of these companies to say, “Hey, I've heard some of your stuff, it's really interesting and I'd like to hear more.” Somewhere in there, I decided well, if I can do this for college credit, this is the way to go. So I applied to Evergreen which was in a situation kind of like it is now, as it was trying to establish itself or reestablish itself and it was seriously short on students. And they let me in for whatever reason. Away I went, I used my Social Security check to pay for school, it was that cheap at the time. I got the check because my father had died and that's one of the benefits you got, you probably still get it. So I went from music librarian to music director and just ran with it. I got in contact with all these little companies that I was researching through little magazines I was finding in, like, the Evergreen library and Bluegrass Monthly and Living Blues. Looking anywhere I could, you know, this is all pre online. So I was just ferreting out things, finding little record stores, records by small artists and small magazines, discovering other radio stations that were doing similar things and it all just sort of blew up. It was just an explosive time and I ran with it and started the whole networking thing. First we did a supplement to the KAOS Program Guide, which I called OP which came out of Lost Music Network, which came out of my mind L M N ...O P and OP was a cool sounding name, I thought. I started putting that together as a supplement and then it just outgrew the KAOS program guide because there were so many people all over the country, all over the world, putting out their own music, and much of it not getting heard anywhere. And I thought well, I can put it all together I can get people networking and I started contacting all the places with Dave Rauh from KAOS working as a sales manager, we sold ads to that. The first art director was my girlfriend at the time Alisa Newhouse, it was great. And then my next girlfriend became my next art director, not because they're my girlfriend, but because I tend to be attracted to artsy people. She added the whimsical approach. Instead of being just like, punk rock graphics of the day, she was hip and cool, but it was not just the collage type of art that you were used to seeing. It was not just irony, there were just little touches throughout the probably most people never saw.

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Markly Morrison  08:41

Right, there were little details, drawings in the margins, things like that.

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John Foster  08:45

Yeah, I'm glad you saw those. A lot of people never saw that. But yeah, she would do little things. Just to, to add a little sparkle to what was really a ton of information. You know, looking back at it now, I can't even read the thing because the font size is so small. We made it so small because we just didn't have the money to have over 100 pages every time for the magazine. Yeah, it just, it took off and we started the A to Z Project. The first five, I think five or six, were just called like OP 1,2,3,4,5. And then we said, Let's make this into something that has an end to it because I could just see just taking over my life and never doing anything else in my life except listening to small records.

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Markly Morrison  09:47

So that was the spark to switch to doing alphabetical order so you'd know when it's going to be over.

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John Foster  09:56

Well it was just as an organizational tool really, just to give it some, a little bit of focus. There was no genre, particularly that we were working with, just anything that we got our hands on. We'd deal with, you know, as long as it was indie. I mean, that was the thing. It didn't have to be alternative. It just had to be independently produced and distributed, basically.

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Markly Morrison  10:22

Style was not an issue. It definitely looked like a punk zine on the surface, but it was way more than that.

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John Foster  10:29

Right and yeah, it was a punk plus, I mean, we were, you know, Dana and I were both influenced by the punk movement, certainly the whole do-it-yourself thing. But that was really not the emphasis, the emphasis was on independence in doing your own thing, and meeting up with others who were doing the same thing, meeting them through the mail at that time, because, of course, the internet did not exist. You know, it was a great internet project before the internet existed.

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Markly Morrison  11:09

The reviews were very brief too, they weren't so much reviews as just a description, you would get like the general idea, I think there was a cassette review that I read for a band called You Suck and it just said, “30 minutes. They destroyed these cover songs. I think I'm going to try to produce their next record, because I love it so much. This music has no redeeming value...” and then it just lists a phone number to call. [laughs] That one stuck out to me.

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John Foster  11:50

Yeah. You know, I actually, I didn't have anything against people being critical or non critical for that matter, just to get it out there. And, you know, the idea mostly was to be descriptive. But I thought personally, for people just reading it, that they would want to have a point of view, they would want to know what the writer thought of it. So I let them do that, if they wished, and if they didn't wish, that was fine, too. You know, I was a hippie, so whatever goes.

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Markly Morrison  12:30

I think the networking aspect, was definitely what made it have such a huge reach. Like globally, really...

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John Foster  12:41

Absolutely. That was the thing, you know. 

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Markly Morrison  12:45

It's catalog of like minded folks. 

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John Foster  12:48

Yeah, and this was happening at the same time that people like Bruce [Pavitt] and Sub Pop, or Subterranean Pop as it was at the time. They were organizing things in a different way. They were thinking in terms of regional scenes and you know, building, building local, and, you know, small mobile units, that type of thing. You know, they were all into local and small, I was not into that at all, because I grew up local. I wanted to get as big as possible. You know, big within that independent music thing. I grew up in a town of less than 2000 people and I knew that wasn't my scene. I was just interested in what people in Finland are doing, in Sweden, I mean one year, we had some guys from Sweden who just came over just to visit with us just because they they'd read about what we were doing in the magazine. That was a kick for us. So, for me, you know, international and national is the way. I, of course, I loved it when small town folks like in Iowa were doing things in their basements or whatever. But, you know, unlike Calvin Johnson you know, really centering everything around Olympia, or Bruce just categorizing everything by, you know, the Seattle scene, the Chicago scene or whatever... that was not me.

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Markly Morrison  14:28

Yeah. Olympia was always in the magazine at some point. It was like something that was referred to consistently.

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John Foster  14:38

Yeah, we lived here and we loved it. Although was not that hospitable to indie artists in some ways at that time, because it was a lot more divided between. I mean, there was that greener, townie divide that, that Calvin Johnson really bridged by being a townie and coming out to Evergreen and working with me at OP and also working at KAOS. You know, that was great. Bruce was from the suburbs of Chicago. And, you know, there are all kinds of other people who came from other places. But, you know, Calvin was really our townie and he was great.

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Markly Morrison  15:33

Yeah, and he's still very much promoting Olympia to the rest of the world. I feel like the Lost Music Network is sort of what put the idea in people's heads that this was a hub for creativity, or at least the home of a network.

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John Foster  15:57

I think so too. I mean, yeah it had some cachet because this was coming from here and then, you know, out of this, came the Sub Pop's and the K Records and you know, other things like that, but certainly Olympia and KAOS and OP were very important in you know, spreading the word about Olympia. I misspoke, but yeah, OP and KAOS, were very important in attracting people to Olympia as well, who came to Evergreen because of it and just came through town.

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Markly Morrison  16:43

And there's also the side of breaking so many artists, when I look through the features, I'd say probably 90% at least are things that I've never heard of, to this day. And then in there, you have some names that like, well, here's this new scrappy kid from such and such podunk town and now they're considered a master of their craft.

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John Foster  17:13

Yeah and well, that's like anything, I mean, you're gonna find that some things rise and some things are never seen again. And just from doing it, you realize, well, it's not so much about the artistry. It's just the way things go sometimes. I mean, sometimes it is about the artistry, sometimes cream rises to the top and sometimes cream just goes right downhill. Yeah, you just, you just can't tell.

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Markly Morrison  17:46

Yeah. Now at what point with KAOS, you're the one who came up with the rule or the guideline about playing pretty much primarily independent recordings on the air. Was that before OP happened?

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John Foster  18:06

Yes, you know, my years are all kind of fuzzy. I guess. But, yeah, the interest in indie music came before OP came to be. OP as a serious project really started in 79. And I'm thinking that green line policy which you speak of, which says that people on KAOS, the presenters or DJs whatever you want to call it must play 80% indie music, might have been you know, someone else will really know, maybe 76, 77, 78?  Anyway, it'd be before OP really became a thing and that came directly out of my experience as a record librarian at KAOS and realizing that, that we weren't really fulfilling our mission as an educational radio station, which we were licensed to be in terms of our music. Because we were playing mostly major labels and music that you could hear in any dorm room. I was a zealot, I took it upon myself to try to change that thinking about what we could be as a radio station and I wrote up the that green line policy and the way it happened was that KAOS was run by consensus. Basically the decisions were made by who attended the meetings and whether they could come to a consensus on it or something. And their meetings. I think at the time the meetings were Mondays at noon, we all gathered and whoever wanted to attend could attend. And you didn't even have to be part of KAOS to do it, you could just come in and attend. I don't know how well publicized it was or anything, 

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Markly Morrison

But it was open to the public.

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John Foster

Yeah, it was open,  it was probably open to anyone who could listen to that radio station. And then I brought it to the meeting one day and said, This is what I think we should do. And, you know, although there were tons of conflicts at KAOS about all kinds of different things, for whatever reason, and I wasn't behind it in any way, I didn't do any social engineering or anything but it got passed by consensus and we agreed that that's what we'll do. And we started doing it. And as far as I know, they're still doing it today which is something I'm very proud of.

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Markly Morrison  21:12

Yeah, I'm not sure that it's still the the official policy, but it's definitely the encouraged trajectory of whoever's doing the programming that that's the guideline.

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John Foster  21:27

 It's a guideline. No, well, that was a policy though. Yeah. And the reason was called the Green Line policy was because as librarian and then as music director, I would put a green piece of tape on the spine of each of the records to indicate it was independent and there would be a red line if it was not independent. So this became, you know, if it had a green line, take that right out of the record library, and you can play that.. It doesn't have to be good. It just has to be green line. It's independent and that's what we did.

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Markly Morrison  22:06

What was your jam back then? What was your tendency with music? Like when you first came to Olympia?

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John Foster  22:18

Yeah. I think I was into the, well, I love Joni Mitchell and I love Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. I love Bob Dylan. My sister was a folky and my brother was sort of eclectic sort of had blues and jazz taste. I like Miles Davis. I like John Coltrane. My sister would play things like Pentangle which was old English folk and I heard a lot of Peter Paul and Mary, that kind of thing and also the, you know, the Rolling Stones and The Beatles, my brother was more into The Stones. My sister was more into The Beatles. That was kind of common back then and I would say I was kind of a rocker primarily. Although I love James Brown. I liked loud, aggressive music. The first single I ever bought was by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. It's a song called Fire. [singing] I am the God of hell and fire! I bring you fire! Ahhh!  So that was that was that song. I loved that. And then I kinda liked The Doors and The Jefferson Airplane. Yeah, just kind of the 60s thing, plus we listened to Top 40 on the radio and knew all that stuff. Then I got into sort of underground FM stations which were new at the time. Most of the FM bands, they just didn't know what to do with it, you know, AM was the dominant band on the radio so they sort of let people experiment on FM and brought up all the underground stuff. Which I loved. I had sort of a mentor, he was like a socialist cigar salesman. I won't even go into the whole story of how I met him and all that but he would play a station in New York City called WBAI. A Pacifica station, a nonprofit thing, very radical folks. They would play things like the speeches by the Black Panthers and things like that, which, you know, I'm coming from, I grew up in a very small, totally white town and when I say “totally white”, I'm saying totally white town in rural Connecticut. A dairy farming town originally. So to hear, you know, to hear the African American radicals of the time; Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael and Bobby Seale, well, it was inspirational and revolutionary, you know, I can't say I quite related, but I knew there was power there. I was just attracted to that for some reason. Can't say why to this day. I'm not sure where I was going with this story...  Oh, you were asking about my music influences, my music and radio influences. One of the stations I applied for to work at in Pittsfield Massachusetts, was some guys from New York City. Jerry Graham was one of the guys. I guess he made quite a lot of money in radio in New York City. And he started a station on the AM band called WGRG for Gerald R. Graham which was like an underground FM station on the AM band. In terms of play, they played rock and the pop jazz of the times, ECM records, which is a big sort of, I'm not sure how to describe them today, but mellow, mellow jazz of a type, you know, Keith Jarrett, that kind of thing. They'd play that and some blues and things you ordinarily didn't hear on commercial radio. And they also had a guy named David Pitt, who was their news director and he did in-depth local news of type I haven't really ever heard on commercial radio since then, although I wanted to. He was just exceptional. I found out later, when I read his obituary just recently that he was a world renowned journalist who had decided to move to Pittsfield Massachusetts, for some reason. Pittsfield Massachusetts, by the way is in the Berkshire Hills about 10 miles from Lenox, which was the home of Tanglewood, which is a famous classical music spot. So I think a lot of artsy people ended up there, including me a couple of different times, because of my high school career, which we're probably not going to get into here, but I went to four different high schools, again, you know, searching for myself in the early 70s. One of them was Stockbridge School and which was right next to Lenox and the Berkshires, which is where I heard WGRG for the first time, and where I met, briefly, David Pitt, who was the news director at WGRG, who was also the journalism teacher at Stockbridge School, and was also a bartender [laughs]. So another very inspirational figure, even though I didn't get to know him as well as I should have at the time.

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Markly Morrison  29:12

Were you set on radio from childhood? 

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John Foster  29:16

Oh yeah, I loved radio because, you know, growing up in this small town, I knew it was small and I knew that I wanted something bigger. And the one thing I should say about my small town was that it also had its own town and gown thing going on, in that there were two prep schools in that town. Kent School in South Kent School and what that meant was money. I guess you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking About New England prep schools, they're sort of, they are for the higher classes to prepare them for their life. To go into Ivy League colleges and then from there to become bigwigs on Wall Street and whatnot. So there were two of them in my town and the kids from those schools would go to our little Elementary School, which was a kindergarten through eighth grade, 300 students. And it turned out to be the best school I ever went to and I think some of that is probably due to the influence of those prep schools, wanting to make sure that... the professor's there wanted their kids to get a good education. But there were no such a thing as a private elementary school back then, at least in this area. So they had to send their kids to public school, and they did and I guess that was very important for me.

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Markly Morrison  31:16

So the elementary school was kind of being shaped as pre-prep.

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John Foster  31:21

Well, it wasn't quite that. I mean, it was interesting, because it was still all the kids who just grew up in the town, the farm kids, the kids whose dads worked at the gas station or in the grocery store. My own mother was a sort of a strange, I don't know what the word would be, she had grown up in a middle class family in Plymouth, Massachusetts and ended up getting married twice and losing two husbands to polio but somewhere along the line ended up meeting someone who was very rich, she was not romantically involved with him. But basically, he gave her a... he rented her the house that I grew up in at a nominal fee. It's a Revolutionary era house that they had that his family had used in some summers. But really, it was kind of a broken down old house. But it was, you know, an intriguing house nonetheless. So after her second husband died, she was living in the Cranberry Town in Massachusetts, and my father said, Well, “I've got this house, you can basically, you can give me $50 a month for it”. And that's how we ended up in Kent, Connecticut. That was so... again, I'm wandering... Okay, this is the thing about ages, you know, all the various threads come together and strange ways. So I ended up in this small town and was exposed to the prep school kids, which wasn't really my scene and I also was exposed to the other kids who were very much of the small town New England and not very interested in being much more than that. And I was. I don't know where that came from but I wanted to get out there and, you know, I was smart. When I got out of eighth grade, I was offered a full scholarship to Kent School for Boys, which was something they offered the top student in the grammar school. Yes, we care about our local kids kind of thing.

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Markly Morrison 

Yeah, sure

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John Foster 

...and I didn't accept it because that wasn't who I wanted to be. I didn't want to be you know, future lawyer, Governor, whatever, you know, I'm...

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Markly Morrison  34:41

You're not Mr. Wall Street,

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John Foster  34:44

That's just not me. Instead, the first school I went to out of grammar school was a Quaker school in Poughkeepsie, New York, also I got a scholarship there, happy to say, and I didn't like that because the school wasn't as good as my grammar school. And I was also, I was exposed to another group of rich kids that I was not very enamored with. And, you know, I told you earlier, I was a hippie, but I was not very interested in drugs. In fact, I was anti-drug. And I was kind of square in a lot of ways. I had a lot of small town in me. And I just had a lot of my own self. I don't know where I got that but I was not a follower of anyone. And I was just miserable and depressed most of high school, but I did meet a lot of interesting people. And they influenced me later in life.

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Markly Morrison  35:49

So out in school, growing up.

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John Foster  35:50

oh, and this came... this all comes,  now I'm bringing the thread together. The whole thing about radio is that radio was from somewhere else. I could hear things. I could hear music I hadn't heard and I could just envision a life beyond my small town. I just loved it from the earliest age. My friend, the cigar salesman gave me a big old radio and I connected it to a big old antenna, which I put up on our roof of the big old Revolutionary era, beat up house that I grew up in and explored the dial. You could hear on AM, the way AM works, it skips along. I could hear things all the way down the Eastern Seaboard and up to Buffalo, New York, which is hundreds of miles away. It was exciting. It was the 60s when I was doing this you know. I remember the first time I heard You Can't Always Get What You Want by The Rolling Stones on WKBW in Buffalo, New York, and things like that. And so radio was a huge influence on my life and continued to be the rest of my life.

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Markly Morrison  37:29

Yeah. So you came out to Olympia as sort of a one-man counterculture and you settled in.

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John Foster  37:41

Yeah, I mean, I wasn't the only counterculture out there. But I was, I was definitely part of a counterculture and probably a counter-counter-counterculture. My friend Steven, who I'd met at the first high school I went to was the guy who invited me out here because he thought I'd be interested in Evergreen. I wasn't really that interested in college. At that time, I was more interested in seeing the country and figuring out what I was gonna do for the rest of my life. But when KAOS presented itself, I gotta say I leapt in, and I took the opportunity and I haven't regretted it a bit. I also I found my people at Evergreen. I met most of my best friends that are still my best friends today. Most of them are people I met at Evergreen in the late 1970s. I met my wife at Evergreen in the late 1970s... mid-1970s. Met her my first week of college and we're still together happily. Many many years later. You do the math. 

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Markly Morrison  39:06

Wow. So in the midst of all this, you're doing KAOS. You've got OP Magazine...

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John Foster  39:15

For credit, by the way. Yeah. Presumably

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Markly Morrison  39:17

Yeah. Presumably you're doing this as a student and that was your main focus. Right? Was OP and KAOS, were those sort of Evergreen independent projects?

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John Foster  39:30

Yeah, KAOS first and then the magazine and setting up the nonprofit, the Lost Music Network and learning how to do that.

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Markly Morrison  39:42

And we didn't really touch on Lost Music Network, how you came to that, that name and where that stemmed from, because that's sort of at the genesis of all of this, right?

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John Foster  39:56

Not the genesis, the genesis was my work KAOS but it came directly out of my work working in the music library KAOS and it's just a catchy name. I think that came into my head at some point because I knew I wanted to do some sort of networking project at a certain point and I don't know, I couldn't tell you Oh, yeah, was April 15 1977 or something...

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Markly Morrison  40:27

Yeah, somewhere in there. 

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John Foster  40:30

But yeah, it came to me and I thought, yeah, this is what it's all about: helping people discover lost music. I mean, I was really, I think I mentioned the word zealot before. I really was. I wanted everyone to be turned on to all the music that was out there. And, you know, this is common with youth in general, they discover something and they want everyone to know about it. Yeah, it's like those days we have a group of people called “Jesus freaks” who were people who were newly converted to Jesus. Man, they would bug you to death. Well I was like that, except about music. 

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Markly Morrison  41:16

Yeah, I definitely relate all of that. Now, what can you tell me about John Foster's Pop Philosophers?

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John Foster  41:35

That's it. That's right. John Foster's Pop Philosophers was a loose group that, I'm not even sure I could say that I founded it, or formed. Steve Fisk and Steve Peters, who are my most musicianly friends were always in and I think, you know, Geoff Kirk is also a very good musician who always had something to do with it, or most of the time. Anyway, Steve Fisk was always there and Steve Peters. I think they were always there doing it. And then there were other people who would come at various times and be part of it. George Romantic [?] was a great drummer, but was a punk rock drummer in that he just he took up the drums at Evergreen just because he has he thought he could. Because, you know, the punk ethos said he could and it turned out he was great at it, just because he had just an excellent feel. He was a great friend of mine, died of cancer several years ago. He was always there on the drums and I think it sort of came out of more of a jamming thing. Various permutations of people mostly just doing the songs I would kind of write and kind of not write. Steve Fisk would make them more into compositions. But some of the songs are very good. I wish I had done more with that, but I didn't. I just didn't have the energy and I'm the type of perfectionist who can't really give himself totally to something unless he can be really good at it. And I just couldn't be good enough at it. At first to really do it. There's some things that are not like that, you know, I can play basketball and I don't care if I'm that good or not, but it's but things that I care about, like music, you know, this hard for me to not be as good as I want to be. But at the same time, I wasn't willing to put in the time to become better.

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Markly Morrison  44:38

Yeah. So your role, you were the vocalist.  I did some listening through and it's a lot of storytelling, personal anecdotes, and then you've got, you know, obviously written out lyrics. Was it a sort of a mix? Did you improvise?

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John Foster  45:09

A lot of it was improvised. I mean, there were songs and then I would change them every time. My brain is very good for trivia but it's very poor for lyrics. Even my own. It's really hard for me to memorize something. It has always been that way. When I was in high school I was in plays, I was always awful because I was thinking all the time what's my next line? I couldn't just get into the role because I always have to think what's the next line? So punk rock was great for me because I could just make the line whatever I want to be. I knew the basic story.

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Markly Morrison  45:57

Yeah well, I guess that makes sense why it was convenient to organize OP Magazine in alphabetical order . It's a good plan. So when OP starts picking up steam and it's getting out of town more and more, when you went from the newsprint to a glossy covered magazine and I'm assuming your distribution was up, was that paying the bills for you and the staff at the time? Or I mean, I know it was a labor of love...

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John Foster  46:52

Well, let me get into the business of it a little bit. At first one of the things I did when I was still doing the KAOS program guide and inserting stuff about music in there and you know, then doing the OP one and the OP two and the OP three, those were like inserts to the KAOS music guide program. What I would do is I would send them like music directors did at the time in general, I would send it to all the different promotions reps and also to all the record labels, and then I just started getting a better and bigger list of contacts. You know, as part of the whole networking thing. I thought Well, I think other radio stations will be interested in what we're doing. So I started sending it to all the different college radio stations and all the different NFCB stations which that was the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, which were stations like WBI, which I spoke about earlier, the Pacifica stations and the listener supported nonprofit stations not affiliated with colleges would be in them of which they were, I don't really know how many, but there were some across the country. It was a very interesting group of people. KRAB in Seattle was one at the time, another very influential station. So I started sending it to them. Then I would start finding out about record stores that were also interested in indie artists. How I did this, I'm not even sure now.

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Markly Morrison  49:10

I've got this article from Olympia magazine. Yeah. 1983. And in here, you say that you send “up to 2000 free copies out, which is a lot for us because we only print 6000 copies”.

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John Foster  49:26

Okay. All right.

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Markly Morrison  49:28

So a third of a third of it was going out just to get the word out.

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John Foster  49:33

Just getting the word out. So I would send it to the radio stations, the record stores, anyone else who was doing a zine, I would send it out to them. The so called fanzines or whatever, just a little music magazines. Anytime I could find an address. I think I spent time in libraries just researching a little music magazines and anytime I could find an address I would send them. And of course, then, people would tell me about them. As people got involved in the network, they would say, “oh, have you checked this out?” And it would give me another group to put on the mailing list. So, yeah, that free mailing list got to be very large. Probably larger than KAOS wanted to spend, although they had a nonprofit rate to send them out. 

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Markly Morrison  50:45

That had to be crucial to the business side of things.

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John Foster  50:50

Oh, yeah. I mean, without that, we couldn't have done it. Because, as you know, I'm living on nothing, and as my daughter resents today, we were living in a house that cost $100 a month to rent. Our garbage service was, you know, the Evergreen dumpster. I mean, you know, we did whatever we could to get by, and then at a certain point, yeah, it did. You know, we separated from Evergreen and part of going to the A to Z project was, you know, becoming our own nonprofit. So we weren't associated with them anymore. Yet we still rented time and space from Evergreen graphics. I paid the Evergreen typesetter Shirley Green, a wonderful woman, still alive in her 90s. She would stay after work at graphics where she worked and typeset the magazine for me, then I would rent time to typeset it after she would leave. You know, talk about burnout. There were some days where I would work...you know, she worked for a few hours and then I would come in like at 10 at night and then work through the night typesetting. She taught me how to use all the equipment. Everything was different then in terms of, we had to use a specialized typesetting machine, a special machine just for headlines and such. We had to you know hands strip the thing, wax the stuff, it was so different. Printing was relatively primitive at that time compared to now. But eventually you're right, what happened was it became so popular within an underground set, you know, that that we could pay Dana and I were living together in the $100 a month house and I think we paid ourselves, I couldn't even tell you, but enough that we could get by, like $500 a month or $1000 a month. Something that, would seem like I can't believe you lived on it. But we were living on ramen and you can stretch that pretty far. I wouldn't say we were comfortable, but we were fine. And no one else got paid. Everyone else volunteered their stuff. I had college interns to work. People like Calvin [Johnson] and Bruce Pavitt and Steve Peters. Some people that I've forgotten their names. Victoria Barreca. Robin James was very helpful, he was an excellent intern for me for a long time. He became a librarian.

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Markly Morrison  54:38

Not to mention all the contributing writers from all over the place.

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John Foster  54:42

Contributing writers from far and wide, all with their own expertise.

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Markly Morrison  54:49

I was pleased to see Eugene Chadbourne as sort of a recurring character in the magazine.

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John Foster  54:59

Yes Eugene Chadbourne was just the kind of artist that we liked to promote, just wacky but interesting. And he came to town and played in some of the bands that we dealt with, you know, Gary Wilson, they would come and play here. And it was great. Luxury a band from Iowa sort of pop band, who we really enjoyed, they came and played at a local bar. And I was too young to get in but somehow snuck in. 

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Markly Morrison  55:39

So you were a minor when you were doing some of this? Technically?

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John Foster  55:48

Yep. Yeah. Well, I started college when I was 19 and so for part of it I was a minor and then I was a major. And then I did it until... '84 was the last issue. That was when I was 28. And then Dana and I went into the Peace Corps, went to Senegal, West Africa, and then the Solomon Islands. And then we came back. I started working at the Olympian and then, Dave [Rauh] and Toni [Holm] had started their commercial FM station here in town KXXO and they offered me the job being their first program director. They said they could guarantee me a year at whatever the newspaper was paying me at the time and I took it and now it's 33 years, 34 years later... I started in 1989 and now we're in 2023. Yep. There's a life.

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Markly Morrison  57:11

It's the old crew.

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John Foster  57:14

Yeah, it is. It's the old crew doing new things. 

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Markly Morrison  57:20

Very different music format.

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John Foster  57:22

Oh, yeah. Yeah, the station we're running is what's called in the industry Adult Contemporary. Adele, Maroon 5, Pink. Some others I should remember but I can't right now, Ed Sheeran is big. That's a big one. Dua Lipa is coming on strong,

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Markly Morrison  57:47

but then we still got you know, your Sade, Fleetwood Mac,

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John Foster  57:52

Got some of the old stuff. Yep.

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Markly Morrison  58:01

So I'm just wondering how daunting it was, if you started having any regrets about the alphabetical theme, once it started getting toward the end of the alphabet? Because I don't think we've mentioned specifically that the A issue would focus on things, artists and labels and cities that start with the letter A and so forth.

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John Foster  58:32

Yeah, so OP had the alphabetical theme with the A through Z issue and yeah, we would just have a lot of a things in there, you know, A labels, A artists, whatever. It's just, it just made it fun for us. And as for graphic design elements, it was fun to use the alphabet. And you know, we weren't limited to that. It wasn't everything A but the main features would be A. All the reviews would be A through Z things you know? It was just, it's just a fun thing to do. As we went along, no, I never regretted that at some point it would be over. People would always ask me “well, what are you gonna do next, the double A? Or are you gonna switch to a whole new system?” No, I, you know, I went to Evergreen. Everything's all about doing projects and that was me. Yeah, I'm gonna do this project. I'm gonna put everything into it for a few years, and then I'm gonna be done with it and that's exactly how it went... I've never done anything with it again. Now after Z, that was an interesting thing that happened, towards the end, when we realized, Oh, someone, people are going to miss this was that we had the Lost Music Network Convention, here in town.

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Markly Morrison  1:00:20

Yes. I was looking forward to hearing about this.

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John Foster  1:00:24

Well, I don't remember that much about it, but I do remember certain things that it was like a regular convention, we had some workshops on how to do this or that, some more technical, some more about publicity and marketing, things we were getting kind of good at, as we've done it for a while. But the main thing, and everyone knew it was, so what's life after OP going to look like? Not for us, but for all those people out there and the network. What are they gonna do? 

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Markly Morrison  1:00:59

I'd like to just interject, because I am reading through the magazines and in reading through the magazines, you're building up to this event. At a certain point there's an announcement that goes out and then in a later issue, there's a form that's included, where you ask people to send how much you want to pay to come. What kind of food do you like to eat? And what do you think we should talk about at this thing, and you're being very inclusive. You're inviting all the readers who care to come just like, please come! Come to Olympia, and we'll make this thing what you guys want to make it. And we're going to basically divulge our resources to all of you.

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John Foster  1:01:49

Yeah. I've forgotten exactly how that came about. But yeah, we wanted it to be something that was helpful for the network and that if they want to continue it on, I was going to make it is easy for them as possible and what came out of it was that a group of people who said, “Yes, we are all going to assemble together in some place”, and they had to decide where they- well, they were from all over the country, and they were all going to move somewhere and put together a publication and keep it going. That's what they wanted to do and I think that was great. I gave them the mailing list and stuff for free was I just thought that it belonged to them, really, it was their network. And I wasn't gonna do anything with it and it gave them a good start. And out of that group, of course, you know, it's hard to get a group together to do anything and they were basically going to be like a collective. It split very rapidly into two groups, one was going to be based in Los Angeles and the other in Ojai, California. And the group in Los Angeles stayed together for quite a long time, they put together the magazine called Option which became quite a commercially viable magazine. And from what I can tell it was good. Some people said that was a sellout, because it was slicker than OP. I didn't I didn't see it like that. Then there was another magazine that came out basically done by one fellow named David Ciaffardini in Ojai, California. Sound Choice and it was less slick than OP. but it has the same spirit behind it. I don’t think that had trouble getting readers. It was a lot for one guy. Out of the Option group one of the best known writers was Richie Unterberger, who has written numerous books now, some of which are really interesting, mostly about obscure 60s rock bands. I can't think of the other people, what they did or anything else. I just know him because I see his books around.

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Markly Morrison  1:04:56

Can you tell me anything else about what you remember about when the conference actually came? Was it several days?

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John Foster  1:05:03

I think it was several days. 

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Markly Morrison  1:05:07

Who showed up for that? How many folks do you think there were? I mean, you don't have to name names but I mean...

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John Foster  1:05:14

It was in the summer, I guess it's summer of 84. We rented out the dorms at Evergreen, then also some people bought hotel rooms and then I'm gonna say, and I could be way off, I'm gonna say like 100 people showed up. And I think probably the best known at the time was Henry Kaiser, who is also an experimental guitar player and part of the Kaiser Family who you know from Kaiser Steel, and also Kaiser Health Care, that same family.

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Markly Morrison  1:06:07

I did not know he was part of that.

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John Foster  1:06:09

Yeah, he came up from Oakland. I think it's where they lived at the time. But a lot of very good musicians. We played down at the Tropicana which was a local club. My band played I think one night maybe two nights The Pop Philosophers, yes, I think we did. Plus other bands, it seemed to me there was lots of music all the time, but also just a lot of sessions and getting together and talking about indie ideals. I loved it. I mean, it was great.

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Markly Morrison  1:06:56

Did you use a slide projector for anything?

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John Foster  1:06:59

Maybe some people, I didn't. I just talked. I'm a very low tech guy. I'm sure I just talked.

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Markly Morrison  1:07:09

I wonder how many of those folks wound up staying here?

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John Foster  1:07:15

I don't know. I mean, I know that people came out here because of OP. The story, perhaps apocryphal is that Bruce Pavitt came out because of OP I don't know. I thought he might have just came out because of KAOS, but I don't know. But you know, I'm sure we had some influence. And now that I think back, I'm amazed that we were able to pull it off. To put together anything like that, it's a project unto itself, you know, along with doing the magazine, which was a heck of a lot of work. Which is, seems that even now, it'd be a lot of work, but it'd be a lot easier now than it was then.

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Markly Morrison  1:08:07

Yeah. I want to just pull one more quote from this 40 year old interview here.

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John Foster  1:08:14

 What is that interview? I don't know what you're...

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Markly Morrison  1:08:17

this is an interview with a guy named John Foster, this handsome devil here.

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John Foster  1:08:23

And it's in short live magazine called Olympia Magazine

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Markly Morrison  1:08:26

Olympia Magazine.

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John Foster  1:08:28

I don't really look back at this stuff very much and some of it, I mean, you probably know some of what I'm saying is wrong. Because you probably have it from me 30 years ago, or 40 years ago before my memories have been warped. You know that's kind of the nature of history. You find out the story has changed even within the person over the years.

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Markly Morrison  1:09:02

This is talking about the imminent demise of OP, which was planned. So this is about a year beforehand, and you say that “there might be another magazine in its place, but it won't have the same art director won't have the same editor and it probably won't be done in Olympia, Washington.” Bingo. “But I don't know we've talked about some computer linkups and stuff and something might happen there on a small scale, especially in 1985. But I think we still have a ways to come before everyone has computers in the home and they can just automatically plug in and find out what's happening with music.” You filled that void in the early 80s. It was an early stand-in for the Internet.

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John Foster  1:09:50

It was a transitional thing. You know that something was here, briefly and then gone. VHS tape tapes, whatever. No, I'm proud of it, I really am. I think it was an amazing thing that we did. I mean, it wasn't all me, but I was the spearhead and I did a lot of the work. So, you know, “a great project” as they would say at Evergreen.

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Markly Morrison  1:10:26

Yeah, definitely a great project, and music and Olympia are still a huge part of your life today, all these years later. What made you stick around?

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John Foster  1:10:49

Ah, geez...friends. When we came back out of our last stint in the Peace Corps in 1988, coming back from the Solomons. We just realized, this is where we have our communities. And you know, I didn't really know it was gonna develop, I didn't know where we were gonna go, what was gonna happen, but this was the community that we love the most. So we came back and here we are. We raised our kids here. And you know, I still love Olympia.

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Markly Morrison  1:11:48

I think that's maybe even a good place to stop. I do have one thing that I meant to bring up. With OP, as the editor, you were very, you really cared about your readers, and you were open to interacting with them. I've read a letter where somebody wrote in and just berated you personally [John laughs] about your format choice and I guess he really didn't like the letter U issue.

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John Foster  1:12:27

Oh, yeah. [laughs] That thorny U issue? Oh,

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Markly Morrison  1:12:34

Yeah and he said “I'm still gonna keep buying it because there's nothing better” [laughs]. But you basically said, you're like, “Well, maybe you should come to this conference we're planning” and you know, tossing ideas around.

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John Foster  1:13:00

And I agree there isn't anything better. [laughs] I'm guilty of the arrogance of youth. I knew I was doing a good thing. They better enjoy it.  As an editor you know, it's just, it's a lot like being a program director, you just have to make choices and you have to live with them. And there are always gonna be people who think they can do it better. But if they don't do it, then your way is the way. So I just had to do that. I'll give a shout out right here to Mr. Pratt, my seventh grade English teacher. He taught me everything I know about English really and the written word and grammar and all that. And without him, it would have been much, much worse than it is, you know, as it is. I didn't really know that there were style guides or anything like that. I've looked back at some things that I've learned since then, and realized that I was using some English grammar things that we don't do over here. But I basically I made up how a magazine was edited. I've seen other magazines, but I didn't know all the... I wasn't a professional editor at the beginning. And now I feel I can call myself professional editor. Something I learned as I went along. I guess that's a good Evergreen project right there. Is knowing how to do it. But the whole idea of being inclusive, I think that's part of being a hippie and being who I am. And just a general respect I have for people who do work, who do their thing. And so I would want to honor them in certain ways. Now I'm not going to be namby-pamby with them. As you noted in my response to the letter writer, I mean, sometimes you just have to clean things up and make it so more people will enjoy it, but I just did my best with what I had at the time. It turned out pretty good.

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Markly Morrison  1:15:50

Sure did. All right. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add?

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John Foster  1:15:56

No, I'm sure you've got plenty of material there, you know, all about my life now. I think I should say that Dana was gonna be part of this interview and she got sick, and she couldn't be. Without Dana, that magazine would have been much less interesting. Just because she gave it that whimsy and had that, you know, that visual touch, which I don't have at all. It's a lot of information and she made it visually appealing. I can't say that I could have done that. She's the rock there. She's great and David, of course, David Rauh was also gonna be here, but he's, you know, taking care of his partner who had a stroke, Toni [Holm]. You know, without him, of course, selling the ads, man, we wouldn't have done many issues, I gotta tell you, there always, always has to be someone who takes care of the money.

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Markly Morrison  1:17:16

Some of those ads are some of the best parts of the publication too.

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John Foster  1:17:22

Yeah, the ads were great. You know, most people submitted their own ads, and some ads we made based on their specifications. That was great to see what people came up with, and of course, the advertisers are very important. They were the ones who saw what we were doing was important or important to them and put a little money in to make it work because to be in the network itself, how much was it? It was like six dollars a year or something like that? Because I didn't have a lot of money. I thought, well, most people who are reading this don't have a lot of money either, so we'll try to make it so they can afford it if they want it. So we did.

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Markly Morrison  1:18:15

That's good. I should say Dana is still making beautiful artwork.

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John Foster  1:18:20

Yeah, you know, Dana, she's not a graphic artist professionally, she's a visual artist and teaching artist. You know, incredible teacher and incredible artist. So I lucked out with her. I hope she thinks the same of me [laughs]. But whatever we do, we get along pretty well.

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Markly Morrison  1:18:46

Great. Alright. Well, thanks, John.

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John Foster  1:18:50

Thank you, Markly. It's fun to reminisce.

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