Podthoughts by Colin Marshall: G.I.O. Get it On

Posted by Maximum Fun on 19th September 2010

Vital stats:
Format: Loveline clips and Loveline-related interviews
Duration: ~1h-5h
Frequency: surprising
Archive available on iTunes: all

Like most everyone radio-inclined in my generation — not that there are terribly many of us — I grew up on Loveline. For a few middle- and high-school years there, rarely did a Sunday-Thursday 10 p.m. hour come when I didn’t tune straight to Seattle’s 107.7 “The End” for what I craved. Late-night, informative, improvisational, hilarious: this, it seemed to me, was the best use of the medium of radio. I still think of the show’s 1995-2005 hosting team of Adam Carolla and “Dr. Drew” Pinsky as perhaps our time’s finest edu-comedic duo. Sure, Adam’s now got his own bigtime podcast and Drew remains on Loveline (alongside someone named “Psycho Mike”), but it ain’t quite the same.

As luck would have it, mini-legions of fans more obsessive than me were recording almost each and every show during its heyday. They’ve been making these recordings available on the internet for as long as large file transfers have been feasible, be it on your webs, your Napsters, your Bittorrents, your Morphei, etc. None has been quite so perfectionist about it as a guy named Giovanni, who in recent years has risen to the throne of Adam Carolla’s “Superfan”. Popular demand urged him to start his own podcast, where he’s the DJ and the greatest hits are old Loveline clips. Now he’s done it, with G.I.O.: Get it On.

Like most of us young listeners, Giovanni approached the show primarily as a laughter delivery system; given the surfeit of low-I.Q. callers Adam instinctively mined for comedy gold, it filled that function reliably. On-air, the hosts would often question whether or not the callers were learning from their advice — indeed, whether they were capable of learning from it — but we all know it was the listeners, not the callers, who were taking notes. Lord knows what trouble I would have gotten into if I hadn’t spent thousands of hours immersed in this rogue’s gallery of semi-sentient sex-and-drug dysfunction cases.

With what seems to have been a totally absent family and a peer group even dumber than Loveline’s caller pool, Giovanni admits to having needed all the radio help he could get. The show, he says, was the sole influence teaching him how to “live right.” Adam, Drew, and their engineers were the closest thing to family he had. These are two of the things he admits in an interview with longtime Loveline board operator Anderson Cowan [MP3]. Giovanni isn’t only the Raider of the Lost Tapes; he’s a relentless pursuer of conversations with people close to any Carolla-centric project.

There is no way to exaggerate Giovanni’s enthusiasm for Adam Carolla and Loveline. This comes through not just in the very fact that he puts together a podcast like this, but in the way he does it. It’s not as if he simply imports a favorite episodes into Garageband and records an intro saying, “Hey, here’s a good one.” He meticulously weaves what he considers to be the best moments of separate shows from different times linked by guest, by theme, or by something more abstract. He dedicates part of one episode, for example, to stringing together all the times Jeremy Piven ever discussed the production of Judgment Night, where Adam worked as a stand-in [MP3].

I really hope nobody brings an intellectual property axe down onto Giovanni’s project. If anything, I’m pretty sure whoever owns what he’s excerpting should immediately hire him. They’ll find a way to make money off what he does. Failing that. the vast Adam Carolla empire must have a use for him. And I know he’s Adam’s Superfan and all, but his archiving work reminds me of one thing above all: Dr. Drew was pretty damn funny too.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas, the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]