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| The Great Northern Radio Show, seen from above during our winter show in Bigfork. |
The Great Northern Radio Show is coming soon, with our biggest show ever this Saturday, June 29 at the Reif Center in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. We’ll be live on Northern Community Radio from 5-7, with free tickets available to our live audience at 4:30. Call the Reif box office at 218-327-5870 to reserve your free tickets.
The show got some Sunday feature headlines this weekend, with a Nathan Bergstedt column in the Grand Rapids Herald-Review and an Amalia Spagnolo piece in the Hibbing Daily Tribune. We’re also going to be in Thursday’s Scenic Range News-Forum, the heartbeat of the western Mesabi.
From Bergstedt’s column:
An interesting challenge with this genre of program is the absolute necessity of maintaining momentum. Brown noted that in a music concert, there will occasionally be breaks where the musicians tune their instruments and such. But they don’t get to do that, since being on the radio in addition to being a stage act, they need to maintain audio and visual entertainment value at all times.
“My philosophy is to just think of the show in 15 second blocks, and to make every 15 seconds as good as it can be,” said Brown. “Even if it’s something simple, try and make it interesting and compelling. We put a lot of energy into the show.”
And Spagnolo’s feature:
Brown’s show has been likened to Keillor’s iconic show enough that he’s had time consider the comparison.
“More than PHC (A Prairie Home Companion),” he said. “‘The Muppet Show’ is probably my model. We don’t have Muppets, but I’d compare it quite a bit to that. We keep the scrappy attitude of we’re just a small show. … It’s like ‘A Prairie Home Muppet Show.”
Brown, though, is serious about the professionalism that he and the team put into producing GNRS.
“Behind the scenes, I take a lot of pride in the production — making it very precise and professional-sounding — as a very professional product you hear on the radio,” he said. “But we kind of carry that persona of this little Northern Minnesota, backwoods radio show. Every show is an original.”
Thanks for the ink, Range media!
I’ll be showcasing various aspects of the show here throughout the week. I know this might get tiring if you normally read MinnesotaBrown for Range news or political scuttlebutt. But I’d like you to know that I dedicate a lot of time to this project and it’s an absolute joy in my life. Please, have a listen or join us Saturday in Grand Rapids.
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