They like each other — really! Chris Bellomy (left) and Tom Urquhart produce another ‘Good Show.’
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‘When [they] turn off the mic, they’re the same people.’
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‘Good Show’ producer/go-fer Tony Diaz (standing) gets King Friday ready for an in-studio performance.
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Bellomy chats up King Friday.
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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RadioFlyers
KTCU’s “The Good Show” puts the wheels back on mod-rock.
By ANTHONY MARIANI: STORY AND PHOTOS
It’s another Sunday night at the Moudy Building on the TCU campus, and inside, the guys from “The Good Show” are patiently, haphazardly, happily, frustratingly trying to fill the airwaves.
In a cramped jumble of a few rooms, separated by windows and loaded with radio equipment and swivel chairs, DJ Tom Urquhart is experiencing some technical difficulties while simultaneously bantering with co-host Chris Bellomy and attempting to cue up a song from a new c.d. by local garage-rockers This Damn Town, whose frontman happened to be in the neighborhood and decided to stop by. In the adjacent sound studio, the guys from the power-pop quartet King Friday are strapping on their guitars to play some tunes. Producer/co-host/go-fer Tony Diaz is bouncing all over the place, electrical cords and anxiety trailing behind him like clouds of dust, and still sweating from recording a comedy skit with Bellomy in which the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is depicted as a Klingon named Commander Kang (home planet: Quon’os).
Amid the chaos, the Goodfellas manage to play tracks from the likes of The Fall, William Shatner, Fugazi, The Pixies, The Record Hop, The Roots, The Who, Centro-matic, Joe Jackson, The Decemberists, Bauhaus, and Engine of the Ocean, among dozens of other artists whose music you can’t count on hearing anywhere else on the local dial.
Every week for the past six years, KTCU/88.7-FM The Choice has been happily broadcasting the sweet insanity that is “The Good Show” as if in honor of dearly departed Quality, to the memory of the days when the airwaves overflowed with rock ‘n’ roll attitude, when no on-air rules other than those born of common decency and maturity applied, when DJ’s — get this — selected their own music, from rap to rock to whatever.
All the good local rock shows — “The Metal Shop,” “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” (syndicated), “Edge Local Show” — are long-since dead, recently dead, or dying. The only remaining program whose producers acknowledge that significant rock was created after the Reagan administration and sometimes in our backyard is “The Adventure Club,” on KDGE/102.1-FM The Edge. But since the show is emitted from one of six local stations owned by the scourge of the creative side of the music industry, the communications giant Clear Channel, and since The Edge either sinks or swims on ratings, DJ Josh Venable not so subtly drops in among the deep cuts a ton of familiar, accessible, non-adventurous fare. (KERA/90.1-FM “90.1 at Night,” hosted by Paul Slavens, would be a contender if it weren’t so maddeningly bereft of levity.)
The story in this region reflects a nationwide epidemic. Music lovers have more convenient and hip ways to get music, including web sites and satellite radio. Traditional radio only seems to be good for chatter. The world, according to the Goodfellas, is a much weirder, crueler place, when miseducated blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern have better relationships with communities of listeners than rock DJ’s do.
For those of you local music lovers who’ve ever regularly listened to radio, try and remember the last time you felt some sort of bond with either a station or a specific show, specifically in the rock universe. You’ll probably find yourself back in 1990, at a time before multinational monoliths had commandeered countless signals in every city and before music had splintered into its myriad sub-genres, sub-sub-genres, and sub-sub-sub-genres.
The Goodfellas want to take back the community. To make the average listener feel part of something, Urquhart, Bellomy, and Diaz are reaching out in various ways: by doing the unthinkable and actually continuing to play listeners’ requests; by introducing more local musicians and scenesters into the mix; and, most recently, by taking a proactive role in a newly created arts organization, the Fort Worth Arts Consortium, whose mission is to increase the audience for local art while inspiring local artists to maximize their talents.
Pretty big bluster from a program on local college radio, an entity not historically known for its hipster cachet. The University of North Texas’ KNTU/88.1-FM The One has had an all-jazz format for years, and KTCU, aside from “The Good Show” and a couple of other programs, has pretty much consistently, perennially, uniformly sucked. Scour the universe and you won’t find another college radio station that plays classical music during the peak listening periods of morning commute, lunch time, or rush hour. Jazz and classical are fine — just not in prime time on college radio, the one metaphoric locale that’s supposed to be young and rebellious, everything that white-bread mainstream radio isn’t. Not young and privileged. Not young and zombified. Young and rebellious.
That “The Good Show” stands out against the morbid backdrop of traditional Metroplex radio is no accident. Aware of their unique position, somewhere near the vanguard of the old guard, the Goodfellas work hard at continually improving the show’s overall quality, to cash in while other comparable shows are cashing out. The program has never been better — track selection is more varied and diverse, local musicians and music are getting more love, and on-air experimentation, mostly in the form of ol’ fashioned comedy sketches, is more prevalent. Long-time scenester Kevin Aldridge, formerly of loud-rockers Brasco and currently of mood merchants Chatterton, says “The Good Show” is the only remaining non-talk program he makes time for. The show, he said, gives him “the feeling of being in the room with them. ... I also have a common interest with the hosts and the music they play.”
The success of “The Good Show” may have something to do with the fact that Urquhart, Bellomy, and Diaz can get away with just about anything. They’re not beholden to KTCU law, only to that of the Federal Communications Commission. “The Good Show” is a feature show, a type of program that’s usually run and overseen by a host or hosts who are generally older, non-TCU-affiliated professionals and semi-pros. KTCU’s regular programs, which make up a huge portion of the station’s daily broadcasts, are run by students and overseen by professors. Little or no creative thinking is required to helm those meager dinghies.
The Goodfellas, as volunteer guns, also aren’t responsible for generating any revenue for the university, even though hundreds of donors in each pledge drive cite “The Good Show” as their number- one reason for giving. (Anecdotal evidence is the most “scientific” way that college radio feature programs can measure listenership.) Andy Haskett, who joined TCU as a communications professor 25 years ago, served as KTCU station manager for 12 years. He’s witnessed the program’s success. “They’re amazingly popular,” Haskett said of the Goodfellas’ work. “It’s really hard, in popular shows, to put your finger on why something works. Sometimes shows have all the ingredients but still don’t work. ... Maybe ‘The Good Show’ works because when [Urquhart] and [Bellomy] turn off the mic, they’re the same people.”
Irreverent, incredibly intelligent, young and rebellious, “The Good Show” simply is one of the last bastions of good traditional rock radio — in the Metroplex and more than likely in this part of the country.
Think of “The Good Show” as a rock band, with a frontman/lead guitarist and rhythm section, buoyed by a solid stagehand. The spotlight rarely wavers from Urquhart, the one teammate who assembles 90 percent of the playlist. (Even when he’s not on-air, his ego is, in the form of his taste in music.) The 39-year-old, who never dropped needle to platter until he arrived at TCU nearly a decade ago, takes a rather mild-mannered approach to the job. He has a calm, erudite, friendly baritone voice, an impressive command of modern rock, and an almost altar-boyish reverence for the higher power of radio.
Urquhart is Felix to Bellomy’s Oscar. Insouciant, opinionated, and convinced that rock ’n’ roll music plateaued in the 1970s, the 39-year-old comes across as your everyday barstool philosopher-king. He doesn’t seem as interested in the music around him as he is in his freedom to entertain. He also makes Urquhart laugh a lot.
The duo dynamic is well-served by the presence of Diaz, who joined “The Good Show” about a year and a half ago. He not only functions as both Urquhart’s and Bellomy’s right hands, he also contributes to the show’s look and feel, as either an (often hilarious) on-air personality or (often hilarious) character in one of the comedy skits.
None of the Goodfellas has any significant radio background. Cheesy as this may sound, music is what brings them together.
Urquhart’s grandfather, an organist, hosted his own live music show years ago in Detroit and regularly played with the Guy Lombardo Orchestra; Urquhart, as a student at Arlington Heights High School, played trombone in the school band. Urquhart says he was about 14 years old when he bought his first record, Elvis Costello’s Get Happy. “The cover looked cool,” said Urquhart, who’s been in love with the record since.
Bellomy was also a band geek. The youngest of three saxophone-playing boys, Bellomy had, let’s say, odd taste in music. He was attracted to both extremely popular and extremely outré sounds. Young Bellomy was probably one of the few people on the planet who could switch from Toto and ’80s-era Fleetwood Mac to Maynard Ferguson and Miles Davis without blinking and/or passing out.
Both Urquhart and Bellomy, who’ve known each other since sixth grade, loved music, but they had yet to develop mature taste buds. Urquhart remembers turning on KTCU in 1979 and being confronted by a Sex Pistols song. “It sounded like crap,” he said. “It scared me.” Jazz on AM radio was about all Bellomy was interested in — until he got to Austin College in Sherman and frequently began tuning in to Magic 102.9, the virtual home of Spandau Ballet, Air Supply, and, yes, Laura Branigan. “All crap,” Bellomy says now, looking back on those dreadful, dreadful days.
The DJ’s aren’t sure how they were introduced to new rock. They just remember being strung along through the darkness by a cacophony of soundbytes, word-of-mouth whispers, and gut instinct. Urquhart lucked into discovering the Electric Light Orchestra and the Cars. Bellomy ended up with early, 1970s-era progressive rock — and not just any prog, but the real flowery kind. “I was always 10 years behind,” he said. The year was 1983, on a ride with an ex-girlfriend in a ’73 Camaro, when Bellomy was first “forcibly exposed” to the sound one of prog’s most popular innovators — Yes. The song: “Roundabout” (circa: 1973).
Urquhart and Bellomy, who had both been shuffling in and out of odd jobs, started hitting the club circuit after both had turned 21 years old in the late 1980s, but didn’t really connect musically until they started working together in administration at downtown’s Radisson Hotel (formerly the Hyatt). Manning the graveyard shift meant they could make a little noise at work; a portable boom-box behind the front desk served as their accomplice. Urquhart, a burgeoning music snob, enjoyed turning the time-warped Bellomy on to artists of the day, such as Hüsker Dü, The Dead Milkmen, and The Smiths. Bellomy’s massive appetite inspired Urquhart to discover more adventurous sounds. The sonic love even spawned a quasi-musical creation, the “band” Lee Harvey Deutschendorf, consisting of Urquhart and Bellomy and named after two of Arlington Heights’ most famous alums, the guy who killed JFK and John Deutschendorf (a.k.a. John Denver). LHD covered lots of ground, most notably Christmas classics. Who could forget LHD’s lo-lo-lo-fi, accordion-based great, “Rudolph, the Red Party Leader”? Or “Rosco, the Snow Man”? And don’t forget “Whole Lotta Jingle Bells.” (Matthew Barnhart, famous North Texas producer and musician, reportedly possesses some LHD tapes.)
Their interest in popular music officially piqued, Urquhart and Bellomy began earnestly paying attention to radio. The two best rock shows, in Urquhart and Bellomy’s shared opinion, were George Gimarc’s, on KZEW/97.9-FM The Zoo, and Buddy Wiley’s, on The Edge (before Clear Channel). These jocks played everything from the Buzzcocks to Supertramp — and local music. “The musical blueprint of ‘The Good Show,’” said Bellomy, “was taken from George Gimarc.”
KTCU wasn’t shabby, either, around this time, the late 1980s and early 1990s. “It’s kind of died off now,” said Urquhart. “But a lot of students from that era were really dynamic. A lot of them went on to work for record labels or radio.”
As anyone born before 1979 knows, radio was — was — one of the primary avenues by which music lovers received the rock. Much in the way that Gen-X’ers who dug music fantasized about tearing off blazing guitar solos in front of packed stadiums, many kids from that generation also dreamed of pushing their record collections on fresh ears. When the chance came for Urquhart to get behind the mic, he acted quickly.
“Austere” and “disorienting” are two words that describe the wing of the TCU studio from which “The Good Show” spills forth weekly — multiple glass rooms and booths, offensively bland carpeting, shadows everywhere, blank-walled halls no wider than the average man’s shoulders. Strolling through — especially at night, when some rooms are lit and others aren’t — is like navigating a doll house of mirrors.
Almost everything, including the equipment, is just as it was when Urquhart began dee-jaying. “Like home” is probably how he’d describe the place.
Urquhart got started by simply responding to a call for volunteers. He was a TCU student at the time, freshly transferred from UTA, and had stopped working after five years as production manager for Fort Worth-based Harcourt College Publishers (formerly Harcourt Brace). Someone told him he had a good “radio voice.” “I always wanted to be on-air,” Urquhart said. “It just sounded like fun.”
KTCU, according to Urquhart, was coming off its “golden age,” when nearly every student in the country, including many at TCU, wanted to be part of the zeitgeist, when rock music and rock radio were cool and had yet to be completely corrupted by the digital revolution. Things had become anemic by the time Urquhart signed on. “They just gave us a grid with about five open slots,” he recalled. “They said, ‘Fill ’em in.’ It was the first time in years that TCU had solicited volunteers.”
Though Urquhart mostly jumped from slot to slot at first, he soon scored an almost-regular Friday night gig, spinning mostly rock. Though he stuck to the playlist imposed on all DJ’s by the station then, he occasionally sneaked in some obscurities, gaining confidence with every off-road sonic excursion. “[Radio] was a real education for me,” he said. “I just fell in love with it after a semester.”
Urquhart had his eyes on a permanent slot, “one that wouldn’t move.” He worked his ass off that summer, he said, dabbling in myriad formats — from Triple-A to classical to mod-rock — and teaching himself how to get the most from the equipment.
A piece of Saturday morning radio real estate opened up, and Urquhart jumped on it. “I had no competition,” he said. “I wasn’t going to get bumped by sports.” He took on a partner, friend and fellow TCU student Steve Levering. “The Tom and Steve Show” debuted in the summer of 1998.
Urquhart’s occasional backsliding from the official playlist had now become a full-blown middle finger to authority. KTCU’s non-reaction confused him. He and Levering were essentially subverting the playlist, yet station brass kept calling and saying, “Good show!”
Urquhart and Levering figured that the non-mainstream music on their show was bound to attract a non-mainstream crowd. Urquhart remembers his first memorable call, in response to Bauhaus’ “Telegram Sam.” “A woman called and said she hadn’t heard that song in years, let alone on the radio,” Urquhart said. “I asked her what she was doing, and she said, taking her kid and her friends to their soccer game.”
That’s when Urquhart and Levering realized who was really listening. “Who else is up on Saturday morning but young kids going to work or soccer games and their parents?”
Feeling inspired, Urquhart and Levering began promoting themselves, on their own dime. Urquhart, by then a senior, felt his radio show was becoming a major part of his life.
KTCU was still looking for more volunteers. At the behest of Urquhart, Bellomy signed up and received a prime Saturday night spot. His show shared with “Tom and Steve” an allegiance to forward-thinking modern rock but was also willing to dip into jazz and classic rock.
The three novice DJ’s came together over the 2001 iteration of a once-annual TCU-sanctioned music festival created by students called Noizefest. Since Urquhart and Levering had brilliantly produced the previous year’s event, they were once again called on for 2001’s concert. With help from booking agent extraordinaire Melissa Kirkendall, the three DJ’s, by most accounts, pulled off the best Noizefest to date.
“Tom and Steve” was beginning to unravel. Urquhart was gravitating toward explosive rock, while Levering was exploring his attraction to meditative electronica. “I was petty about ownership of the playlist,” Urquhart said. “But my songs were two minutes long. His were eight.
“The last thing I think you wanna hear when you wake up on a Saturday morning is trance music,” Urquhart continued. Soccer moms want “something to wake them up.”
Animosity between the co-hosts grew. “We’d walk into the studio with our boxes of c.d.’s,” Urquhart recalled, “like our artillery.”
Urquhart, frustrated, had to reacquaint himself with his mission — to have fun. He immediately sold himself and Bellomy on doing a show together.
Urquhart and Levering set a December date to end their professional relationship, but when Levering walked into the studio one Saturday morning in October and saw Bellomy sitting across from Urquhart, “Tom and Steve” disintegrated on the spot.
Bellomy says the first few episodes of “The Good Show” were “rocky.” “Usually on some shows [on other stations], when the mics are turned off, the knives come out,” Bellomy said. “We wanted to reverse that,” save the verbal abuse for the on-air banter between songs.
Some listeners didn’t get the joke and were worried that the two DJ’s truly didn’t like each other. The co-hosts decided to settle down and ease up on forcing the ’tude — on each other and listeners. Bellomy likens early episodes of “The Good Show” to those from any successful sit-com — most characters, as everyone knows, really don’t get interesting until about the third season.
For Bellomy, “The Good Show” started to become what it is today about a year later, at the millennium — not at the flip from 1999 to 2000 but at the real millennium, the change from 2000 to 2001. (“There was no ‘Year 0,’” Bellomy explained patiently.) To ring in the new age, the DJ’s played their idea of “The Best Music of the Past Thousand Years,” from Leonard Bernstein to The Toadies to Mozart. Goodbye, staid. Hello, silly.
Lots of folks with healthy ears remember rock radio the way it was, even as recently as the mid-1990s. Yesteryear’s average DJ had taste and wasn’t afraid to use it. He also endeavored to communicate with listeners, to embrace them as equals and not just as fat wallets in need of ransacking. Listeners back then represented a “community,” not a “market.”
There are two primary ways Urquhart, Bellomy, and Diaz go about communing with their listeners. The first is obvious. The studio doors and phone lines to “The Good Show” are always open, to fans from all over, touring national acts, and local artists. Notable past guests include Chomsky, Pleasure Club, and Vaden Todd Lewis before he left The Toadies to form The Burden Brothers. “The Good Show” also plans to invite Dallas-based blogger Cindy Chaffin to the studio to help interview featured artists and select songs for the playlist. And the fellas keep trying to nail down a commitment from Denton-based Lance Yocum, of Spune Productions, to co-sponsor a series of local music showcases around town.
The other way the Goodfellas try to be a part of the larger community is by being out in it. Urquhart and Diaz are two of six officers in the Fort Worth Arts Consortium. For Urquhart, the role is a first: He’s been behind events before, but he’s never been as far away from the studio and into the streets as he is now. He’s hoping that his grassroots efforts somehow positively influence his on-air work, and if he happens to pick up a new “Good Show” listener along the way, then great.
FWAC is unusual in that it’s fueled by philanthropic tendencies and creative aspirations. Most of the officers are artists on some level, and many of the few dozen members unabashedly bring their agendas to FWAC. “We say, ‘However you contribute is what you get out of it,’” said Diaz, FWAC co-chairman alongside local musician and regular “Good Show” guest Neil Schnell (host of “The Bad Show,” a mini-show within “The Good Show”).
“The Good Show” guys make sure to keep their activism separate from their work. All they say they’re doing is helping foster an environment hospitable to progressive-thinking, open-minded, arts-friendly folks — the kind of people who would love the progressive-thinking, open-minded, arts-friendly material on “The Good Show.” “The goal is to unify the arts scene,” Diaz said of FWAC’s mission. “We need to make each other less oblivious to each other’s work. ... We’re gonna push each other [up] to get to the top,” implying that in less-civilized cities (that’s you, Dallas), artists step on one another to reach the summit.
FWAC started life as a random conversation among Diaz and some other hipsters during a packed Aardvark performance about six months ago. The first meeting took place a month later and attracted about 15 people. The first formal meeting happened two months later, at the Wreck Room. At some point in between, certain FWAC’ers became “officers” by agreeing to tackle certain tasks. “Everyone has equal say,” Diaz said. With the recent construction of a handsome web site, (www.fwac.net), some good word-of-mouth, and progress in compiling and distributing the first of what may be many free sampler c.d.’s (due this spring), FWAC appears to be for real.
Diaz, frontman for one of Tarrant County’s most talented rock bands, Goodwin, is fast becoming a cultural force. He knows just about everybody on the scene. To Urquhart and Bellomy, Diaz has proven invaluable as both a teammate and solid conduit to The Street. One of his more memorable early roles involved cruising night clubs and “reporting” back to Urquhart and Bellomy on-air via cell phone. A powerhouse of a man with a booming voice and unruly shock of wavy black hair, Diaz arrived on “The Good Show” at a perfect time. Bellomy had begun concentrating more intensely on developing the show’s theatrical pieces and was looking for someone to help with the voices. He could have done worse than score one of the region’s most energetic, frenetic, charismatic frontmen/lead singers. “[Diaz] is great,” Urquhart said. “He keeps the show honest. “
The first time Diaz heard “The Good Show” was while driving aimlessly around the swamplands of Mosier Valley, trying to get over a girl, about two years ago. “I laughed,” he said. “Their humor was just like mine. I thought, ‘These guys are so hip. They must be getting laid every weekend.’”
He became a regular listener, and when time came for Goodwin to deliver copies of its first demo, “The Good Show” was high on the list of recipients. Urquhart and Bellomy, according to Diaz, regularly spun one particular Goodwin song. Emboldened, Diaz called the DJ’s and asked if he and his bandmates — like many bands before — could drop by the studio and perform acoustic.
Urquhart and Bellomy agreed, and one on-air Goodwin performance led to an open-ended invitation for Diaz. Urquhart said that “once you meet [Diaz], it’s hard not to like him.”
Diaz was similarly smitten. “Just sitting there, in the studio, I thought it was so hipster and collegiate and so pop-culture-ish. I loved it.”
About a month later, Diaz had become a full-fledged Goodfella. The program’s recent switch to Sunday nights from Saturday mornings may help explain the noticeable increase in listener activity. Or maybe more people within KTCU’s 10,000-watt ambit are tuning in to witness the new, Diaz-laden “Good Show” dynamic.
“What we had in mind, when we started ‘The Good Show,’ was to not be like commercial radio,” Bellomy said. “It’s so obviously programmed by consultants, and there’s no connection to the jocks. There’s no sense of community. It’s just a product that’s churned out. ... Talk radio has that sense of community that music used to.”
For the Goodfellas, the set-up at KTCU couldn’t be any sweeter — no commercials, no public service announcements, no chains binding the hands of the hosts’ more vaudevillian tendencies, no draconian restrictions on what can and can’t be played.
The only factor keeping this arrangement from crossing over from “great” to “heavenly” is the absence of a sweet paycheck every two weeks.
Apart from the show, the Goodfellas are doing a little better than OK — Urquhart, expecting his first child with his wife Angela this summer, has for the past five years been a white-collar stud at Verio, the internet company based in Denver with an office in Dallas. Bellomy, a former Verio employee, is operating, with a professional partner, Plan B E-mail, for businesses. Diaz, when not working with Goodwin, is an internal auditor by day and a UTA student studying history by night.
All three say that while they enjoy their full-time jobs and creative outlets, they probably wouldn’t mind seeing “The Good Show” reach a wider — possibly national, possibly global — audience. “Aside from ego,” Urquhart said with a laugh, he’d also like the show to grow because he thinks more people would like to listen to the kind of music he enjoys. “I try to put a show together and pretend it’s what I’m hearing when I randomly tune in, something I would want to listen to.”
For artists or a group of artists such as the Goodfellas, expanding the fan base is a natural, logical progression.
But there aren’t many options. Commercial radio is out, on principle. “We’d like to be more than a blip,” Bellomy writes in an e-mail. “But we’re not willing to sacrifice our honesty with our audience in order to achieve celebrity status.”
Web radio? Another non-starter. “I certainly don’t mind [webcasting] as a supplement to FM,” Urquhart writes in an e-mail. “However, my personal definition of what ‘real’ radio is doesn’t include a medium that isn’t easily accessible while driving my car.” (“The Good Show” can be located on the internet at www.goodshow.net and www.myspace.com.)
The only option with some concrete potential is syndication on satellite radio. But for a show whose hosts pride themselves on their relationship with the surrounding community, broadcasting to listeners all over the planet would mean adjusting the show’s content to appeal to a low common denominator, a category of folks who probably not only have never heard The Toadies, the cut*off, The Polyphonic Spree, Engine of the Ocean, or King Friday but don’t want to.
If “The Good Show” has improved over the years, it’s been in the local band department. While always friendly to Dallas and Denton outfits, the show never really bear-hugged the Fort Worth/Tarrant County scene, which is a crying shame when you realize that “The Good Show” broadcasts within walking distance of the Aardvark, one of Cowtown’s biggest venues partial to Fort Worth bands.
That’s all changing, thanks in part to Diaz’ long list of contacts and love for his hometown, and to Urquhart and Bellomy, who, while both runnething over in good intentions, don’t draw the line between Fort Worth/Tarrant County and the rest of North Texas with as much fiery bitterness as some of the rest of us.
What may keep some music lovers awake at night is the thought that without “The Good Show,” Fort Worth/Tarrant County bands would have no — zero, zip, zilch — traditional radio outlet.
Playing local music, for the Goodfellas, is just another way to a) separate “The Good Show” from impostors and b) follow in the path of righteousness.
“We tell musicians who come on all the time, ‘We’re not charity workers,’” Urquhart said. “‘We play your music because it’s good. Not because you’re from here.’”
Of all the admirable attributes about the Goodfellas, the most striking is their collective utter lack of guile. A single momentary conversation with any one of them reveals men as easy-going and free of pretense as Grandpa. Even if a big, fat satellite radio deal doesn’t come through or KTCU goes off the air, Tom Urquhart, Chris Bellomy, and Tony Diaz surely will be involved in something entertaining, something intelligent, and, indubitably, something “good.”
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