Photograph by Wesley Law
Starting at 5 a.m. every weekday, Tom Sudholt woke his KFUO-FM audience and eased them into their day. When pop announcers shrilled “Don’t go out unless you have to!” he’d say, in his low, melodious voice, “There’s a bit of precip out there.” He often sounded mildly amused, but never snooty. A native of Belleville, Ill., Sudholt came to classical music at the age of 8, when he discovered his father’s old LPs and decided they were more interesting than pop. He didn’t know how to say they were “more complex”—and even now, after 24 years on-air, he refuses to put it that way. “At some stations, there is this aura of sanctity about the presentation of classical music that is just bogus,” he says. “I mean, come on, half of these composers died of STDs!” Their music, though, is very much alive—especially to Sudholt, who refuses to accept some temporary dead air as the end of Classic 99.
Did you ever learn an instrument?
The only thing I ever learned how to play was the compact-disc player and the phonograph. I decided to become a virtuoso listener.
Yet you have a phonographic memory?
Yep. I hear something once or twice, and it’s in my memory forever. That’s why I held off buying an iPod for so long.
What’s playing in your head right now?
Wafts of Brahms’ First. I’ll even wake up with a song in my head.
What was the worst?
Morris Albert’s “Feelings.”
God.
I don’t know why it happens. It’s just generally how my brain hums.
Sound fascinates you.
Even the recording and propagating of music fascinates me. A singer has been dead for decades, and yet I can still listen to him? The luster of music has never worn off for me.
But being that sensitive to sound must have its downside. What are the worst sounds?
I’ve been in a couple of pretty good car wrecks, and a car being crunched has a very unique sound. Once, somebody threw a 25-pound boulder on my car from the Spring Avenue overpass. I can still hear it.
You were accepted into Saint Louis University’s law school. What happened?
Three weeks after I graduated, my father took a nap one June afternoon and didn’t wake up. I was the person who found him. With that, my childhood was effectively ended. I knew instinctively: Life is short; do what you love.
So how did you get from there to KFUO?
I developed a very Walter Mitty–esque sort of musing: “I listen to KFUO all the time, and I’ve learned so much from it. I wonder what it would be like to be on the other side of the mic.” After a couple of months, I screwed up enough courage to walk into the station and I gave my pitch to a man named Ron Klemm. He admitted years later that I sold him in 5 minutes.
Another mentor was Bob Evans, right?
He taught me the basics: How to smooth out your presentation, how to organize your thoughts and your content, how to not outstay your welcome, how to say lots with little.
What are you especially good at?
Coming into a situation where everything has gone to hell and vamping, filling time. Johnny Carson was a good teacher. Behind the curtain, he paced like a madman, but he’d take all that energy and channel it into looking absolutely smooth and controlled. He even knew how to screw up well.
How do you relax people you interview?
Damned if I know. I just feel it. It’s an attitude: Look, we are going to have a good time, and so is the audience, and if there are minor inconveniences, we are going to get around them. We are not flying a plane that’s lost an engine. We are just doing radio.
What developed your sense of humor?
Fawlty Towers, and Mad Magazine when Gaines published it.
Were you a performer as a kid?
Oh no. I was very introverted, very shy, painfully self-aware. I was into astronomy and classical music, and I didn’t care about sports. Can you be at more of a disadvantage?
Radio seems like an odd choice, then.
Radio’s what finally got me out of my shell. If you love something, you forget about yourself. And then, when you get response, the audience changes you.
How do you know what to say? You did your programming ad hoc, no script or formula.
There’s so much bullshit in media today. Most of it is extremely phony and extremely fabricated. People going, “Hi! Isn’t it a beautiful day?” when they have a migraine. Be real—but don’t overplay the pathos. Nobody cares what you are doing unless you make it relevant. What does the audience want to hear?
And how do you decide that?
For one thing, by the weather. Gloomy fog or a brilliant, cobalt-blue sky? We are all profoundly influenced by the weather. If it’s cold and damp, you want the symphonic equivalent of a roaring fire. The puckish good humor of Sir Thomas Beecham doing Haydn, to me, is just right. And if it’s a gorgeous, clear September morning, Mozart’s 39th. You match the music with the atmosphere. Programming computers can’t do that. Media conglomerates can’t, either; they’re too busy worrying about their bottom line.
I hear a tinge of bitterness! I know you can’t talk publicly about the end of Classic 99, but what was the response from listeners?
I got this avalanche of hundreds and hundreds of emails—I’m still trying to answer them all. I was stunned out of my mind. They were the greatest audience in the world: passionate and appreciative.
Wouldn’t any classical music audience be?
No, I don’t think so. St. Louis is an amazing place. We have an arts community and sector whose vibrance and excellence are far out of proportion to the community’s size. And one of the wonderful things about Classic 99 was, that sector had its voice. 24/7.
Now KWMU-FM is trying to restore that voice in HD.
HD, technically speaking, is something of a nonstarter. It doesn’t have enough transmitting power to get through the walls of a lot of buildings. I mean, God bless ’em. I don’t want to diss what they’re doing. But you have to have what they call saturation to have a presence in media. Right now, a lot of arts organizations are going to pay a lot more and get a lot less advertising on other stations. Classic 99 gathered the demographic. And it wasn’t just people in their smoking jackets and wingback chairs puffing on calabash pipes. Although if they wanted to listen, they could, too.
What else have you learned?
Rule No. 1: Anybody in media who comes up to you and says “I know what the audience wants” is a liar. There are some pretty surefire things not to do, though. Profanity—too easy. Any Neanderthal can do that. Self-indulgence—talking about yourself too much. Talking politics—unless somebody has behaved so stupidly, anybody will agree.
Save it for talk radio?
Yeah. This is a country so racked by polarized dissent, and KFUO was an oasis where all that could go away. It didn’t matter if you liked Ralph Nader or Glenn Beck. I’m proud of that.
Someone once told me she didn’t like classical music because “there are no words.”
[Taken aback, he thinks a minute.] There were instrumental hits in the ’50s. Let’s see, what has there been since? Oh God. “Music Box Dancer.” [He sighs.] All I can do is answer with a question: You can only decipher the mood of a piece through the words?
What music with words do you like?
I’m a child of my generation: I like Fleetwood Mac. I’m very fond of Genesis. I always admired Madonna, because I thought she was a master manipulator of media and musical style. And I love Lady Gaga. I think she knows exactly what she’s doing.
Why is music, of all kinds, so powerful?
Our bodies always respond to rhythm. Think about it: the beat of the heart and the lungs, the electrical activity of the neurons. Life itself has rhythm. Rhythm is everywhere. God, I sound like a bad George Lucas film.
What would you do if music vanished off the face of the earth?
I would keep the music going in my head.
If you couldn’t? How would your life change?
I don’t think there would be much of it left.
What’s next for you?
Just because we can’t work for six months [and keep the severance pay] doesn’t mean that we can’t plan. There are some efforts under way toward a successor station. It needs to have an Internet base; terrestrial radio is not going to last, and all other technologies are pretty much a stopgap. When you liberate the Internet from your home computer—and I think the iPad is that seminal, intermediate step—and you start getting Wi-Fi radio, that’s going to be it.
If you could do anything you wanted with a new classical station, what would you do?
I really wouldn’t alter what we did at Classic 99. If anything, I would expand upon it. With the Internet, you can actually get out in the community you’re talking about, broadcast events with an iPad and a USB mic. You are free from the constraints of three 60-second spots at 20 past the hour, 35 past, and 50 past. You are free from that clock.
Back to the emails you received after the station closed—what was their tone?
A sense of being bereft and being lost. I didn’t expect that, not to this degree.
Obviously, they missed you.
All the lovely compliments people showered on me for my morning show—there were many mornings when I thought, “Oh God, was that even a sentence?”
So what role was Classic 99 playing in people’s lives?
Solace. It helped people face the day, and find some peace from the din of stress. Classic 99 kind of moderated those brain waves. And it soothed the bereaved. I will never forget the response when 9/11 occurred—everyone turned us on. I remember thinking, “What the hell am I going to say after a day like this?” I think I said, “Where words fail, music begins.”
What about people who brush it off, saying classical music is dead anyway?
Y’know, I’ve been hearing that for 24 years. It’s an awfully lively corpse.
I loved the way Classic 99 ended broadcasting: with Beethoven’s Ninth, and then silence. No words.
It was either that or Mahler’s Sixth, which ends in despair. No thanks.
