Austin radio icon John Aielli, whose fearless, off-the-cuff approach delighted and polarized listeners for more than 50 years, died Sunday at the age of 76.
“He was a pleasure to work with and was very important to what the stations have become,” KUT/X General Manager Debbie Hiott said in a message to staff.
“John was an Austin treasure and was an indelible part of so many lives here in Austin,” said Matt Reilly, director of the KUTX program, in a statement. “His unique perspective on the world made John a joy to be with. Our lives are less interesting without him.”
Aielli’s death silences one of the truly unique voices in American broadcasting.
a life in music
From the start, Aielli seemed destined for a life in music. His dad was a pianist and his mom sang in a jazz band.
He was born in Cincinnati in 1946, but the family moved to Killeen, near his mother’s family, when he was 8 years old. There, Aielli sang in her school choir and studied piano. At 17, she earned a piano scholarship to UT Austin. But he only covered tuition, so he put off school and worked a few years as an announcer at Killeen radio station KLEN to save money. That was how John Aielli became the man who alerted the town of Killeen to the assassination of JFK.
Arriving at UT in 1966, Aielli put his broadcasting experience to good use to get a job at KUT, then an eight-year-old public station known as “The Longhorn Radio Network.” He was a 20-year-old student spinning music on the sidelines.
Aielli loved classical music, but her musical curiosity was irrepressible. He started adding different genres to the rotation: folk, world music, you name it.
Decades later, he said he hoped that mixing different types of music would introduce more people to classical music and “soften the austere elitism of classical music”.
For the same reason, it went through a phase of wear overalls for classical music performances.
Eklektikos is born
In 1970, Aielli’s show was called Eklektikos in honor of his wild mix of musical genres and interviews. It was this formula (or the lack of one) that lasted more than 50 years.
Beyond playing music, Aielli he interviewed countless musicians, writers and artists.
His long, meandering chats with guests (and without them) became a trademark of the show. In the early days, however, it may have been out of necessity.
“When I got to KUT, John was working six hours a day,” says Jeff McCord, now a music editor and host of KUTX. “In those days we were running in the [music library] and find CDs to play and run back. And you got tired of doing that. If a person was interesting, I would talk to them for a long time.”
Aielli himself described his work as that of “facilitator”, someone who connects his audience with the cultural life of Austin. And, as his following grew, so did his role in that cultural life.
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Although he was often in the audience at plays and concerts, Aielli had musical ambitions of his own. During the 1970s she trained as a vocalist and gave annual recitals. In the stairwell of the old KUT studios, her haunting vocal scales would reverberate through the floors of the building every day. Her Holiday Sing-Along at the Texas Capitol became a cherished tradition for generations of Austinites.
For decades, she dreamed of moving to New York to pursue a singing career. But when she was confident enough in her abilities in the early 1980s, he saidhe felt he was too old to start a new career.
He said giving up that dream may have been one of his best decisions.
“I ended up by default doing something that I really love,” he said. The Daily Texan. “I can be in the music world playing records and talking to musicians. I can’t be happier than that.”
‘Absolutely fearless’
The truth is that the music and the guests were not what turned Eklektikos into the decade-long phenomenon that it became. The show was about Aielli himself. He did things you don’t hear on the radio. He might have an author to talk about a new book, but decide they should talk about gardening instead. He would interrupt in the middle of a song to comment on it. He let the dead air take over for long periods of time.
Aielli broke “every broadcasting rule out there,” McCord said. He refused to wear headphones (one of the reasons for the dead air) and did not prepare for interviews. He led to moments that either elicited laughter or chills, depending on the listener, McCord said, like the moment Aielli “somehow mistook Bono for Sonny Bono.”
“[Aielli broke] all the streaming rules out there.”
Jeff McCord, Music Editor and Host of KUTX
It never fazed John.
“I just wasn’t afraid.” McCord said. “When the Titanic The movie came out, he kept putting on that soundtrack. He would very often play a song three or four times in a row if she really loved it. You know who does that on the radio? No one.”
“Eventually we had to hide the CD,” he said.
Aielli had a stream of consciousness presentation style. He freely associated words and topics to determine what to play or talk about, and could feel improvised and chaotic. But chaos was an integral part of the magic he created.
“If there is no dead air, that means you have to be prepared in advance for everything,” Aielli once told his hometown newspaper, the Killeen’s Daily Herald. “I like to fly through the seat of my pants.”
Destined to be an icon
For many people, discovering Eklektikos was a strange welcome to a city with a reputation for oddity, a rite of passage that moved generations.
“What I like most about Austin is the friendliness”, Aielli once said. “There are good people here, and it spreads to people who come here.”
Those close to him felt that friendliness along with the weirdness.
“He could be very generous,” said Jay Trachtenberg, a longtime friend and colleague of Aielli’s.
At the radio station, Aielli would bring thrift store finds and homegrown tomatoes to share with her co-workers. He kept chocolates on her desk to hand out and was quick to praise anyone who tried on a new outfit or hairstyle.
But like his presence in the air, he could also frustrate.
“John lives in his own world, and sometimes he’s not aware of what’s going on around him,” Trachtenberg said. “Sometimes we did it for the fun of our co-workers. We’d be like the odd couple arguing.
The station is full of stories about Aielli, like the time a worker walked into Studio 1A at night to find him standing on his head in total darkness, Trachtenberg recalled. “So John is upset that he was interrupted!”
Aielli lived alone, but she loved being around people. She often shared stories of her friends on her show. In her free time, she would spend hours at her usual table at the Cherrywood Coffeehouse, reading a book or chatting with strangers.
He was “a very sweet guy,” Trachtenberg said.
The work of some innovators may seem less innovative over time. As time passes, what made them special becomes commonplace. But the opposite happened with Aielli. As broadcast conventions became less free—what McCord calls “tighter”—Eklektikos seemed weirder by comparison. In a city that prides itself on rarity, Aielli was destined to be an icon.
“I was lucky,” Aielli once said of the twists of fate that landed him a half-century in radio. But of course we do too.
There used to be a bumper sticker you saw around town that summed up Aielli’s affectionate and complicated relationship with her audience. He said, “If you don’t teach your kids about John Aielli, who will?”
The answer is: thousands of his fans and friends. Without it, radio will never be the same.