RADIO MAN RIDES THE INTERNET WAVE JAZZ DJ TAKES TALENT TO WEB.

Byline: JASON KANDEL

Staff Writer

BURBANK - Inside a converted horse stable, "voice of smooth jazz" Michael Sheehy offers a dose of his favorite music mixed with adolescent humor on Planet Pootwaddle, his Internet radio station.

Listeners can hear Bing Crosby, the Beatles or Bon Jovi and everything in between -- 24/7.

"You may be hearing Sinatra one minute and Little Feat the next minute. We're all over the place, but we make it work," he said. "We're giving listeners an alternative."

Sheehy is part of a growing number of people who, with the ease of the Internet and a passion for music, have started radio stations from the comfort of their own homes.

While the 232 million regular radio listeners per week still far outnumber Web listeners, Edison Media Research and Arbitron Inc., which do surveys for radio and other media, said there are 29 million Internet radio listeners a week, up from 20 million three years ago.

"There are a lot more Internet stations. There are a lot more former professionals doing Internet stations," said Sean Ross, the vice president of music and programming for Edison Media Research. "It's gotten easier to do as far as the technology. Plus, in an age of specialization, certainly a lot of the formats that wouldn't have made sense on somebody's $200 million radio station make sense on somebody's Internet radio station or alternate delivery system."

He started the station in April and since then caught the ears of about 1,000 regular listeners.

Glenn Nishida, who has owned a recording studio in West L.A. for 30 years and has worked with a virtual who's who of artists, is one of them.

"I am a huge fan," Nishida said. "There are many reasons why I listen: They have a massive library -- I don't think I've heard the same song twice. The set lists are so eclectic, and yet everything seems to work. Being a musician, I love to be exposed to all the different styles of music that Poot offers."

Sheehy records from a converted horse stable in his Burbank backyard in the city's Rancho Equestrian neighborhood.

In one 10-by-15-foot room, he has a digital workstation system -- a virtual studio in a box. The walls are lined with thousands of CDs and vinyl, plus gold records he won during his radio days as a jazz disc jockey for KTWV-FM (94.7) The Wave.

In an attached 5-by-10-foot converted feed room/tack room is the office and announcing booth. There, a rotation of noted TV voice-over and radio personalities -- friends Robert David Hall, a former station music director; Ellis Hall, the longtime lead singer for Tower of Power; and Wally Winger, who does voices on "The Family Guy" -- filter through from time to time to record wacky station IDs, the voices between the music. All told, Sheehy invested $40,000.

From the days he blasted Jimi Hendrix from his childhood home in Sacramento, Sheehy, 57, was born to be a radio man.

A child of the '60s hippie counterculture, he drove his parents nuts. His father and mother had good taste, but their idea of keeping up with the latest music was to buy a Glenn Miller Orchestra album every couple of years.

Still, as a child he was surrounded by music. He even had an aunt who was married to Ray McKinley, the drummer who played with Glenn Miller, Jimmy Dorsey and other music legends.

Sheehy descended on Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco every chance he got in 1967, the famed "Summer of Love." He made friends with Dale Evans and Timothy Leary, people he says influenced his life and his radio station, www.planetpootwaddle.com.

"All the best parts of these people are bundled up and put into Pootwaddle," he said.

The name Pootwaddle comes from a reference to Spike Jones & His City Slickers, a popular band that performed satirical arrangements of popular songs, punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells and ridiculous vocals -- a style Sheehy tries to emulate.

"The essence of that fun is what Pootwaddle is about. It's about being silly and just letting it go," Sheehy said. "A lot of our comedy is not that funny. It's stupid. It's fired right by -- bing, bang, boom."

Readers might recall Sheehy, who rose from obscurity at KNCR, North Coast radio, outside Eureka to work at a local radio station and then The Wave, where he became "the voice of smooth jazz."

For a while, he worked at Killer Music on Sunset Boulevard, the premiere music jingle production company in the country, known for the Wheaties commercials and Levi's 501 Blues.

The idea for Pootwaddle came about 1990 when Sheehy commuted between his Burbank home and work in Culver City. He didn't like what was on the radio, so he created mix tapes using an eight-track.

He bought a digital workstation, and, in his spare time, he put together compilations; and 15 to 20 years later, he has hundreds of these tapes.

"Basically, they became my own personal radio station," he said.

A couple of years ago, he decided to share through the Internet the music he had been compiling all these years.

"What we're trying to do is put something good for people out there to enjoy, and maybe learn a little something," he said. " ... This is just the start."

jason.kandel(at)dailynews.com

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Photo:

(color) Michael Sheehy, left, creator of Planet Pootwaddle, and voice-over and radio personality Robert David Hall work in an attached 5-by-10-foot converted feed room/tack room in Sheehy's Burbank backyard. The rooms serves as office and announcing booth. There, Hall and others record wacky station IDs.

Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer