James Van Osdol has been a fixture on local airwaves for more than a decade, but his job just got more high-profile. Since July 17 he has been the morning-drive DJ at one of his old haunts, Q101, replacing the recently departed Erich “Mancow” Muller. The gig’s only temporary–the station is working on a new morning show that will debut in the fall–but Van Osdol’s not complaining. “I’ve held down a lot of temp jobs over the years,” he says. “I was a filing clerk in a real estate office, I delivered pizzas. Doing this is a lot more fun.”
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A Rogers Park native, Van Osdol first arrived at Q101 shortly before he graduated from Columbia College in 1993, at the height of Chicago’s alt-rock boom. Both on air and as assistant music director he promoted local acts on the station, developing and hosting the program The Local Music Showcase (now Local 101), which was many listeners’ introduction to groups like the Jesus Lizard, Local H, Tortoise, and Triple Fast Action. In 2001 he left the station, and after a brief stint as music director and DJ at WXRT he took a similar post at WZZN. Last summer Van Osdol was in his fourth year at the “active rock” station when he decided to start working on a new project on the side: an oral history of the Chicago rock scene during the 90s.
Not long after he signed the deal, though, Van Osdol was out of a job: WZZN switched to oldies, with syndicated programming produced out of town, to fill the hole left by WJMK, which moved from oldies to the Jack FM format in June 2005. “The book became a saving grace for me,” says Van Osdol. “I was unemployed for several months and it prevented me from getting too depressed about not having a job. I spent 12, 13 hours a day working on it, lining up the interviews, doing them, transcribing them. It was really all I did the entire time I wasn’t working.”
Though he sticks to the station’s current playlist, he has a little latitude and has included interview segments and live studio performances of acts like Mike Patton, the Beastie Boys, and the Smoking Popes’ Josh Caterer. Once the new morning show debuts in September, Van Osdol will likely move back to the late shift. He says it’s a tough schedule for a family man–he lives in Skokie with his wife and two young children. But Van Osdol considers his career–four stints at three stations over 13 years–as relatively stable in comparison to those of many DJs who bounce from city to city.
