The Fistful of Soundtracks Internet radio station has been streaming film and TV score music since 2002. One of the programs on the station's lineup is the program of the same name that I began during my sophomore year at UC Santa Cruz because I wanted to bring a film music radio program to the local airwaves. I didn't want to play typical college radio music, so I rebelled and started A Fistful of Soundtracks, which first aired on KZSC on Friday, June 21, 1997 at 12:30am. The only Santa Cruzans listening to the radio at 12:30am are either gas station clerks or paranoid potheads who have no choice but to flick on the radio because they're afraid their TV sets are going to attack them and do some creepy Videodrome thing with one of their orifices or something. This wasn't the audience I was looking for, but hey, I had to start somewhere.

My favorite film composers include Schifrin, Elfman, and of course, Morricone. Like the members of The Clash (R.I.P. Joe Strummer), I've been fascinated by Morricone's music and the amoral, gritty, sometimes badly dubbed world of spaghetti westerns. The title A Fistful of Soundtracks is a shout-out to Sergio Leone and Morricone, whose Fistful of Dollars main title theme was the other tune besides A Tribe Called Quest's "Check the Rhime" that I couldn't stop humming when I was a teenager.

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