Shane Kinder once had a beer named after him.
It’s a “fun fact” about him, he said Friday from the Columbus Arts Council, where he’s worked as the office/theater manager since 2019. The Monk on the Radio Belgian Blonde is a reference to Kinder’s radio personality as “Monk on the Radio” on Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s ALT 101.7 where he’s worked since 2002.
“Just a conversation between myself and the brew master at Band of Brothers Brewing Company in Tuscaloosa,” he said. “… That’s probably the coolest thing I’ve probably ever had in my entire life.”
He’s still got an unopened bottle, since the beer’s been discontinued. It’s one of several anecdotes to come out of Kinder’s radio career, which began unexpectedly when Kinder was in high school in the early 1990s.
Though a lifelong music-lover, Kinder had never considered working at a radio station before one Saturday early in his senior year when a friend attending Mississippi University for Women asked him to come visit.
“He did a radio show on Saturday mornings,” Kinder said. “He asked me to come up and sit with him one Saturday, and when I got there, the guy before him … said, ‘Scott called in sick. He wants me to show you what to do.’ So I had a radio show still in high school at 17 years old, and it just kind of stuck.”
That two-hour shift that Saturday turned into a weekly appointment. Kinder would work two two-hour shifts at WMUW every Saturday, and he’s never been without a radio job since. He’s worked in Starkville, in Columbus at 99.9 The Fox — still his favorite local station — and finally ALT 101.7 in Tuscaloosa, where he lived from 2002 to 2017. He moved back to Columbus to be closer to family, but still works for the Tuscaloosa station at night, hosting “Indies Only” every Saturday night where he plays entirely independent and unsigned music.
Not as many people know about independent music, he said, and he loves introducing listeners to those musicians.
“When I was a kid, I had two older cousins, and I would sit in front of my stereo and I would play my friends some of the music that my cousins let me listen to,” Kinder said. “I’ve always loved sharing new stuff with people and here I am many years later, still doing the same thing.”
It’s a career that’s helped him meet musicians, comedians, authors and athletes. He once interviewed Deonte Wilder, the Tuscaloosa-born boxer who held the World Boxing Council heavyweight title from 2015 to 2020, and has had drinks with musician Miranda Lambert.
Getting to know people, and particularly musicians, is Kinder’s favorite thing about his jobs — both his radio jobs and his job at CAC, where he helps coordinate bands coming to Columbus.
His years on the radio have come in handy when it comes to booking musicians, he said, since he’s met so many over the years.
“To get to know as many people in the community as I have, and to be respected by them and to be on a first-name basis with them and get high fives from them from time to time,” he said. “It’s a good feeling.”
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