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The longest-running programme in the history of the Church of the SubGenius, and one of the longest-running radio shows of any kind: a weekly hour, broadcast without a meaningful break for thirty-nine years. This is everything of it that still exists, gathered into one place and made searchable.
The Hour of Slack went out every week from 1985. It was written, cut and hosted almost entirely by Rev. Ivan Stang out of WCSB in Cleveland, and it was never really one thing — part sermon, part tape collage, part radio drama, part answering-machine messages from strangers. Bands, ranters and mail-art arrived in the post for decades and went straight to air.
The show outlived its own distribution. Episodes went out on tape, then on syndicated reel, then to community stations, then to a podcast feed that only reaches back to 2007, then to a personal MP3 stash on a host that has since gone dark. Each of those was somebody's private copy of a public broadcast, and each was disappearing separately.
This archive is those copies, put back together and checked against each other. Six independent sources were merged on episode number, so nothing overwrites anything — every claim keeps the archive it came from. Where a show survives in more than one place, you get all of them. Where the audio is lost but the Church's own broadcast log survives, you get the log — and the two sets turn out to barely overlap, which is the single luckiest fact in the whole thing.
129 episodes are still missing. They are listed here anyway, loudly, in the years they belong to. READ THE FULL STORY →
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