The Hour of Slack ran weekly from October 1985. Rev. Ivan Stang made it out of WCSB in Cleveland, and for most of its life it was the Church of the SubGenius's only regular broadcast: an hour of sermon, tape collage, listener mail, unsigned bands, ranters, answering-machine messages and whatever had turned up in the post that week. It ran for thirty-nine years.
A show like that is unusually hard to keep. It was never released as a product — it was distributed, in the way radio used to be: on cassette, on syndicated reel, to community stations, later to a podcast feed, and at various points onto whichever hard drive a listener happened to own. Every one of those was somebody's private copy of a public broadcast, and each of them was quietly rotting on its own schedule.
This archive is an attempt to stop that. It takes every surviving source anyone could find, merges them on episode number, and publishes the result as one searchable run.
The principle
Nothing overwrites anything. That is the whole method. When two archives both hold episode #1042, a naive merge picks a winner and throws the other away — and the one it throws away is often the one that survives. Here, every source is kept alongside the others, and every claim about an episode remembers which archive it came from. Where a show exists in three places you get three links. 1,512 episodes are held in more than one independent archive, which is the only real insurance there is: if any single host lapses, those survive it.
The six sources
| Source | Episodes | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| archive.org item | 1,562 | A single Internet Archive item holding the show as individual files. The largest single source by a distance — and the one that was hardest to see, because item-level searches count it as one row and never look inside. |
| Wayback Machine | 1,287 | Two personal MP3 stashes that the Church's own radio page used to link. Both hosts are dead today; the Wayback Machine still serves the files they held. |
| archive.org collections | 1,038 | Off-air tape captures, the Church's own
uploads, and syndication feeds — airchecks, radio4all,
radioprograms, opensource_audio. Entirely different provenance from
the item above, and it reaches into the 1980s. |
| podcast feed | 849 | The show's own feed. Comprehensive and well-described — Stang wrote real notes for almost every episode — but it only reaches back to 2007, which is less than half the run. |
| show logs | 282 | The Church's own per-episode log pages for #423–#859. Many are verbatim broadcast rundowns rather than blurbs. 944,477 characters of them. |
| CD-ROM catalogue | 125 | The Church sells the show as twelve-episode MP3 CD-ROMs, and its catalogue page lists what is on each disc. That page alone supplied 67 episode titles the archive previously knew only as a number. |
Two things that turned out to be wrong
A dead host had moved, not died. One of the old MP3 stashes, db8.ca, had
been written off: the domain serves 88 bytes today. But its owner had re-uploaded the entire
collection to the Internet Archive himself, under his own name, in September 2023. Checking who
uploaded a large archive item closed 54 episodes that had been recorded as permanently lost,
including an almost unbroken run of #201–#234 that had been the worst hole in the whole show.
The run is shorter than its numbering. The show appears to end at #2000, but #1891–#1999 were never broadcast. The only evidence anywhere is Stang himself, in #1890, wondering aloud whether it was really #1998 — his own count had drifted by roughly 108, which is exactly the size of the apparent hole. The final tribute episode was then filed at #2000 as a round milestone. So the real run is #1–#1890, plus a handful of half-numbered specials — #1327.5, #1704.5 and friends — that exist in only one source each.
What is still missing
129 broadcasts have not been found in any form. No audio, no log, no listing beyond the fact that the number was used. They are shown throughout this archive as loud pink placeholders in the years they belong to, rather than being quietly skipped — an archive that hides its holes is lying about its own completeness.
The stubborn core is the #200s and #300s, roughly 1990 to 1992: the era after the show was well established but before anyone was archiving anything digitally. What would recover them is not research. It is somebody's shelf — a cassette, a CD-R, a minidisc, an off-air aircheck taped straight off a community station at the time. Those copies exist. They are in lofts.
Condition does not matter. A hissy off-air recording of a lost episode is worth more than a perfect copy of one we already have. Undated and unlabelled is fine too — the show logs are detailed enough that an unidentified recording can usually be matched to a number from its contents.
POST ON THE FORUM →The CD-ROMs
The remaining gaps are, in part, no longer a research problem — they are a purchasing one. The Church still sells the show on MP3 CD-ROM at subgenius.com, twelve episodes to a disc, each one shipping with detailed text logs. Several discs carry material that survives nowhere else: volume 9 (#856–867) holds two episodes recorded here as lost, and volumes 16, 17 and 19 hold full-fidelity copies of episodes that otherwise survive only as low-quality rips. No disc images exist on the Internet Archive — this material is buy-or-nothing, and buying it supports the Foundation directly.
How to use it
- Browse by year. Every year from 1985 to 2023 is a block you can open. The bar shows how well that year survived — the 1990s are essentially complete at 50-odd episodes a year, which is a full weekly schedule.
- Search anything. Titles, Stang's episode notes and the cast index search instantly. Type three characters or more and the full broadcast logs load too, so a search runs across every word of every surviving rundown — song titles, guest names, whatever the Church was arguing about that week.
- Follow a person. Names are chips; click one to pull up every episode that names them. Fair warning: this indexes who is mentioned in the title and notes, which is not proof of who was in the studio. Treat it as a citation index, not a credit list.
- Filters narrow to episodes with audio, episodes with a broadcast log, text-only episodes, or the missing list.
Provenance and honesty
Dates marked ~ are estimated. Where an episode's year could not be established from
a feed date or an archive record, it is inferred from its position in the numbering and flagged as
such rather than presented as fact — a year block containing estimated dates says so in its
header.
Episode notes are reproduced as Stang wrote them, with one intervention: the Microsoft Word stylesheet that his paste-ins leaked into the feed for years has been stripped. Some episodes carry only a repeated boilerplate template instead of real notes; those are treated as having no notes rather than being padded out to look documented. 843 episodes have genuine written notes.
Every figure on the front page is counted from the dataset itself each time the archive is rebuilt. None of them are remembered numbers.