Note: Part 1 here.

One of the pleasures of being Tommy Mischke's Boswell is that the guy gives you the sort of honest, expansive answers you feel like giving him when you're on his show. We hardy fans know him as the craisin in a bowl of radio tapioca; a muser, a poet, a bard amid the mundane, predictable and pre-programmed.

Which brings us to the speculation he might have given up his City Pages webcast Thursday to return to the local airwaves. The two possibilities seem to be WCCO-AM and perhaps its vacant 1-3 p.m. slot, or a return to AM1500, which ejected Mischke a year ago but has struggled mightily since.

"Both of them came to me a couple months back," Mischke acknowledges. "Steve Konrad, the program director at KSTP, asked me if I'd have any interest in rebroadcasting my City Pages show late night at KSTP. He asked me to think about ways we could do some kind of City Pages/KSTP shared thing together.

"WCCO had me over to their offices in late November to meet a regional operations director who was a CBS guy from out of state and didn't know me from Adam. The GM and [program director] at WCCO made it clear they wanted me, but the CBS guy didn't know anything about my work over the years and it was clear I was going to have to pretty much impress him all over again.

"Anyway, as 'CCO began to meet with me more often KSTP seemed to become less interested, and by late January, Steve Konrad was saying that KSTP was going to be going in a different direction. 

"Meanwhile at WCCO, I've now learned the same lesson I learned over the last year at City Pages: You can have the nicest people in the world in management rooting for you and trying to help you out, but the big corporation guys call the shots and they're out of state and using a whole different set of criteria to make their decisions.

"I like the General Manager and the Program Director at 'CCO, but it's become clear that the folks who own this radio station move slowly and consequently there is no offer, nor talk of a time slot, at this time.

"I think one of the things going on over there is that a big union contract negotiation is coming up this late winter or early spring and I have a feeling a lots riding on that. But what do I know about unions? I'm a 17-year veteran of a famously non-union operation over on University Avenue."

I asked Mischke what giving up his year-long experiment with web radio says about the format's potential — or lack thereof — compared his traditional radio. He was unsparing.

"This is my take on web radio: I wasn't any good at it. If you checked into who was listening to a particular program during the last month you might have found 3,500 people checking it out, which is 3,500 more than should have been," he lamented. "I'm getting old and maybe I don't have what I used to, I don't know. But I thought my programs were absolute crap."

Whoa. Sure that's not the final-show endorphin depletion talking?

"My work at KSTP had two things going for it that this gig never had. Number one, a live news person was available to me to interact with, and a live producer as well. They were right there beside me and gave me a point of reference for directing some of my material. They didn't always need to respond, but they gave me a sense of the "live" feel of the show. They were always great foils," he explained.

"The second thing was phone calls. My show at City Pages became something people downloaded after the fact. They'd come home from work, download it, and listen while they walked the dog, or download it and listen as they went to bed. Ninety percent of the listeners never listened live. One guy told me he down-loaded 15 hours worth of programs and drove to Florida, listening all the way. That's fine, but not one of those folks were able to call me. My show was already over at that point.

"Losing the spontaneous interaction with the random caller, the lone quirky guy calling in on his cell phone, that was a crippling blow. My fondest memories in radio were the people who came out of the woodwork, the eccentric, iconoclasts who'd call out of the blue and turn a mundane program into something memorable. At City Pages, I never learned how to effectively make up for what was lost there. I turned to the City Pages staff and rotated them through with various interviews, but I was using them as a crutch I'm afraid and not doing enough of my own heavy lifting."

Despite that garment-rending, I know from talking to Tommy over the year that he's in love with his weekly City Pages column. That feature was part of the original web-print deal where Mischke brought several advertisers and essentially covered CP's costs — meet the new entrepreneurial journalist. I wanted to know how a revised deal would be structured.

"The joy of my year at City Pages has been writing and hanging out with a pretty cool group of people who welcomed
me warmly, and who I now consider friends," he began. "Nothing is changing there. I get to stay on as a weekly columnist. Mark Moeller of RF Moeller Jeweler, who has been about as loyal to me as any brother could ever be, will buy the half page next to my column and be the lone sponsor."