Greg Mitchell, "The Beginning Or The End: How Hollywood – And America – Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb"

WORT Music Playlists

What was that song I heard? Who was the artist, what is the album title, where can I get it? Where can I find the entire playlist for a show?

Click on the Playlists button to bring up a calendar where you can choose any date to find the playlists for that day. If you can’t find the right playlist or the song you’re looking for, your best bet is to call the station the next time that program’s on and ask the host yourself. If that’s not possible we may be able to help you, but please have as much information as possible at hand when you contact us, such as: approximate day and time the music was played, what type or genre of music it was, who hosted the show and any other information you remember about the selection and we’ll do our best to track it down.

Contact Information

Music Director: Sybil Augustine – musicdirector@wortfm.org (for music submissions, charts and tracking, promotional exchanges for music events and following up on volunteer applications or other requests. Please include specifics in your subject line, such as “Hiphop Music Submission” etc, )

Digital Production Director: Aaron Scholz – aaron@wortfm.org (for record donations and sales, promos recording volunteers, etc.)

Music Calendars: Submit your events online here or send by email to calendar@wortfm.org

How do I get my music played on WORT?

We accept submissions in most genres and styles of music, focusing on noncommercial, out-of-the-mainstream, independent releases (check out our playlists and music charts for more information.) It may take up to a few weeks for us to review and process your submission so we appreciate your patience, and feel free to contact us to follow up. Please send your music, indicating any tracks with language that needs to be aired after 10 pm and including a one-sheet description and any biographical and tour information, to WORT Music Director, 118 S. Bedford St, Madison, WI 53703 and/or to musicdirector@wortfm.org.

We do accept digital files on .wav or mp3, but currently we still prefer CDs to digital submissions because it’s the quickest way to get it into the hands of our programmers and onto the airwaves, though we have a growing digital library. Digital submissions should be .wav or other lossless files, or high quality mp3s [128-320 kbps.]

You can follow up or “track” your submissions by email, or call 608-256-2001 on Wednesdays between 1-4 pm CST to ask if we received it, has it been reviewed, has it been added to our library, and what kind of airplay it’s getting—e.g. light, medium, heavy or charting. Thanks and we look forward to hearing your music!

Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers

Stu Levitan’s guest this hour is Greg Mitchell, whose twelfth book The Beginning Or The End: How Hollywood – And America – Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, is just out from the good people at the New Press, and getting rave reviews. https://thenewpress.com/books/beginning-or-end

“The Beginning or the End” was a B movie about the A bomb, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in February, 1947. It promised to disclose what it called “the biggest, best-kept secret in the history of the world – the men, the magic, the machines behind the world’s strongest force – the atom bomb.” The movie was, the studio declared in all caps with exclamation points FACTUAL! AUTHENTIC!”

Well, not quite. Because a movie set in motion by scientists wanting the world to know the truth was taken over by the military and the White House needing the world to believe a lie. How that happened is the business that occupies Greg Mitchell in his twelfth book, The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. It’s not just a great yarn with some surprising participants, it’s also an urgent warning about secrecy, manipulation and suppression.

Those are frequent topics in Greg Mitchell’s oeuvre. I had the pleasure of interviewing Greg eight years ago this week for a related book, his important expose Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki and the Greatest Movie Never Made Among GREG’s earlier books, two fascinating looks at politics in California. The Campaign of the Century, about Upton Sinclair’s radical campaign for Governor in 1934, which won the Goldsmith Book Prize, and Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, about Richard Nixon’s redbaiting campaign for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950.

He is a former editor of Editor and Publisher magazine, Nuclear Times and has an important place in the history of rock and roll journalism, as the editor at Crawdaddy magazine who commissioner the first major profile of Bruce Springsteen before his first album was even released. Bruce returned the favor by writing the preface to the 2013 edition of Greg’s SO WRONG FOR SO LONG: How the Press, the Pundits–and the President–Failed on Iraq. Greg is on Twitter at GregMitch, writes for The Daily Beast and blogs at gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com

I was between shows in 2016 when Greg published “The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill,” – you may notice a theme emerging — so I am very pleased to welcome to Madison BookBeat one of my writing heroes, Greg Mitchell.