Boulder’s nationally syndicated public-radio favorite is celebrated with an appearance from NPR’s Lakshmi Singh

For 35 years, the music has been the bait to get you to tune in to KBCO at 8 o’clock on a Sunday night, or whenever “eTown” airs on 500 radio stations around the country – a whopping 40 of them in Colorado alone. (Or Spotify. Or YouTube. Or on the website. Or an app. It is 2026, after all.)

And, talk about chum: Cyndi Lauper. Buddy Guy. Bright Eyes. Emmylou Harris. James Taylor. Gregory Alan Isakov. Joan Baez. Lyle Lovett. Nathaniel Rateliff. Moby. Brandi Carlile. Peter, Paul AND Mary. The list goes on for a thousand names.

All merely the sweet, sweet honey to get you to listen in and be inescapably inspired by story after story of persons great and small taking the initiative to make their little corners of the world just a little bit better.

In the real yet mythical land of eTown … the message is the music.

Take Detroit’s Veronika Scott, who has employed more than 100 unhoused people since 2012 to make more than 100,000 waterproof, self-heating coats that transform into sleeping bags, using landfill-bound automotive scrap donated by General Motors as insulation.

Or legendary gospel singer Mavis Staples, whose father was so mesmerized by a sermon delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King that it led to his family joining him on freedom marches and the Staple Singers recording the 1972 spirituals classic “I’ll Take You There.” (“There” is heaven, BTW.)  

Then there’s Jane Goodall, a groundbreaking advocate for animal welfare – but you probably already knew that. If you listened to her interview on “eTown,” you also know she discovered chimpanzees as a wee coastal English girl while reading the pages of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

“I fell in love with Tarzan passionately and personally, I must say,” Goodall said on the show. “And then what did he do? He married that other stupid wimpy Jane – and that made me jealous.”

Nick and Helen Forster, who were married one month after the first “eTown” episode aired in 1991, co-founded more than a now-legendary weekly radio show that has released 2,616 episodes heard by a weekly audience of close to 1 million. They created a community that has become a real force for change and connection in an environmentally challenged world.

And it is a global community without borders, as vividly illustrated in 2002 when Nick Forster conducted a historic real-time video interview with three American and Russian astronauts working together on the International Space Station while orbiting 250 miles above Australia.

As Flight Engineer Daniel Bursch floated to the window to describe the majesty of the view, Forster pointed out it was a 1968 photo taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders – ”that image with no borders, showing only the natural systems, mountains, rivers and oceans – that created the environmental movement as we know it today.”

Looking back down at the big, blue ball from space “definitely does make you aware that the Earth is a living thing,” Bursch told Forster. “We really need to take care of the Earth because, by taking care of the Earth, we take care of ourselves. And if we don’t, we’re not going to survive as a species.”

Then, Flight Engineer Carl Walz produced both a guitar and keyboard that the astronauts used in their down (space) time. “It turns out that music plays a big role in our daily life on the International Space Station, he said.

“That was an out-of-this-world moment, literally, that pushed the limits of what a radio show could be,” Nick Forster said Wednesday, 35 years to the day after eTown’s first episode aired – both coming on Earth Day. He said it at a public gathering to celebrate eTown’s “bEarthday” at a sold-out eTown Hall, the former and in some ways forever church in downtown Boulder that has preached the gospel of eTown for 14 years, following a move from the nearby Boulder Theater.

Located at 1535 Spruce St., eTown Hall, is a multi-purpose, solar-powered auditorium with a full backstage recording studio. When eTown is not called to order, it hosts about 200 concerts, play readings and community events each year. Nick says they’re close to burning the mortgage.

Boulder mayor Aaron Brockett, who delivered the evening’s opening greeting, called eTown Hall “an absolute cornerstone of the Boulder cultural scene.” And still very much a sacred space.

“I’m sad to say that Boulder’s building codes are incredibly difficult to navigate,” Brockett deadpanned. “At some point, Nick was like, ‘Hey, if I were a Reverend, would that make all this easier?’ Well, they looked it up and found that, yes, actually that would smooth a couple of things over.”

So Forster did what I did in order to legally officiate three weddings (and counting): He went online and got himself ordained. In the eyes of the city, that made this building a church again. “At the planning department, they still refer to Nick as ‘The Rev,’” Brockett said.

“It is absolutely no coincidence that the first eTown concert was on Earth Day, because they’ve been making the world a better place and reinforcing our environmental values for every day of those 35 years,” said Brockett. “And the amount of phenomenal music I have discovered through eTown is indescribable.”

This Earth Day gathering was an unusual way to commemorate the radio show’s 35 years of musical performances. Because this night wasn’t so much about the music itself but rather an opportunity for longtime fans to hear Nick and Helen Forster in an intimate conversation led by NPR’s Lakshmi Singh, one of the most recognizable voices on public radio since 2000.

The music is being more properly showcased in a two-hour, two-part retrospective podcast. Singh took the audience through some of the show’s origin stories, but was clearly more interested in drawing thoughtful portraits of Nick and Helen Forster as human beings, in that signature NPR kind of way that would make Terry Gross proud.

We all learned some things. I’ve gone 35 years thinking the E in eTown stands for environment. It does, but turns out it also stands for entertainment, energy, education and enlightenment.

How it all began

Singh brought out the co-founding couple one at a time, first focusing on Helen, the producer who is largely responsible for the organizational success of the operation but might be known to some as the emcee, a vocal contributor and producer of the show’s “e-Chievement” award segments.

Singh introduced us to the daughter of Croatian immigrant parents who moved from Minneapolis to Telluride in 1970 “because I wanted to be free to try on different sides of myself,” she said.

She rented a cabin that had no running water or insulation, “but it did have a deluxe outhouse.” She loved it “because I was 20,” she said, “and because it was $25 a month.” She came for two weeks, “and I stayed for 15 years.”

Helen was cast in a local stage production after overhearing a producer at the Telluride Post Office saying he was looking for local actors for a staging of “Of Mice and Men.“ Before long, Helen was producing her own stage productions, singing in local clubs, performing improv comedy and hosting a weekly radio show. By 27, she had become one of the three original co-owners of the renowned Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

She calls hers a very “Forrest Gump kind of life,” one made possible in part by parents “who raised me to be a person,” not one limited by gender norms. “They told me, ‘You can do anything you want to do,’” she said.

She was then asked by Sigh about entering into a music industry that remains largely run by Peter Pans – men who never grow up.

“Are you asking, ‘Am I a woman?’” she said. She was. And yes, she is.

Nick Forster, meanwhile, has described himself as a feral kid who walked away from a privileged path in upstate New York at age 14. It was 1968, and Forster essentially told his parents he was not going to live the life they had planned. Meaning: Harvard, then a career in investment banking. Forster was attending an all-boys boarding school at the time with now U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Bobby and I were wide receivers on the opposite ends of the freshman football team,” he said.

“I think it’s an instinctive thing where one recognizes whether you’re among your people, and for whatever reason, I was out of sync with the other kids in my class.”

But, wait: Before we move forward, there is this one story you have to hear about Pete Seeger and Forster’s bad-ass mother.

“So, Pete lived near where I grew up, and he was trying to raise money to clean up the Hudson River,” Forster said. “I was at this concert in Cold Spring, N.Y., in 1967, and it was Pete and Don McLean and the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. Anyway, this mob of VFW guys came down with baseball bats to break up the concert, and they were carrying a banner that said, “Don’t clean up the Hudson, clean up this country. Get rid of commies like Pete Seeger.” They came across the bridge and they’re marching down toward where the bandstand was.

“Then, two things happened: The director from the philharmonic turned to Pete and said, ‘Hey, let’s play ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ And also, my mom marched up to the front of this group and she covered up their banner with her shawl – just banking on the fact that they probably wouldn’t hit a woman.”

Not only did Forster’s mom quell a riot, “The whole thing turned into a sing-along,” Forster said. “And these VFW guys had to take their hard hats off and sing along, because the band was playing the national anthem.”

Years later, Forster was backstage at a festival making small talk with Seeger himself. “I said, ‘Pete, I don’t know if you remember this thing with the mob, and my mom went over and covered up the banner …’

Seeger interrupted Forster and said, “That was your mother? Why, I’ve told that story a hundred times!”

From Bulgaria to Boulder

Fast forward to 1990. Forster was riding high with his band Hot Rize, which was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame last September. The band was playing on a State Department tour of Eastern Europe with several contemporaries at the time.

“This was pretty early on in the opening up of that part of the world,” Forster said. “After playing in Sofia, Bulgaria, there was a reception with communist leaders and emerging democratic leaders. There were poets and students; dissidents and military men. It was the most incredibly diverse crowd, and they didn’t like each other. They wouldn’t have been in the same room together were it not to hear music.

“And at the same time, I saw up close and personal what happens when government and industry are the same thing, which is just basic environmental degradation: The air was foul. The water was foul. On a clear day in May, you could see for just a few blocks because of the coal dust in the air. It just felt like this place had been poisoned.

“I was not a well-read environmentalist at the time. I was just a guitar player, but I was also a dad with three kids. It was a wake-up call, a glimpse into this dark future that we need to avoid.

“And so on that trip, I came up with this idea for a radio show that would combine the power of live music to bring people together with ways to stimulate the conversation around sustainability and climate change and renewable energy and clean power.”

Forster decided to tape a pilot demo of his show to sell at the Public Radio Conference in May 1991. The lineup of artists who signed on was impressive: David Wilcox, the Subdudes, Maura O’Connell and Sonny Landreth. The demo never made it to air, but he did get an offer to run 13 episodes on NPR. Only problem: There was no money. The operation would have to survive on ticket sales to the live tapings. That and some modest savings Helen had inherited from her parents.

“Our first sponsors were the John and Helen Suback Memorial Foundation, which was my savings account,” Helen said with a somber smile. “Had they seen what this has become, they would be thrilled.”

But, not so fast. In that remarkable first season, guests included Lyle Lovett, Shawn Colvin, Michelle Shocked and Nanci Griffith.“ But it was an unsustainable model. “After 13 episodes, we ran out of money,” Nick said. “And we went off the air.”

There’s (another) bounceback – you know there had to be a bounceback. For Forster, it was the idea to record a live episode from the Anaheim Convention Center during the 1992 Natural Products Expo. He came out of that with $400,000 in advertising. eTown was back.

But first, there was one other order of business, and it came from Helen.

“I told Nick, “If we’re going to get married, we’d better do it now, because we’re never going to have another free weekend,'” she said.

Where do we go from here?

Singh ended the evening daring to go where no resident of eTown has yet dared go before. While the Forsters seem ageless, Helen is 75. Nick is 70. There has to be a succession plan … doesn’t there?

Not necessarily. Nick made it plain that eTown is sitting on thousands of hours of recorded content that can be made into assets for its listeners for decades to come. But with the future of radio morphing into a hybrid model integrating traditional broadcasting with digital, AI and on-demand content, the founders of eTown sure made it sound like simply choosing replacement hosts and going on with the show as fans have always known it is not likely to play out that way.

“‘The Tonight Show’ survived successive hosts” said Nick. “Garrison Keeler’s show (‘Prairie Home Companion’) did not.

“Succession planning is absolutely part of our vision for the organization But it doesn’t necessarily have to be a replication of what we do currently. It can evolve. It can morph. It can be something else.”

And with that, the couple went out with the only two songs of the night. First, Nick and Helen sang a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You.” The crowd then joined in for “Happy Birthday,” along with champagne, cake and an enduring, emboldened mission for a planet that, 35 years later, needs eTown now more than ever.

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Email him at [email protected].