After 25 years of ‘Electro Lounge,’ David Luckin still isn’t ready to chill out

In the back of Castaways Vintage to Modern, an antique store on the border of Fairfax and Avondale, past the heirloom furniture, assemblies of curios and racks of fashion relics, behold the vestiges of the physical media age: Crates and shelves of 12-inch long players. They were first introduced in 1898 as 7-inch shellac discs, meant to be spun at 78 RPMs, and had a great run before being replaced by eight-track cartridges. Then came cassette tapes. Then compact discs. Digital music, of course, upended everything. First pirated, then downloaded, now streamed.

Planned obsolescence. A decades-long boom for the music industry, and successive cycles of bust for obsessive music collectors. 

Aside from the shellac 78s, David Luckin’s seen it all. He’s been collecting vinyl for more than 50 years. For nearly half that time, he’s been the host of the Electro Lounge, a music show that airs Saturday nights on WJCT News 89.9 FM. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them,” he says, thumbing through a crate of jazz LPs. “My kids didn’t want them.” 

Sometime in the early aughts, vinyl mounted a comeback. Fueled by independent artists and retailers, as well as nostalgia-prone Millennials, sales of LPs surged, eventually surpassing those of CDs at the beginning of the current decade. In stock market terms, Luckin had diamond hands. After all those years of holding, he was ready to sell.

A year ago, Luckin partnered with Castaways owner Jason Roth to begin offloading his LP collection. He now curates the shop’s roughly 400-square-foot selection of vinyl, the vast majority of which came from his personal collection. The move coincided with, if not a retirement from WJCT, a throttling down of his many roles with the organization. “What was I going to do?” he says of his shift into vintage retail. “I can’t sit still.”

Raised in New York, Luckin got his first-ever retail gig hawking records for a music and headshop in Rochester. After college, he worked in TV news, behind the camera and in the editing bay, with stints in Jacksonville, Orlando and New York City, before settling in at WJCT in 2000. He retains a New York pace, an immutable get-up-and-go.

Dressed in a black T-shirt tucked into faded jeans, the 73-year old bounces from one record bin to another, extolling the songwriting prowess of Hoagy Carmichael and the extraordinary composition of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley’s band on Somethin’ Else, enthusiasm pouring from his trim frame, belying a body that was, just six years ago, racked by chemotherapy after a breast cancer diagnosis.

“It’s the love of sharing music,” he says of what’s galvanized him over the years. “Doing my show each week, that’s really kept me going.” 

During his time at WJCT, aside from tending to the Electro Lounge, Luckin’s produced dozens of specialty music programs – from Hotsy Totsy, a celebration of roaring 20s and Depression-era tunes, to the Juke Joint, an exploration of jump and jive, R&B and other rock ‘n’ roll precursors.

When the station began shifting much of its music programming to its 24-hour HD channels in 2020, Luckin played a pivotal role, curating the mix of both the classic-hits-themed Anthology on HD3, as well as Jacksonville Jazz Radio on HD4. All the while, he has served as WJCT News 89.9’s station manager, assembling the daily lineup of news and talk programming. He also worked for years on the station’s daily local affairs program, First Coast Connect, as executive producer.   

But the Electro Lounge has been Luckin’s calling card, a place where his varied interests – cinema, news – often intersect with his vast and eclectic musical tastes. 

A ‘Night‘ launch

Electro Lounge premiered at 10 p.m. on a Saturday in November of 2001 (though it was originally called Night Flight). The show was unique among music programming on local radio. Just as digital music disrupted the record industry, radio was upended by consolidation in the new millennium, with the amount of independent music stations plummeting across the dial, alongside the number of songs one might hear in rotation on any given station.

Luckin’s playlists, by contrast, were sprawling. 

On the Electro Lounge, one is as likely to hear a hi-fi cut by British reggae group Aswad as a Sinatra torch song, the latest Billie Eilish smash or a deep cut from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy. He’s known to mix in clips from historic radio broadcasts and scenes from famous films. The soundtracks of prestige TV shows remain a well into which he often dips. Songs by local artists find purchase too.

It’s a broad, heterogeneous mix, yes. But as much as Electro Lounge reflects Luckin’s idiosyncratic tastes, the show’s nightly playlists cohere around a genre defined by laidback, atmospheric idioms performed by DJs and producers with names like De-Phazz, Afterlife, Vargo, Thievery Corporation and Bliss.

“It’s space music, essentially,” he says. “Spacey dream music.” 

Believe it or not, there is a format for spacey dream music. It’s called chillout. And – like pop or R&B or rock – it has its own chart, as well as a lengthy list of subgenres: downtempo, ambient, nu jazz, lounge, trip hop, deep house.

But mostly, for Luckin, it comes down to an ethos: “With all the craziness of the world, it’s nice just to give people a little island of peace.”

Turns out, listeners were eager for Luckin’s sonic atoll. From the jump, the show drew ratings, and has remained in the top 10 in its time slot for the entirety of its 25-year run. 

“I specifically remember crossing the Main St. Bridge – windows down, volume up,” says artist and longtime local arts advocate Tony Allegretti, recounting the first time he tuned in. “It was very Euro, very global. Sophisticated. I remember thinking. Miami doesn’t have anything on us.” 

“David’s a walking music Wikipedia,” Allegretti says. “He’s like a good teacher who opens your mind. Not the kind that makes you memorize things. ” 

Listeners have sent letters and emails over the years. Some just to say “thank you” for the music, some are quite affecting. A listener recently credited the Electro Lounge for getting her through “one of the hardest times of my life.”

“You can’t quantify that,” Luckin says. “I never took myself as seriously as the listeners did. I just felt like I was the lucky guy who got to do a radio show.”   

Directing my attention to the music emanating from Castaway’s house speakers – a soulful, celestial soundscape with a deep groove – Luckin opens up a gatefold album jacket, revealing the LP’s impressionistic cover art, which he says is a piece by Gauguin.

“People are always blown away when I tell them this is The Rascals,” he says of the record, Peaceful World, a jazz-influenced departure for the ‘70s blue-eyed soul band. He reels off some of the album’s august guest artists, from preeminent jazz bassist Ron Carter to the iconic harpist Alice Coltrane. “I bought this when it came out in 1971.” 

Now one of Jacksonville’s longest-running locally produced radio programs, Electro Lounge is still going. And so is Luckin. Despite what his playlists may have led listeners to believe, he’s not ready to chill out.   

“It just blows my mind that somebody, maybe in their 20s, is going to take this home with them,” Luckin says of the beloved record from his collection. “They’re going to get the same kick out of it that I did all those years ago when I first heard it.” 

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In celebration of the show’s 25th anniversary, a live broadcast of Electro Lounge will be held on Wednesday, September 16, from 8 p.m.-9 p.m. at WJCT Studios. Here’s how to attend

Electro Lounge airs from 10 p.m.-midnight Saturday nights on WJCT News 89.9 FM/ WJCT HD1.