charting all the stuff that happened to be in his backpack (From the February Memorial)

Erica:
“Tim was such a legend at the radio station, he’s still a legend, I went to a show in Chicago recently, I was talking to a girl who’s a junior in college there, about who was there at the radio station who she know and she stopped me and said, “wait, you knew Metal Tim?” And on the rocklist, which is this email list that almost all the people who’d been on the Rock Format are still on, which is I guess a little embarrassing, but people I’d never met and who Tim had never met are all talking about him, it’s really great, really a compliment--because Tim’s mission as Rock Format Chief was to make the station cool, by putting together these amazing top 30 charts for the station, and I remember when they turned up in San Francisco somehow, on some discussion list, talking about how WHPK, which was just this 100-watt station, was so cool with the stuff it was playing…but it was all because of Tim, because he’d made them up.”

Kareem:
“That’s the thing we were talking about the other day, that there was a moment when Tim was doing all these top 30s and he made the station super-important to the worldwide noise and experimental scene, and it was 100% based on the fact that he was charting all the stuff that happened to be in his backpack at the time.
And it’s sort of hard to explain now, because it wasn’t passive, like he’d stumbled into this thing, I was talking with a bunch of WHPK old folks, and Peter C., who was substantially older than many of us, was saying that “when he met Tim, when Tim was 18 and Peter was in his mid-30s, 'Tim knew more about music then than I do now,' he described Tim as a fully formed person. I think that’s important to realize, that Tim had such a well-formed sense of self, and aesthetics and belief and ideology, in ways that not many people I know do.”