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James "The Hound" Marshall sits in the kitchen of his Lower East Side apartment, chain smoking soft-pack Marlboros and talking about the music business. "It's as bad as it's ever been," he says, "and it probably will get worse. [Record companies] have the idea that all the music being made has to reach some kind of mass audience."

"A mass audience used to be a hundred thousand, then it was a million, now it's ten to twenty million. Everything is geared towards that. It's just all the same shit."

For three-and-a-half years, The Hound has built a loyal audience for his weekly show, Saturdays from 3 to 6 pm on WFMU, 91.1 FM, playing what he considers good music; mostly "Weird old records. Most of the stuff I like is just this really old R & B and Rockabilly, old instrumentals -- stuff like that. My taste sorta stops around 1965."

Even in these days of oldies stations and classic rock formats, it's a safe bet that the only spot on the dial anyone can hope to hear The Crossfires, The Trashmen, The Vikings, The Shades, Dick Dale and his Beltones, Mojo Watson, Guitar Junior, Gene Vincent, The Cellos, The Jaguars and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters (to name only a few) is The Hound's show.

Marshall does not have what's considered a fine radio voice, but he makes up for that in distinct attitude. Besides music, his show is a mix of talk with friends he's brought to the studio, strange news stories culled from the daily papers and clips of old radio commercials. WFMU is a college station out of East Orange, NJ and gives Marshall free reign. "No one ever says a word about what we play. We change directions a lot, but I try to keep a vibe going. I just try to have some fun with it."

Most of the music he plays is from his own large collection. The show has several long sets, each with its own theme. There might be a rundown of girl groups, or a study of the Bo Diddly beat. There's always a "Hillbilly Hangover" set and lots of Rhythm and Blues.

Sometimes the vibe can be strong. Last January, "We were doing the genealogy of the song "Surfin' Bird", back from the original incarnation with The Lamplighters in 1948, right up through The Trashmen and The Ramones. And at that exact time in Minnesota the singer of the Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird" died. It was pretty weird."

Few of the artists Marshall plays are likely to end up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is, for him, the whole point. "These records have an eccentricity and regional identity that's completely washed out by the time something gets to a record nowadays. Every record now pretty much sounds the same.

"Rock and Roll was always sort of based around independent labels, and access to it was really easy. It came out on 45's and was really cheap to make. It was easy to get 'em played on the radio - just give the DJ a hundred bucks." Now, says Marshall, playlists are dictated by computer survey and payola is in the tens of thousands of dollars.

"'Classic Rock' is fairly appalling. We had to endure all that garbage once, and now the second time. It's like, 'oh-my-god Led Zeppelin is never going to go away.' [Radio] is in the hands of very conservative people and large corporations. It's all about demographics. There's no soul to any of it. I've heard it all a million times."

And, Marshall says, it won't change. "The media is so big now it has to propagate itself, so as fast as something can come up it will be pounced on before it has a chance to grow, like Rap. I think the healthiest attitude is just total hostility to the record industry."

Asked which jocks he admires, he mentions The Mad Daddy, a Cleveland DJ who "talked completely in rhyme. He eventually killed himself. There's an old black guy in Chicago who sits in a basement on a milk crate and plays blues records all night."

The Hound owns a rare tape of a pirate radio show, "out of Saigon in 1969. The guy's tripping his brains out, reading ads for whorehouses, playing these bad psychedelic records and talking over them.

"That's my idea of good radio."