Halloween and holiday festivities may look a bit different this year, but the team behind new radio station WJAE420 is hosting a holiday special on Halloween night to encourage listeners to “light up and listen” and bring the spunk back into spooky season.
Halloweed, produced by cannabis-activist Lee Estes and WJAE420, is the station’s first holiday special and promises video messages from national cannabis activists, art by England-based artist Tom Estes, new music (including a brand-new song, “Monster,” by WJAE420’s own Angela Edge), and an interative game called “Smoke the Ghost.”
“With the pandemic, it’s likely a lot of people will not be able to pursue their usual Halloween activities. We wanted to provide a festive and entertaining event that they could participate in at home,” says station co-founder Wendy Love Edge. “Enter producer Lee Estes. He created Halloweed and Smoke the Ghost especially for WJAE420 and we are most grateful.”
The Halloweed special will feature cannabis activists from around the country, including national and international activists Mike Wise and Richard Rose. Local favorites include Rick Funderberg from Arkansas Hemp Genetics and Wendy Love Edge.
On Halloween evening, WJAE420 will air an episode of local comedian Zac Slusher’s Trashblood Horror Podcast from  4:20 to 6:20 p.m. In between the two broadcasts will be a cannabis-themed music mix, and later on, co-producer and founder Angela Edge will release “Monster” exclusively on the station website before releasing it on music platforms iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube – we are eager to find out if there’s a surprise music video coming, too, so we will just have to keep up with social media to be, hopefully, pleasantly spooked.
WJAE420 hatched from the quarantined creative minds of dynamic duo, Angela and Wendy Love Edge. In any involvement, the Edges’ always strive to create community, so they wanted to create a radio station that could connect music, art, plant medicine and healing, “which come from the same place in the human spirit,” Wendy says. The station celebrates cannabis and music, giving the hosts a larger, more circulated platform to promote what they care about. Wendy credits cannabis with saving her life and embraces the culture. Angela supports this, and though not a cannabis patient herself, she understands how important it is to promote the information, culture, and music to break the stigma still associated with the natural medicine, according to station information.
Being natural activists and feminists, the producers are diligent about spinning female artists in each mix: “It’s high time for equality in air play!” Along with the lady-charged jams, programming features community show called “Tea Time with The Edges” on Sunday evenings, tunes by Chris Cash with The Weekly Weird on Friday and Saturday evenings, and a daily “420 celebration” from 3 to 5:30 p.m. to match each time zone and includes a mix of music and a variety of cannabis-themed talk shows such as The Mike Wise Show, Cannacorner with Candis Dyer, Cannabis with Chris, and The Wendy Love Edge Show with Topher Kogen.
“We have been harvesting cannabis music from all different artists and genres and playing it daily since we started. Again, this is a celebration and community building effort that also will hopefully help to break the stigma,” says Wendy. “Lee did a phenomenal job harvesting music for this (Halloweed) event!”