--Written by Melissa Milton

Bob Murret's record collection has superpowers. It can time travel, transporting you back to the New Orleans of the 1950s and 1960s as Bob, best known as WWOZ’s Rare on the Air, spins them every Wednesday night from 7 to 10 pm.

That vinyl collection of more than 50,000 platters can survive natural and man-made disasters as powerful as Katrina (thank goodness for the location of that warehouse!). And it can also shapeshift into digital files that are a whole lot easier to lug around than those old platter boxes that Da Rare used to carry to dance parties in the New Orleans of his youth, a time when, as he fondly recalls, "All you had to worry about is what we're gonna do this weekend."

Da Rare started playing his favorite music for OZ listeners in 1982, when his dear friend Billy Delle, one of the station's original show hosts, brought him in to play the blues, R&B, soul and swamp pop that you won't hear anywhere else. After anchoring the Thursday night time slot vacated by Ernie K Doe in 1983, Bob retired in 1990 to spend more time with his growing family. To the benefit of all OZilians, Da Rare returned to the air after an absence of nearly 20 years, playing what he describes as "the rare, the obscure, the unheard, the who thats and the what nots."

"I missed it because I remembered how much fun I had doing the show. I love talking to the listeners, I've got great listeners. I'm telling you, I would not trade these listeners for all the tea in China. I've got them going all the way back to the '80s."

"WWOZ has come a long, long way. I’m amazed at how far we've come along." Da Rare remembers when the station was limited by its bandwidth and reached only "from the shores of Arabi to the shores of Algiers."

"I used to have to drive away from my house in Chalmette to hear the broadcast!" he laughs.

"I'm pro-OZ, I believe in what we're doing with the music, I personally have a great time when I do the show. I'm hoping that the listeners enjoy it as much as I do. I try to give them a little history when I’m on the air. Every Wednesday night I usually try to pick a little history thing that maybe young people or out-of-towners don't know about how things were and what we did."

Da Rare has a superpower himself, that of cultural preservation. He sometimes jokes on air about needing "a memory pill" but the memories he carries are invaluable to documentary makers and archivists. Bob has contributed to a number of short films that will help preserve the city as it once was for future generations.

"I had probably the biggest memorabilia collection of New Orleans in town before Katrina. I had all the breweries old neon signs, I had glassware, matchbooks, swizzle sticks, menus. I can tell you the restaurants, the dance lounges, the strip clubs, who danced at the strip clubs. I mean, I just remember a lot of stuff. I think the reason I remember is that I enjoyed it so much."