Who hosted The Big Enchilada?

Steve Terrell. His byline is printed on every episode page we recovered, and on the hundredth-episode page he describes his own background in radio before the podcast started.

Can I listen to the episodes on this site?

No. We hold no audio and will never host any. Fifteen of our twenty pages name an Internet Archive item where the file was uploaded, and those items are public at archive.org.

How many episodes were there in total?

At least 131 — that is the highest number printed on a page we recovered. Our documentation covers twenty of them, all between episode 77 and episode 131.

Why is there no tracklist on this page?

Our automated read of this show's playlists failed and produced nothing we trust. Rather than publish a broken tally we publish none. If you have the playlists, we would like them.

The Big Enchilada — Archive Record

Call an episode “96 Bottles of Tears on the Wall” and you have already told the listener what kind of hour it is. The Big Enchilada worked that way for years: find the joke, build the show around it, stamp a number on the front. We recovered twenty of its episode pages from dated Internet Archive captures, and the titles are still the best evidence of the thing’s character.

What we actually hold

Twenty pages. The earliest is 18 October 2014, episode 77. The latest is 29 May 2019, episode 131. The crawler caught one page in 2014, three in 2015, three in 2016, one in 2017, seven in 2018 and five in 2019, so the record gets denser as it goes rather than thinner, which is the opposite of how these archives usually run out.

The numbering is the part worth staring at. The show was already seventy-seven episodes deep when our record starts, so most of it happened before anything we can show you. Fifty-four numbers separate 77 from 131, and about fifty-five months separate the two dates. That works out to roughly one episode a month if the count ran unbroken. We have twenty of them. Everything else is a number we can name and a page we cannot produce.

The titles, in order

2014-10-18 — BIG ENCHILADA 77: 2014 Spooktacular
2015-01-11 — BIG ENCHILADA 80: Friendly Rock ‘n’ Roll
2015-08-31 — BIG ENCHILADA 87: Songs for a Fading Summer
2015-10-21 — BIG ENCHILADA 89: Spooktacular 2015
2016-05-29 — BIG ENCHILADA 96: 96 Bottles of Tears on the Wall
2016-08-23 — BIG ENCHILADA 99: Honky Tonk Hellfire
2016-09-24 — BIG ENCHILADA 100: One Hundred Years of The Big Enchilada
2017-11-24 — BIG ENCHILADA 114: Fallout Fashions
2018-01-29 — BIG ENCHILADA 116: Barking Irons
2018-05-14 — BIG ENCHILADA 119: Music to Heal By 2
2018-08-29 — BIG ENCHILADA 122: Puppets in Trouble
2018-09-30 — BIG ENCHILADA 123: A Chile Reception
2018-10-14 — BIG ENCHILADA 124: 10th Anniversary Spooktacular
2018-11-27 — BIG ENCHILADA 125: True Cowboys
2018-12-29 — BIG ENCHILADA 126: COLD OUT HERE!
2019-01-29 — BIG ENCHILADA 127: A Podcast Lovely as a Tree
2019-02-25 — BIG ENCHILADA 128: DESTROY ALL ROBOTS!
2019-03-31 — BIG ENCHILADA 129: Hillbilly Bop
2019-04-23 — BIG ENCHILADA 130: Here’s Looking At You!
2019-05-29 — BIG ENCHILADA 131: But Seriously, Folks

Three habits show up immediately. The Halloween show is an institution: a Spooktacular in October 2014, another in October 2015, a tenth-anniversary one in October 2018. The country strain is real and unembarrassed, running from “Honky Tonk Hellfire” through “True Cowboys” to “Hillbilly Bop”. And the puns are regional. “A Chile Reception” only lands if you know which state spells it that way, and so, for that matter, does the name of the show.

The rest is a man amusing himself. “DESTROY ALL ROBOTS!” is shouted in capitals. “A Podcast Lovely as a Tree” mangles Joyce Kilmer for no reason at all. “But Seriously, Folks” is the last title we hold, which is a decent accident.

Steve Terrell

The host byline printed on these pages is Steve Terrell. That alone puts this show ahead of most of what we have documented on this domain, where the archive frequently does not record who was talking.

On the page for episode 100, “One Hundred Years of The Big Enchilada”, dated 24 September 2016, he writes about how the podcast began. By his account there he had already spent more than a decade producing late-night radio shows at KSFR in Santa Fe before the podcast existed, starting it around 2008 after he joined the GaragePunk Hideout community. We are paraphrasing his own words on that page and we have not gone looking for more. The Hideout was the same community the network itself grew out of, which is how ten years of Santa Fe overnight radio ended up on a garage punk roster.

That matters for reasons beyond biography. The network that carried this show said it wanted hosts who had done radio, not hobbyists discovering a microphone. Here is one, with ten years of overnight shifts behind him before the first episode. The 10th Anniversary Spooktacular landing in October 2018 lines up with a 2008 start, which is the only cross-check the archive gives us.

Where the audio sits

The original site never hosted the MP3s. Hosts uploaded episodes to the Internet Archive and the show pages linked out to them, which is why the audio outlived the site that pointed at it.

Fifteen of our twenty pages name such an item. The identifiers follow the show’s own name plus the episode number, in the shape of BigEnchilada119 or BigEnchilada123, with the capitalisation drifting between uploads — BIGENCHILADA129 exists alongside BigEnchilada80. Five of the twenty pages we hold name no item at all, and we make no claim about the roughly hundred and eleven episodes outside our twenty. We hold no audio, we host no audio, and we will not start.

No tracklists here

Our automated read of this show’s playlists failed. It returned a tally so thin that publishing it would be worse than publishing nothing, so we publish nothing: no most-played artists, no track counts, no representative playlists for The Big Enchilada. Other pages in this archive carry that data because the parse worked there. This one does not, and pretending otherwise would put invented numbers in front of you.

If you have playlists, screenshots or files from this show, the contact page is open, and so is our submissions page.

About this documentation

This page is reconstructed entirely from dated public captures of pages that no longer exist at their original address. This site is independently owned and is not affiliated with the original Radio Mutation network, its operators, its hosts, or the people who made this show. Nothing here is continuous with it. Corrections and takedown requests go through the contact page above, and who we are explains why the project exists.

Next: the full Lost Network index, how the network fits together, and two other shows where the record is thicker — The Mal Thursday Show and House of Wild Delights.