My Time At WMPG, Portland Maine. A Brief Recollection.




I arrived in Portland as a refugee from the Boston area in 1989, in search of greener worlds, better natural environments. Maine does have gorgeous coastlines, woods and mountain access. There are also several good community radio stations, including WERU in Blue Hill to the north (or Down East, as they say) and Portland's WMPG, the station of the University of Southern Maine. In early 1990 I approached WMPG about doing a show of experimental and "progressive" music and fairly quickly was given a show, I think an 11PM to 2AM slot, when the studios were still in the Student Union building out in Gorham.

My show followed The Dads, whose Dad's New Slacks was the most outlandish and experimental show at the time. We became pretty good friends, the Dads Townsend and Pajack and I (Bert wasn't available), and our shows sometimes bled into one anothers if I recall correctly. When my show morphed and moved to another time, we continued to collaborate. Michael Townsend was particularly encouraging of my approach to radio and we worked on numerous projects together in the 4 short years I lived in the area. Portland is lucky to have Michael there as an ongoing creative force and living history book. I particularly recall how much Michael contributed to the re-writing of the station bylaws and constitution (around 1991), when there was considerable friction growing between staff and volunteer programmers over how the place should be run.

I hosted a program called The Plagiarist for 2-3 years. I would play records for the first hour (a sub-show I called World Receiver) and then slide into sound collage for the 2nd hour. Usually I would create a backing tape of sample sound environments during the week and begin the collage using that, then mixing in found sources at the station: multiple looping CD players (AB repeat function) and recording the lot on the Otari reel deck used also for echo effects. After about a half hour I would usually flip the reel tape and play that first half-hour backwards into further mixing. I really enjoyed the show, felt generally inspired much of the time and had some great visitors on air, including Leo Loginov, the Russian pianist who I went to Moscow with later in 1992 and who was part of The Plagiarist Trio which performed at the New Music Across America Festival at Portland Performing Arts that same year. We made an LP of that concert and recordings from Russia but by now most of those records are lost, destroyed and otherwise dispersed. I hope WMPG has one. Jeff Plansker also visited via phone link and in person for some crazy nights of absurd radio antics. There is a 7" record we made called Louisiana Cookin that gives a picture of some of that, copies are still available! Phil Stewart, who commanded a show on Russian and Eastern European rock, was also involved with a lot of the edgier activities at WMPG. We made a radio coloring book as a fund raiser gift. Michael and Ron Welch (the Radio Poet, who now lives in Spain) began a series of shows focusing on the 4 elements, the first and perhaps only one we did being on AIR, where we ran an amplified fishing line out the window and across the street which truly amplified the sound of wind. Michael and I were invited up to Bowdoin College by Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky, then a student at Bowdoin) to perform electronic music with video to a small but friendly audience. There was another show or 2 in which we sampled Spanish absinthe prior to programming, there were jam sessions in the basement during lightning storms. There was a leaflet-publication we made called Panic Boredom which commented sarcastically on various management schemes we disagreed with. The station was a beautiful haven for fun, experimental activity and I hope it has stayed that way to some extent and does so forever. I packed my bags and went to Russia in October of 1992 for 2 months after which I moved to California.

(Photo found on a flicker page via Google search for WMPG and used without permission. I hope photographer doesn't mind...)

MY 3 YEARS
in Public Radio in Mendocino County



In 1999 I moved to the country, partly as a Y2Ker who foresaw unpleasant futures in city life. While the SF Bay Area is a very liveable urban environment, my sensitivity to pollution and traffic was high. Riding a bicycle in Berkeley began to feel suicidal with all the diesel fumes emitted by AC Transit buses. I moved north to Anderson Valley partly because I'd subscribed for a while to a crazy local paper: The Anderson Valley Advertiser, which familiarized me with the place. Meeting people in the area, making new friends, was not too difficult. I am a bit of a refugee who every few years moves on to find a new home; I've had difficulty settling down. The health food shop in Boonville, Boont Berry Farms, was a welcoming center of civilisation.

Because of my background in radio I was drawn into the small local public station and proposed to do a show there on antique and avant-garde music. The show went on the air pretty quickly and was first called The Worst Is Yet To Come, after an early Billy Jones Edison record about World War 1. Soon thereafter there was a mass quitting of several members of the station staff, including one person who was taking off to pursue a sex change in a less confined, small-townish environment. I began working at KZYX in March of 2001, as half of the Operations Director position and early morning NPR shifts on Thursday and Friday. My time at KZYX was at turns wonderful and miserable; I learned a lot about the technical aspects of radio being operated on a shoestring, and I quickly met almost everyone "of consequence" in the area and so was thrust into the middle of some long-standing arguments.

KZYX had been a central mouthpiece for EarthFirst! activists who tried to save the redwood groves in Northern California from rapacious timber companies throughout the 80's and 90's and continue today. Judi Bari did a show there for some time and several current environmental programmers were her friends. I met some very interesting people and befriended them. There is a type of person who moves to Mendocino, often a lover of nature who has some problems communicating with other humans; I know being one of those. Not surprisingly, the relative isolation lived by inhabitants of the county makes public radio a meeting place for all discussion. KZYX is a wonderful little radio station plagued by recurring problems that grow on the rocky, mountainous landscape there.

One of KZYX's great attributes is its daily playback of Democracy Now, a progressive news and current events show produced by Amy Goodman in NYC. This is singularly the most important work being done by the station, which accounts for democracy Now being the most pledged for show by far come fundraising time. Democracy Now has more recently gone from being simply an audiocast to a fully produced TV show as well, that is: there is live video to the radio show and this is carried by dishTV and other video outlets. Amy has visited Anderson Valley several times on book and fundraising tours, giving talks at the Mendocino County Fair Apple Hall and doing Democracy Now live from the KZYX studios during my first week with the station. We broadcast her talk live using a Codec Buddy, a device we often used to send an improved audio signal over a standard phone line (the box shifts the frequency of the spoken word to a higher frequency where phone lines carry less noise and then shifts it back on the reciving end). Democracy Now was normally downlinked from a live satellite feed from the Pacifica Network and recorded to MiniDisc for playback later that day, but we often had problems with capturing that recording and so would resort to asking for special re-feeds from KPFA using ISDN technology (which, like the Codec Buddy used phone lines to send audio programs but with much higher quality encoding techniques).

The job of Operations Director involved overseeing all of the programming coming into the station via satellite feeds, most or all of these originating with National Public radio or Pacifica. KZYX was interesting in its combination of NPR and Pacifica programming, as well as the many locally produced public affairs and music shows. We also ("we" because i shared the job with someone) did a lot of "air time", announcing between changes in programs, station identification etc. While none of these were particularly difficult tasks, they all took place in a social environment that became competitive, the hours stretched out longer as people were needed to fill in, help out, keep things going, and relationships got fraught with tension. The first 5 months of my being there coincided with great upheavals at Pacifica, in which democracy Now was bullied out of the WBAI studios and certain MOR factions (allied with the Clinton Administration at least nominally) tried to take control of the precious Pacifica stations and transmitters by coup. This climaxed with a lockout at KPFA in Berkeley and a large number of civil disoberdiance arrests I witnessed. There were months where Pacifica, held by imposter leadership, tried to pawn off archived Democracy Now programs on the satellite while we were getting direct ISDN feeds of Amy's new show produced at the firehouse in Chinatown NY. Eventually Pacifica was wrested fromthose hands and resumed its purpose, being a voice for the community against big money interests and being a voice for Peace. One remarkable aspect of KZYX's balance of NPR and Pacifica programming is that NPR listeners become slowly radicalized as they are exposed to the stories coming through Pacifica and some of the very good community generated programs. And then there are members of the KZYX community who constantly agitate for removing NPR entirely from the schedule, believeing the station should be community-based entirely. Some of these people were the most regularly abusive in the interactions with others. KZYX actually owes its existence to a Federal PTFP grant which established funds for new NPR stations in areas beyond major urban station reach.

The End of Amoeba As We Knew It.

I've lived in California for 15 years, beginning in Berkeley where I was introduced to music mega-stores Rasputin's and Amoeba Records. I spent a lot of time at both, being a vinyl junkie, leaning towards Amoeba due to the amazing storehouse of unusual records that would appear for sale there. They even have a section called "Unusually Experimental" which today still holds the oddball recordings I learned to ride a bike on. In Berkeley, the Amoeba shop was the one that would have rare FMP LPs for a while, a great jazz collection and what seemed like miles of used LPs. Amoeba was so successful at what they did, buying and selling in volumes that allowed them discount pricing, that they opened a second shop on Haight Street in San Francisco in the late 90's and another in Los Angeles in the early 00's. I recall selling some records at Amoeba in Berkeley back in the mid 90's and getting a great deal from the staff. By the time the 2 new stores opened things began to change; I guess that's normal for a small operation going big-time. The buying policy became much stricter. The rare LPs had always been taped shut into plastic poly-bags, but it seemed suddenly that each record had an entire roll of clear tape locking it shut and you could hear the guy or gal in charge of taping up records ripping away at the roll of tape, the noise competing with whatever music was on the PA system.

Jeff Plansker and I have made pilgrimages to the LA store on a regular basis on my visits south and since I moved to LA 2 years ago; it is like a trip to church, checking in at the holy shrine of recorded sound. For years you would almost always be surprised at the treasures you'd find. I can only begin to list what great records I found at Amoeba: like the Music In The World of Islam on Tangent Records, another copy of the great Ron Geesin LP "Right Through" that I'd had in the 80's but lent to the electronic music teacher at the Boston Museum School; I literally yelled "Yes!" when I found that about 2 years ago in the Recent Arrivals bin in the LA store. But recently our less frequent visits have supported the feeling that the Great days of Amoeba past are gone. We often leave the shop with nothing; there is just not the great turnover of records that there was back a few years. I suppose with eBay, sellers of vinyl have gotten savier about getting what they can for rare records. The whole market for recorded sound has changed so much in just a few years, with so many young persons just going online for MP3 copies and trading with friends.

While it's good to see the demise of the dinosaur record companies who gave recording artists small percentages of music sales, it contributes to a more specialized and precious world of collecting records. The death of Tower Records was a landmark of this trend, that people are just not buying enough CDs to keep the big retail chain stores in business. Amoeba seems to be going strong, and they have a good dvd/movie room that probably accounts for a growing amount of sales, as many people seem hyped about dvd and home theater (not to mention "gaming") these days. But sadly, Amoeba has begun to feel like the second coming of Tower. The used selection has diminished greatly and prices for rare-ish records are high. We've noticed that it seems there is a box set of anything by anyone who ever farted; everything musical has been commodified to such an extent that it is rendered inert and easily explained. There is so little mystery left in the discovery of unusual music. Now this could be partly an effect of growing older; we may have arrived at a point where looking for recorded music just doesn't provide a lot of discovery any more. We must look into our collections now and figure out what we have gathered, it may be something of a totality which describes the experience of our lives, finding music that we had to have which led to further discoveries. When you're discussing Horace Tapscott and Morton Feldman records I think there isn't that much further to go. The question then is How do I activate what I know, what I have, into an educational force, How can I share this?

So it may seem that an era of record stores has come to an end, both for me personally and in general, that I was just lucky enough to have my interest in recorded music coincide with a period of great richness in the music market. I can't say how much it is me and how much of it is the record market. I've lived my life very closely with records, not having to listen to music constantly but always seeking out new material --often for radio programs I hosted-- and then as an interested listener, maker of music myself and filmmaker who sees music and sound as integral to film experience, to open my own mind, in search of new experience. It is all being folded into the internet. But nothing approaches the clarity of expression found on well recorded and preserved LPs and CDs.

Amoeba is dead; long live Amoeba.