It’s one other vibrant, sunny and promising Thursday morning in Los Angeles in early October, however issues should not going properly for the morning crew on the general public radio station KCSN, referred to as the SoCal Sound.
Morning present hosts Nic Harcourt and Jet Raskin are seven days into the station’s eight-day “shortfall” fundraiser, named for the season and the funds the station is making an attempt to make up after its almost $250,000 grant from the Corp. for Public Broadcasting was canceled after the group was defunded by Congress in July.
This morning, Harcourt and Raskin are experiencing their very own shortfall. They’re behind on their aim for the primary two hours of the present, but they’re plowing forward, pleading with their listeners to contribute to the trigger, providing premiums akin to live performance tickets, vinyl data and a specifically designed long-sleeve hoodie T-shirt with the phrases “Protect Public Radio” written on a graphic of an acoustic guitar held in a clenched fist.
After the impassioned plea comes extra music. David Bowie’s “Nite Flights,” a Walker Brothers music featured on the late legend’s 1993 album “Black Tie White Noise,” blares from the audio system. It’s not the album model, however relatively the “Mood Swings Remix” launched in 2010. It’s adopted by “Ico,” a brand new music from upstart Canadian indie act Jo Handed’s forthcoming album, that’s been designated because the present’s “Fresh Squeezed Track of the Day.” You’re not more likely to hear the 2 songs back-to-back anyplace, particularly on the radio, however that’s the attraction of the SoCal Sound. The station has a playlist, nevertheless it permits its DJs so as to add their very own picks to the combination, making it a listening expertise on the radio dial.
The on-air mic within the station at 88.5 FM SoCal Sound.
(Matt Blake)
A couple of hours later, Harcourt and Raskin are respiratory simpler because the pledges begin to roll in they usually’re almost again on monitor. For Harcourt, the highs and lows of a fundraising marketing campaign are nothing new. He estimates he’s achieved greater than 60 of them in the event you mix his years at KCSN and KCRW, the town’s best-known public radio station which first launched the British-born DJ to Los Angeles listeners in 1998.
“The old-school way of doing it was two fund drives a year, a spring and a fall, but in recent years, public radio stations have found that that’s not enough, so you’ll find mini drives and pop-up drives or day here or day there,” Harcourt mentioned in a current cellphone interview. (The station additionally receives help from numerous native sponsors and underwriters together with My Valley Move, the Pantages, the Hollywood Bowl and others.) Except for the morning drive present, Harcourt can also be heard weeknights from 6 to 7 p.m.
He received his begin in radio at WDST, a small industrial station in Woodstock, N.Y., after a good friend steered he convey his information and assortment of data by artists from Australia, the place he spent his mid-20s, to the station for a specialty present. Harcourt received the gig and ultimately turned the morning host and program director.
At KCRW, he turned synonymous with breaking new artists because the station’s music director and host of “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” and people artists haven’t forgotten. At their gig this summer season on the Hollywood Bowl, French band Air thanked Harcourt from the stage, years after he gave them their huge break in America.
Raskin, his co-host since March 2020, is a relative beginner. An artwork historical past main on the Faculty of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, she switched her focus to broadcasting after an teacher mentioned her desires of turning into the top curator on the Getty Museum had been unrealistic. She recalled listening to KCSN in her automobile, modified her main to broadcasting and transferred to California State College, Northridge, the place the SoCal Sound has its studios. Initially, she was working in promotions till she was supplied an in a single day shift. “I was like, ‘Yes. You don’t have to ask me twice. Of course I want a shift,’” she recalled. That led to weekends and finally the morning present. When common supervisor Patrick Osburn steered that Harcourt add a co-host, he requested Raksin. She additionally flies solo from 6 to 7 a.m. weekdays on “Jet Into Work.”
The station’s different common workers is a mixture of radio veterans, with most refugees from industrial radio who’re thrilled to go away that world for a public radio station the place they’ve extra freedom. Music director and noon host Julie Slater’s resume features a prolonged stint at WXRK (Ok-Rock) New York, the place she adopted Howard Stern. Program director Marc Kaczor, who received the nickname Mookie from late rock ’n’ roll madman Mojo Nixon after they each labored at XTRA (91X) San Diego, is on from 2 to 4 p.m.
Maybe the station’s most well-known character, Matt Pinfield is a former MTV VJ and one-time host of the favored various music present “120 Minutes.” He’s on from 4 to six p.m. and is joyful to be again on the air. In January, he suffered a life-threatening stroke and caught MRSA pneumonia whereas recovering within the hospital.
SoCal Sound program director Marc Kaczor, left, and DJ/MTV legend Matt Pinfield.
(Picture from SoCal Sound)
“I’ve gotten a lot of my abilities back,” mentioned Pinfield, who returned to the air in June. “Certainly, I’m a lot further along than they ever expected me to be. They told both my daughters that I was never going to walk or talk again and probably need 24-hour care.”
The station additionally has a number of specialty exhibits, together with Byron the Curator’s “Bilingual Sounds,” heard weekdays from 9 to 11 p.m., “L.A. Buzz Bands” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Times,” heard Sunday and Wednesday nights, respectively, hosted by former L.A. Occasions columnist Kevin Bronson and longtime pop music critic Robert Hilburn. Whereas the station has 12 paid staff, the weekend workers is essentially made up of volunteers.
The SoCal Sound’s persevering with battle to outlive comes at a time when all radio stations are struggling to retain their audiences amid competitors for music streaming providers, podcasts and social media apps like TikTok. “It’s a big media market and we’re trying to find our place within it with big behemoths and heritage brands,” mentioned Kaczor. “We always lean into the localism and the grassroots of it all and now we’re leaning into that even more.”
Except for providing listeners a spot to listen to a curated combine of latest, native and older artists, Osburn, who turned common supervisor of the station in 2019 after working in gross sales for a number of years at industrial stations in San Diego, factors out the SoCal Sound performs an important function to a particular phase of the music business.
L.A. band La Lom performs at SoCal Sound’s stay efficiency studio.
(Picture from SoCal Sound)
“The labels and the music industry love this format, and they love this radio station because we’re Triple A and we’re in Los Angeles,” he defined. “The industry needs us to survive and be there to break new artists and to break new music by existing artists,” he added. “They really don’t want to see us go away.”
Paul Janeway, frontman of St. Paul & the Damaged Bones, can testify to that. The veteran neo-soul band lately launched their sixth studio album, a self-titled effort on their very own impartial label, Oasis Pizza. The lead single from the album, “Sushi and Coca-Cola” lately topped the station’s weekly playlist, which is an enormous enhance for a band that loved a next-big-thing buzz a decade in the past after they performed Coachella and appeared on many of the community late-night TV exhibits.
“For us, it’s been a long journey, but we’ve always kind of lived in that world of KCSN and the public radio sphere,” Janeway mentioned. “We’re not Top 40 artists. It’s a platform and a place for us to live. We have no other place to go.”
As for the SoCal Sound, the station fell a bit wanting its aim to cowl the quantity of the grant cash that was rescinded, Kaczor mentioned. “Although we didn’t hit our goal, we consider the last drive to be a success. We actually had fun doing it,” he added. “We’ll be doing our best to raise even more money moving forward. We may have to get creative with it.”
