Because The KCSBeat is the Santa Barbara Independent’s column on all things KCSB, it can’t ignore Dave from the Grave, the station’s most enthusiastic fan. This week, Colin Marshall begins his investigation of the man, the myth, the listener:
To judge by the degree of enthusiasm that comes across on the phone, Dave is a man of strong opinions when it comes to music and broadcast media. Yet he never seems to vent the flip side of this: the negative opinions that he surely must have of about at least some of what he hears on KCSB. This positivity has been the salvation of many a young programmer, the flagging of whose enthusiasm is to be expected after a few weeks of wee-hours broadcasting. Dave’s calls, bearing his own unique brand of inspiration and guidance, come as a badly needed indicator of the one thing of which every KCSBer wants to be assured: Somebody’s listening.
But for all the kind helpfulness of his KCSB boosterism, a question remains: Who is this guy? How did he come to enjoy so many vastly different genres of music enough to call in and congratulate the deejays playing them? How does he manage to listen around the clock, expressing support for programs at dawn, midnight, and noon alike? Does he ever sleep? A certain mystique has grown around Dave from the Grave, fed by rumor, speculation, and anecdote circulating among current and former staff.
You can read all of part one here.
In the newest edition of The KCSBeat, Colin Marshall’s Santa Barbara Independent column on the whos, whats and whys of KCSB, the highly-connected, SB-to-the-core DJ Darla Bea Smith and her show Rock It Properly get the profile treatment:
Smith’s penchant for rock knowledge pays off in her ability to craft every installment of Rock it Properly around a theme. Past shows have included “Wham, Bam, Thank You Glam” (a tribute to glam rock), “We Gotcha Covered” (nothing but covers) and “I See London, I See France” (I’m not sure, but it certainly sounds intriguing). Even when she had to drag herself into the studio and somehow remain awake for the 3-6 a.m. graveyard shift on her debut last summer, she still managed to adhere to Rock It Properly’s organizing principles.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but ask Smith, a KCSB listener since 1994, why it took her so many years to join the station. “I’m a Virgo,” she explained, “a perfectionist.” It seems the very perfectionism that drives her to produce such a prepared, information-rich program also prevented her from doing so for quite some time. “When I was at UCSB, I was just focused on graduating,” she said, “and when I do something, I want to really do it.” And do it she certainly has, with all of the concentration the big-time FM DJs of old used to put into their broadcasts. As guest Spencer Barnitz of Santa Barbara “Latin big-band spy movie” band Spencer the Gardener remarked, “Darla, your show is how radio can’t be anymore.”
Get the full story on Smith, her program and SB’s surprising musical output here.
This week in The KCSBeat, Colin Marshall’s Santa Barbara Independent column on the multifaceted goings-on of KCSB, DJ Ray Ramos of Friday night’s legendary Jammin’ a Little Old School is profiled:
Collecting nonstop since high school, Ramos has amassed a collection of over 2,000 vinyl albums, which he burns to CDs to play on his show. The night I sat in, he brought what I thought were two large binders of discs, but later, Reynoso showed up packing an absolutely gigantic case containing a seemingly endless variety of all the artists I know and love and many others besides. From this impressive selection — one that represented only a fraction of his entire collection — Ramos spun a wealth of material from the Chi-Lites, Cashmere, Slapback, Con Funk Shun, Slave, the Crown Heights Affair, and more.
Surprisingly, after almost 35 years, Ramos still regularly unearths old school jams hitherto unknown to him. Old school, it seems, is like some sort of magical natural resource: Despite being produced for only a relatively brief period, its well never runs dry. Ramos still makes his regular trips down to L.A., checking in with his usual record shops and contacts, always finding something new. But at his level, old school collecting can be a pricey, competitive game. “I have this dude in L.A. who hooks me up with the good stuff,” he said, “but I don’t tell anyone about him.”
Read all about Ramos, his crew and his music here.
In the latest KCSBeat, the Santa Barbara Independent’s weekly spotlight on all facets of this station, Colin Marshall continues profiling KCSB people with a visit to The Rick Show, “Captain” Rick Fenz’s Saturday-morning showcase of musical variety:
Many DJs choose to create genre-based programs because of a singular musical passion that overwhelms all others — or, less romantically, because they only like one kind of music. Not so for Fenz, whose youth in central New Jersey placed him within signal range of not only Manhattan’s numerous cutting-edge radio stations, but also of a cluster of experimental college broadcasters. Many of these formative years happened to occur in the 1960s, which Fenz described as “a time when mainstream pop and rock had a wide range of influences, incorporating jazz, blues, and R&B, integrating all of that before the commercial aspects of the industry started to pigeonhole everything.”
The unpredictable sets spun by WNEW’s now-legendary Jonathan Schwartz opened the young Fenz’s ears to the possibilities of radio as a medium of expression. “I heard him play one set that included both Frank Sinatra and Johnny Winter. And he made it work! I couldn’t believe how great it was listening to those two side-by-side.” Later, the advent of consumer random-access digital media like the compact disc helped him hone his playlist-crafting abilities at home. “I loved it when those six-disc players came out,” he said. “I’d drop a few albums in, set it to random and just listen to what came out. But it was sometimes a little disconcerting! It’s not always easy to make things flow.”
You can read all about Fenz and his program here.
This week in The KCSBeat, Colin Marshall examines how KCSB puts enough technology in the hands of its programmers to enable the most creative uses of radio possible, and how the station intends to encourage more creativity still:
The station’s live transmissions of the Dalai Lama’s April 2009 UCSB lectures, for instance, were pulled off with little more than a laptop, an inexpensive mixer, and an Internet connection. Smart use of the Internet has enabled KCSB to perform beyond its ostensible means in other ways as well, taking full advantage of the infrastructure offered by its university location. The free voice over internet protocol (VOIP) application Skype, for instance, allows No Alibis producer Elizabeth Robinson to near-seamlessly co-host with her associate in Paris. And with the aid of a lowly $800 desktop computer, KCSB streams live around the clock to the entire world.
“Radio, in general, is not an expensive medium,” said [Chief Engineer Bryan] Brown. “What you need to transmit radio nowadays, you probably have in your house! Whereas radio station technology, KCSB’s included, used to be quite complicated and unintuitive to the outsider, it’s now almost the same audio and computer equipment to which new programmers will have already grown accustomed. “It used to be so in-your-face,” Brown remembered, “with all that tape-splicing, carts, and vinyl. Now the goal is to make the technology practically invisible.”
You can read the whole thing here.
The profiles of KCSB people in the Santa Barbara Independent’s KCSBeat column continue with a glimpse into the institution that is Leo Schumaker’s Bluesland:
To log more than 1300 on-air hours spinning the blues requires total devotion to the form, and Schumaker’s sprouted early. As an eight year old growing up in Oxnard, he spent a day shining shoes with a cousin and needed something to buy with his earnings. Visiting the local Fedco, he browsed the record bins and happened upon Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s Gangster of Love. The chance he took on that 12-cent 45-rpm single paid off. “From that point on,” as Schumaker tells it, “it was the blues for me.”
Schumaker’s relationship with KCSB began when he became a fan of Matt Cohen’s program Jumpin’ the Blues. He called in regularly to talk to Cohen about the blues. “I bugged him,” Schumaker admitted, “and eventually he just said, ‘Quit calling me and get your own show!’” Beginning Bluesland in the days when the studio featured both a mixing board with big, old-style circular knobs and a reel-to-reel machine on the wall, he prepared for his very first 4 a.m. broadcast by hanging a framed picture of his blues hero Muddy Waters on the wall and beginning with a dedication: “This is for you, Muddy.”
Read more here.
New media is all the hype these days with their hi-definition cameras and other miscellaneous junk, but whatever happened to good ‘ol radio? We’re still alive and thriving! Radio is still one of the most important broadcast mediums today—and there’s no end in sight. Be part telecommunication history by becoming a part of KCSB! We are having our Winter Orientation meeting for prospective programmers, newscasters, sportscasters, deejays, and enthusiastic volunteers on Wednesday January 6, 2010 at 6pm in CHEM 1179! Come on down if you want to be part of our totally cool, volunteer-run, non-commercial community radio station! No previous experience necessary—we’ll teach you everything you need to know to be successful in radio broadcasting! Hope to see you all there!
“A Brief History of KCSB”, the opening miniseries of the Santa Barbara Independent’s KCSB-themed column “The KCSBeat“, arrives in the present day with a final chapter on the 2000s:
The KCSB of the 2000s is the KCSB we know today: varied, experimental, prone to change things up every few months, a container of multitudes.
2001 saw the station take advantage of opportunities afforded by the internet, overhauling its theretofore fairly static web site and upgrading its web servers to offer listeners worldwide the ability to tune in via an online stream. This meant that former KCSBers could keep up with the station even if they’d long since fled Santa Barbara. This would have prepared the far-flung attendees of KCSB’s 40th anniversary reunion, held in 2002 in Oak Park, or its 45th in 2007. You wouldn’t think DJs of decades past would necessarily rush back over great distances to their old college station and reminisce, but then, KCSB has that effect on people.
Read the column here, or the entire history here.
In a recent edition of The KCSBeat, the Santa Barbara Independent column covering all things KCSB, Colin Marshall returns to the 1990s, a time when KCSB’s various musical and ideological blocs made peace and created the more open, all-accommodating sensibility the station has today after finding themselves united in a series of common causes: Continue reading ‘The Transformative 1990s Recounted in a Recent KCSBeat’
In part five of the getting-ever-less brief history of KCSB chronicled in the Santa Barbara Independent’s KCSBeat column, Colin Marshall examines the nature of freeform radio itself and what it has to do with a certain nationally-known conservative pundit’s brief time on KCSB’s schedule:
Freeform, at least theoretically, allows not just for the airing of any musical perspective—and longtime KCSB fans will have heard most of them—but all perspectives personal, philosophical, religious, and political as well. My listening reveals that most freeform stations tend to register just the teensiest bit to the left on the U.S. political spectrum. But even as a political moderate, I’ve always felt at home at KCSB, and I wouldn’t be shocked to tune in to it and hear someone expressing a non-left perspective.
Still, many are startled upon learning that, in the late 1980s, KCSB’s staff roster included a certain Sean Hannity, widely known today as the host of national radio’s The Sean Hannity Show, Fox News’s Hannity and Hannity’s America as well as the author of books like Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism. Many statements can be made about the man’s political inclination, but being anywhere the near the left side of the U.S. political spectrum is most definitely not one of them.
Read the whole thing here.
