Rising out of the thick scratchiness
of an ancient 78-r.p.m. record, the sound of a stringed instrument travels
through the darkened bar, vaguely bluesy, yet with a distinct Middle Eastern
tonality. A rich male voice joins in, singing something garbled and foreign.
In a cramped booth in the back, the disk jockey, a manic Allen Ginsberg
look-alike, stands behind a pair of turntables and a stack of machinery,
furiously pulling records and CD's, squinting to read the labels. "This
is Greek hashish music," he yells at me. "In the late 20's, they'd go to
these clubs and take these drugs and then they'd go elsewhere and sing
about it all night. There are places like this still in Queens. I went
to a nightclub once and interviewed this 87-year-old musician for two hours,
and at the end of the interview he asked me where he could score! It's
unbelievable." He grins and turns up the music.
We're at Barmacy, a hipster hangout located in a defunct East Village
drugstore. The D.J. is Citizen Kafka, a 51-year-old former gem prospector
and sometime antique dealer. He is also a regular on WFMU, the semilegendary
New Jersey FM radio station staffed by a cadre of idiosyncratic obsessives,
each possessing extraordinary record collections, encyclopedic knowledge
of cultural arcana and a talent for radio as an expressive medium. Every
Monday night, Barmacy spotlights a member of the listener-supported station's
all-volunteer D.J. staff; tonight is Kafka's turn.
Humming to himself, he cues up his selections, following the Greek tune
with a recording of music from the carousel in Brooklyn's Prospect Park
(a Wurlitzer band organ, he says, offhandedly adding that he recorded it
himself); "I Never Will Forget," a rhythm-and-blues waltz by Shirley Ellis;
and a cracked piece of country harmony by the Delmore Brothers. Then he
leans over to me and announces, "Now it's time to get crazy -- this
is an Inuit song, Eskimos singing into each other's mouths!"
Needless to say, no one is dancing. Kafka's selections do, however,
elicit the extremes of response frequently provoked by WFMU disk jockeys.
Ensconced in a nearby booth are two very stylishly dressed young women,
deep in conversation. As the song changes, one of them walks over to the
stage. "Excuse me," she says. "I have no idea what you've been playing,
but whatever it is, it's just great!" Kafka blushes a little bit and stammers
a response. "No, really," the woman says, gesturing to her table. "I'm
really enjoying it. So, if you put on anything that's kind of long, and
want to come over, we'd love to talk to you." Minutes later, a cocky
postcollegiate
type swaggers up and requests "Emotional Rescue" by the Rolling Stones.
Jaime Wolf's most recent article for the magazine,
about Hollywood script doctoring, appeared last August.
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Clearly, then, the concept behind WFMU remains elusive -- perhaps as
elusive as the dinky 1,250-watt signal emanating from the station's
transmitter
on the Watchung ridge in West Orange. In much of New York City, those who
want to listen in usually need first to attach an FM antenna to their
receivers
and then perform microsurgical feng shui adjustments just to achieve
half-decent
mono reception at 91.1. By the station's best estimates, it draws about
300,000 listeners in a given month. That's a figure that's grown a bit
in recent years, but a tiny blip on the radar compared with the 1.2 million
who listen to Howard Stern in a given week on K-Rock.
But the interesting thing about WFMU isn't so much how many people are
listening as who they are. A self-sustaining, ad-free independent in an
age of radio corporatization, it's a station whose name has become like
a secret handshake among a certain tastemaking cognoscenti. Lou Reed, Matt
Groening, Jim Jarmusch and Eric Bogosian are avowed fans. The critically
lauded bands Stereolab and Yo La Tengo have headlined fund-raising concerts
for the station. At FMU's semiannual fund-raising record fairs, Thurston
Moore of Sonic Youth regularly mans a table. The founder of Matador Records,
Gerard Cosloy, and the Warner Brothers Records senior vice president and
director of A&R, Joe McEwen, have done D.J. stints on the station.
Many of New York's most prominent pop-music critics are regular listeners
-- perhaps one reason the station has four times been named the best in
the nation by Rolling Stone. "You'll see people in parts of the country
far from a metropolitan area with an FMU bumper sticker," explains Byron
Coley, a writer whose influential 80's zine, Forced Exposure, established
him as an important arbiter of rock credibility, "and you'll think, They're
O.K."
A tongue-in-cheek program-guide description for Doug Schulkind's
Friday-morning
show boasts, "The finest in Micronesian doo-wop, Appalachian mambo, Turkish
mariachi, pygmy yodeling of Baltimore, Portuguese juju, Cajun gamelan,
tuba choirs from Mozambique, Inuit marching bands, Filipino free jazz,
Egyptian Kabuki theater and throat singers of the Lower East Side."
At a WFMU night at Barmacy in New York's East Village,
revelers enjoyed the station's eclectic, genre-busting mix of music and
spoken-word recordings.
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The truth may be even stranger than this Borgesian inventory. WFMU is
a place where the Singing Dogs are just as important as Elvis; a place
where you will, in fact, hear Elvis, but in close proximity to ritual
disinterment
music from Sumatra, the soundtrack from "Mothra," a theremin band called
the Lothars and the intergalactic jazz improvisations of the Sun Ra
Arkestra.
It's also a station where specialty programming can mean the scholarly
treatment of obscure rockabilly records, interviews with Nobel Prize-winning
scientists and mathematicians, or the recorded lectures of the Zen
popularizer
Alan Watts.
What holds all of this together is taste. Although FMU's individual
D.J.'s display the broadest possible range of preferences and predilections,
a coherent sensibility has nonetheless evolved out of their biases, expertise
and prescient discoveries -- a sensibility that has put WFMU at or near
ground zero in defining the late-1990's hipster esthetic.
In indie-rock circles, there's an old saying that hardly anyone bought
the records of the Velvet Underground when they were originally released
-- but that everyone who did went out and started a band. In the same way
WFMU has come to wield an influence far out of proportion to its mere
broadcasting
power.
The process by which popular taste evolves is complicated and often
mysterious -- sometimes certain things just seem to be in the air, and
no one can quite say why. But in fact there are identifiable authorities
-- people, publications, nightclubs, radio stations -- capable of pushing
a look, sound or idea to steadily larger audiences. "People who start trends
are usually charming and guileless," explains Geoffrey Weiss, a shaggy,
hyperarticulate vice president of A&R at Warner Brothers Records in
Los Angeles who has an unusually comprehensive grasp of the process. "And
there really aren't that many people, but it only takes one or two in every
town."
Within the music business, forward-looking record- company executives
acknowledge a small handful of stations -- among them KCRW in Los Angeles,
KJHK in Lawrence, Kan., and KCMU in Seattle -- that regularly alert them
to fresh sounds. According to Weiss, WFMU is the most important of the
bunch, not only because of its taste, but also because of its location:
shouting distance from New York City's crucial nexus of fashion, advertising
and media trendsetters with the ability to spread their sensibility out
to the world at large.
For example, back in the late 80's, the collector underground rediscovered
the lushly arranged "exotic" lounge music of the 50's and 60's -- a genre
dubbed "space-age bachelor-pad music" by a Los Angeles-based artist and
record collector named Byron Werner. One member of that underground was
the FMU D.J. Irwin Chusid, who became particularly enamored of the
out-of-print
recordings of the Mexican-born bandleader Juan Garcia Esquivel. A self-taught
pianist and arranger, Esquivel experimented with extreme stereo imaging
and layers of bizarre sound effects on top of his big-band charts, with
choruses gently singing "Zu-Zu-Zu" or brassy passages punctuated with an
energetic "Pow! Pow! Pow!"
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Ken Freedman has steered WFMU, whose survival depends
entirely on its listeners' support, through a number of financial crises
without compromising its unique vision.
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This music quickly caught on with the station's other D.J.'s. By 1993
Chusid was able to produce an Esquivel anthology CD for the indie label
Bar/None. It became a surprise hit, playing a prominent role in the
mainstream
emergence of the lounge phenomenon. It and a sequel disk have sold about
a hundred thousand copies. Fox Searchlight is now developing a film about
Esquivel's life for the actor John Leguizamo. "FMU is ground zero," enthuses
Glenn Morrow, the vice president of Bar/None. "When Irwin came to me, I
had never heard Esquivel. But that put us right there at the beginning
of the whole lounge phenomenon."
Chusid also played a central role in the renaissance of Raymond Scott,
another wacky, unclassifiable composer and bandleader, whose music appeared
in Warners Brothers cartoons of the 1940's and 50's. After several decades
in oblivion, his music has now been re-released on compact disk, used in
contemporary cartoons like "The Simpsons," "Ren and Stimpy" and "Animaniacs,"
sampled by alternative rockers like Soul Coughing and re-recorded by the
jazz clarinetist Don Byron and the Kronos Quartet.
Over the last few years, disk jockeys like Jeffrey Cobb and Gaylord
Fields began playing a lot of French rock and roll from the 60's on their
shows, helping to create a new audience for period icons like Serge
Gainsbourg
and Françoise Hardy. Demand for this vintage material was met with
a spate of domestic reissues, which opened the door for contemporary French
bands (who are also played on FMU) like Autour de Lucie and Air; the latter's
1998 debut made a number of critics' top-10 lists for the year.
WFMU excels at exactly this sort of cultural Dumpster-diving, but the
station has helped break contemporary artists as well. After Ken Freedman's
discovery in the early 90's of the import records of a Japanese band called
Pizzicato Five, their popularity with listeners -- and the station's other
D.J.'s -- led to the band being signed by Matador for distribution in the
United States. The resulting buzz helped Cibo Matto, a Manhattan-based
Japanese girl duo (who had also become FMU favorites), land a major-label
deal with Warner Brothers. Already endorsed by certified hipster-tastemakers
like John Zorn, the Beastie Boys and Sean Lennon, the group's second disk,
which will be released in early June, is generating talk of potential
breakout
success.
The collision and blending of musical styles high and low, from around
the world and spanning the history of sound recording, has been the
cornerstone
of WFMU's philosophy since 1968, when, as the campus station of Upsala
College in East Orange, N.J., it went free-form. At that time, coincident
with the rise of FM radio and the heyday of album rock, free-form was
enjoying
a brief commercial vogue on stations like KSAN in San Francisco and WNEW-FM
in New York. In that context, the concept rarely got beyond long-winded
acid-rock jams and associated period cliches, and the bigger stations
retreated
to more strictly predetermined formats.
Over the years, FMU managed to hew closer to its ideal, but it is only
comparatively recently that the station -- even while facing extinction
-- really has come into its own. By all accounts, the genius domus
responsible
for the modern WFMU phenomenon is Ken Freedman, the station manager, who
prefers to bill himself as the "Elder Scapegoat." A thin, reserved
40-year-old
with a face reminiscent of the young Robert De Niro, Freedman arrived in
1983 from WCBN, a free-form station in Ann Arbor.
A 1989 challenge to the station's license (on technical grounds, from
other stations looking to expand their broadcast reach) meant Freedman
had to guide FMU through a maze of legal and Federal Communications
Commission
proceedings. In 1992, Freedman organized and incorporated a nonprofit
organization
called Auricle Communications and bought the station two years later --
ensuring the station's survival even when Upsala College went bankrupt
the following year. It was a period of nonstop stress and financial
brinkmanship,
during which most of Freedman's hair went gray.
An exemplary free-form disk jockey, Freedman turned out to have an
impressive
business vision as well, using the adversity that FMU faced to raise the
station's public profile and establish it as a distinct alternative-culture
brand. Stepping up fund-raising activities, he established Lowest Common
Denominator, a program guide in the form of a zine, filled with articles,
essays and cartoons, and inaugurated the station's popular record fairs.
Under his watch, the station's annual donations rose from less than $50,000
to nearly $750,000.
And its broadcast reach has spread. In 1996, Auricle bought the license
to WXHD, an FM frequency, in Mt. Hope, N.Y., from which the FMU signal
is now simultaneously transmitted to listeners in New York's Hudson Valley,
western and northern New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania. The following
year, FMU, under an arrangement with the Dallas-based company Broadcast.com,
began broadcasting in real time over the World Wide Web at www.wfmu.org.
Upsala's closing also meant the station had to secure a new home, so
Freedman started the special "House of Tomorrow" fund-raising drive. This
past summer, FMU moved into a five-story building on the edge of Jersey
City's financial district, purchased and renovated entirely from listener
donations. Steps away from the local PATH train, the station is now far
more accessible to its staffers, and Freedman hopes that this will increase
volunteer participation.
What he didn't change was the station's bold musical programming and
its vision of community-based radio. WFMU is still a tiny, shoestring
operation,
run by four full-time employees on an annual operating budget of
approximately
$500,000, none of which comes from advertising, underwriting or Corporation
for Public Broadcasting grants. Some of the disk jockeys have been on the
air at college or other stations. But many were simply savvy longtime FMU
listeners who heard the call and began volunteering -- stuffing envelopes,
cleaning up or helping with the record fairs before auditioning for one
of the coveted three-hour weekly slots.
Monica Lynch, a soft-spoken woman who does fill-in and overnight shifts,
began volunteering in 1997 after arranging a sabbatical from her position
as president of Tommy Boy Records. After 16 years at the label, she was
burned out by the music business's overwhelming commercial imperative,
as well as its constant extramusical annoyances. But working at WFMU, Lynch
says, has helped her reconnect to her original passion. When she talks
about her fellow D.J.'s, she quickly falls into a wonderstruck tone,
describing
their knowledge as "Talmudic." Being at the station, she says, is "like
running away and joining the circus."
'Ordinarily,
the idea of playing something that makes you turn off the station is like
cancer,' says WFMU's station manager. 'We encourage
it.' |
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It's the kind of feeling that makes the station's listeners so fanatically
loyal -- and that attachment, in turn, only encourages more fearless
programming.
"Ordinarily, the idea of playing something that makes you turn off the
station is like cancer. We encourage it," explains Freedman. "Because we
know they'll come back." In fact, while much commercial radio remains bland
and predictable, WFMU may end up as a kind of role model for at least a
portion of the FM band: a pending F.C.C. ruling may allow the establishment
of local low-powered radio stations of up to 1,000 watts with a nine-mile
radius, opening up the dial to additional maverick mini-FMU's.
Certainly the spirit of outsider exuberance is in the air at the House
of Tomorrow. A recent routine staff meeting is followed by the station's
equivalent of a jazz musicians' cutting contest, as Freedman, the "Saturday
Night Toe Jamz" host Kenny G. and Citizen Kafka gather around the library's
turntable. Kenny G.'s first choice has the voice of the young Marie Osmond
issuing from the speakers, reciting a Dada poem by Hugo Ball.
"I can match that," says Citizen Kafka, who is co-producer of "The Secret
Museum of the Air," a weekly radio show devoted to ethnic music recorded
before 1948. He brandishes a disk he has pressed -- or "burned" -- himself;
compiled from different sources, its label reads "Americana Vox Populi."
The dissonant sounds of a poorly strummed guitar fill the air. It is
something called "Fishin' Wire Eddy," a strange homemade doo-wop tune,
with a female chorus crooning the refrain "Eddie, my love" while a man's
voice brays: "You never write! You've changed! From most likely to succeed
to poems against Presidents! From honor camper to orgone biker! Ya call
yourself baroooooook! I don't like you anymore." Kafka beams as the others
stand in awe.
Ken Freedman puts a seven-inch record called "Spin the Bottle" on the
turntable. It sounds equally weird at 33 and 45 r.p.m. "We don't know what
the right speed is," he says quizzically. Kafka is not impressed. "I have
lots of records like this," he says.
"Then burn us some CD's!" Kenny G. tells him.
"Ha! That's too easy!" laughs Kafka. "I have guys screaming about the
moon. Listen to this: this woman walks into a studio where you cut your
own songs. Says, 'I'm a singer.' The guy who runs the studio says, 'Who
do you sing with?' 'The Beatles,' she says, with a straight face. 'Which
record?' 'All of them."'
He hits play, and his colleagues stand around him in eager anticipation,
looking forward to sharing these finds with everyone else on their particular
wavelength.
