I don’t really have time to repost all my articles on this blog. But isn’t that obvious? Just read CityBeat, ‘kay? Thanks! 

If this year’s North Park Music Thing is notable for anything, it’s sheer ambition. Just look at the numbers: 153 bands, musicians and DJs; 15 venues; two nights.

Now in its third year, the festival (organized by the San Diego Music Foundation, whose president is CityBeat publisher Kevin Hellman) is the biggest local music showcase of the year, featuring two days of seminars with music-industry movers and shakers and two nights of music in bars in North Park, South Park and Normal Heights, featuring small acts, local favorites and a handful of touring bands mostly from California.

But who’s worth seeing? I’ve come up with an epic itinerary to get you through the weekend:

Friday

8 p.m.: This one’s a toss-up. Brother duo Writer (at U-31) makes unique, roughly hewn indie rock. Neon Cough (at The Office) offer up jangly pop with saccharine melodies. Street of Little Girls (at Whistle Stop) play epic gypsy-rock with biting lyrics and sugary-sweet vocals.

9 p.m.: If you’ve seen Jamuel Saxon (Bar Pink) more than once, you know that Keith Milgaten’s solo project is never the same twice. Whether he’s manning a laptop as guys covered with white sheets drum ominously on floor toms or he’s playing keyboards with a full band, expect a fevered brand of pop gold with hypnotic synths, Auto-Tuned vocals and dance-y beats.

10 p.m.: One of the best jazz singers in the city, if not the best, Miss Erika Davies (Claire de Lune) has a magnificent, mature voice that flutters fragilely, soars confidently and bends smoothly across registers, augmented with her ukulele and Jon Garner’s lithe guitar. It’s enough to make you wonder why she’d bother playing a local-music showcase when she could be touring Europe.

11 p.m.–midnight: Kadan Club has a hip-hop showcase with plenty of quality MCs, among them the dynamic duo Parker and the Numberman (9:20 p.m.) and the freaky Lady Xplicit (10:40 p.m.). But the highlight is Deep Rooted (11:40 p.m.), local hip-hop mainstays who serve up inspired, cutting rhymes. There’s also an MC battle kicking off at midnight.

12:35 a.m.: Known as much for their sharp suits as their spirited take on folk, gospel and Americana, the gentlemen of The Silent Comedy (U-31) seem to come straight from an older, weirder America. Their latest album, Common Faults, won a San Diego Music Awards nomination. But their live show is another story—one CityBeat writer compared it to a Pentecostal tent revival.

Other highlights: Tape Deck Mountain (U-31, 8:45), Jhameel (The Office, 8:45), Lights On (Whistle Stop, 9:50), Sister Crayon (AC Lounge, 10). John Meeks (Lestat’s, midnight)

Saturday

4 p.m.: Stop by Tin Can Ale House (1863 Fifth Ave. in Bankers Hill) for a free pre-party with performances by Chairs Missing and Vegetarian Werewolf, two great new local acts. Chairs Missing plays radiant acoustic indie rock, while Vegetarian Werewolf dissects the universe with a keyboard and a boom box.

8 p.m.: Make sure you catch up-and-coming indie rockers D/Wolves (Soda Bar). Lead songwriter Joel Williams happens to be the little brother of the dude from Wavves, but don’t expect irreverent lo-fi from these accomplished young musicians. Their melodious, unpredictable songcraft is undergirded with a killer rhythm section that has the expressiveness of a jazz combo.

9:25 p.m.: If you’re looking for folk music with that indescribably magical feeling, you’ll find it in San Juan Capistrano’s The Union Line (Sunset Temple Room, 2906 University Ave.), with their glistening guitars, rolling drums and haunting choruses. But let’s not forget about the wonderful Chairs Missing (Ruby Room), for whom a clone would come in handy.

10:30 p.m.: There’s nothing quite like the Beach Boys-meets- Captain Beefheart mindfuck of Heavy Hawaii (Soda Bar): disjointed lo-fi arrangements, dissonant rock riffs, ghoulish oohaah vocals that sound like a parody of Animal Collective. I can’t help but feel that they’re on to something.

11:30 p.m.: New Mexico (Bar Pink), the new incarnation of much-beloved rock band Apes of Wrath, has a new set of songs that’re pared-down, hard-driving and so awesome that somebody at a recent show felt compelled to pick the guitarist up mid-song and carry him around the room. Seriously.

Other highlights: Hyena (U-31, 10:35), Sleep Lady (Eleven, 10:45), Sleepwalkerz (Queen Bee’s, 11:15), Abe Vigoda (Soda Bar, 11:30), Lord Howler (Kadan Club, 12:30), The Screamin’ Yeehaws (Ken Club, 12:50).

Lineups are subject to change. Double-check schedules at northparkmusicthing.com.

Brock Bousfield of Nero's Day at Disneyland

Considering everything America has gone through recently—two foreign wars, Hurricane Katrina, a devastating recession, a catastrophic oil spill—it’s easy to conclude that we’re living through the cyberpunk nightmare envisioned in From Rotting Fantasylands, the latest album of Brock Bousfield’s solo project, Nero’s Day at Disneyland.

A sci-fi take on Switched-On Bach, Fantasylands combines samples of emotive arias, orchestra hits and jaunty piano lines from Baroque and Renaissance music with the kind of schizophrenic sampled drums, 8-bit electronics and harsh synths you’d expect from Aphex Twin or Squarepusher.

On “In Ailes,” Bousfield borrows vocal samples from a recording of The Threepenny Opera—a 1931 musical critique of capitalism by the Marxist dramatist Bertolt Brecht—playing them in reverse to make disgorged vocal melodies. Over rattling drums and an explosive synth riff, the backwards vocals come across like subliminal social commentary about a society gone mad.

Influenced as much by American Splendor comic writer Harvey Pekar as post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler, From Rotting Fantasylands is as dark as it is ridiculous.

“It’s a sardonic take on ridiculousness” of today’s society, Bousfield says of his album. “It’s definitely intentional.”

In a way, it makes perfect sense that Bousfield, a softspoken 28-year-old who lives in Oakland, grew up in the suburban San Diego neighborhood of Clairemont. For certain people, the suburbs—with their indiscriminate winding streets and ubiquitous chain stores—can be an incubator for madness and rebellion. As a former member of Beautiful Mutants, a synth-punk band that formed the center of a short-lived “mutant punk” scene in San Diego in the late ’90s and early ’00s, Bousfield knows that all too well.

Beautiful Mutants’ songs parodied the emptiness of suburban life. “I buy the things I need / so I can feel OK,” the singer intones over a jaunty keyboard marimba in one track. “When I’m out of Miracle Whip / nothing tastes quite the same.”

The “mutant punk” scene—inspired by Devo’s idea of “de-evolution,” the idea that humankind is regressing rather than evolving, along with drug-addled sci-fi literature like William Gibson’s classic 1984 novel Neuromancer—was inherently out of control. With their crazy shows and penchant for drugs, the Beautiful Mutants felt like a radical response to all of the things San Diego is known for: the military presence, the conservative political establishment, the nondescript geography of the suburbs.

One show at Gelato Vero is still burned in my mind as one of the craziest I’ve ever been to: As Hide and Go Freak (a band that formed after Beautiful Mutants broke up) played sloppy synth-punk, a wildly drunk couple crashed into a crowd of dancing gutter-punks who looked like extras from Blade Runner. When a skinny guy who went by the name Kevin Von Mutant began playing harsh industrial music from a computer, people started drumming maniacally on random pieces of metal. The floor felt like it would fall through. Anticipating a riot, the management kicked everybody out.

Unsurprisingly, none of these bands got a scrap of media attention. “No one was watching, so you felt like you could just do anything,” Bousfield says.

In the early ’00s, the scene began to fragment when Beautiful Mutants guitarist Nick Galvez died. A month after his death, Hide and Go Freak’s keyboardist died of alcohol poisoning. Soon after that, Bousfield moved to Santa Cruz. “It was just time to get out,” he says.

Today, San Diego’s “mutant punk” scene is all but forgotten.

But Bousfield is still Nero’s Day at Disneyland—the solo project he’s been working on since he was 16— playing sci-fi fugues on keyboards painted neon colors. And as track titles like “Charging Swarm of Mouseketeers” and “Plumes of ATM Sinew” suggest, he hasn’t lost his warped sense of humor about our decaying materialistic society.

Nor has he lost sight of it. Ironically, in his day job he tape-records business meetings and conventions at hotels.

“I get to see people from BP talking amongst themselves,” he says.

Nero’s Day at Disneyland plays with Mincemeat or Tenspeed, Bubblegum Octopus, Take Up Serpents and Nerfbau at Che Café on Saturday, July 31. myspace.com/nerosdayatdisneland.

This article ran in the July 28 issue of San Diego CityBeat.

Mark Mothersbaugh (bottom left) and his Devo brethren.

Devo, the legendary new-wave band famous for herky-jerky pop hits like “Whip It,” adheres to the theory of “de-evolution”–the idea that humanity is regressing rather than evolving through societal dysfunction and follow-the-pack mentality. But when the industrial suit-wearing oddballs made Something for Everybody, the band’s first record in 20 years, they did everything they could to appeal to the masses: its twelve subversively catchy synth-pop tracks, which contain references to things like the Taliban and the infamous University of Florida Taser incident, were cleared through an extensive focus group approval process.

Appealing to the masses might sound counter-intuitive to Devo philosophy. But mass appeal is the point, says Mark Mothersbaugh–a Devo co-founder and prolific composer of movie soundtracks, T.V. show theme songs and music for commercials–who maintains that the only way to change society is through subversion. In a recent phone interview ahead of Devo’s performance in Balboa Park on Sunday, July 18, as part of the San Diego Pride Festival, Mothersbaugh talked about the focus group process, humanity’s continuing de-evolution, and how he inserted subliminal messages into commercials.

Tell me about this focus group process. How did that work?

We hired Mother LA [an ad agency based in Los Angeles, who list Devo as their only client on their website], and we talked about the things that changed a lot in the world for us as Devo. Back in the ’70s, if you asked people if they believe in de-evolution, they would say, ‘You’re insane! You’re an asshole! You’re a cynic!’ and now, you say it and people go, ‘Yeah-hoo, let’s party! Things are devolved, let’s go!’ We felt it was time to ask people what they thought about Devo and de-evolution, and we took it to heart.

What kind of feedback did you get?

Well, we did a color study and people decided that the Devo red hat was too aggressive and thought we should change it to blue. And we did.

Did they pooh-pooh any songs you were really into?

Yeah, there were songs that we were surprised they didn’t choose. There was a radical mix of “Don’t Shoot.” I still think that’s going to come out because that’s so radical. It’s maybe the most radical thing that we did in the last three or four months—the last six or eight months, I mean. During the whole time of this record, the last couple years.

What was radical about it?

A band called Polysics did a remix. They really took out a lot of it. They sped it up. Some of the part in the middle where it slows down and there’s a speaking section—they took half of that out. They took out a lot of the “I’m a man”s. It’s a lot of [voices fast rock groove] “Don’t shoot!”, “Don’t shoot!”, “Don’t shoot!” It sounded more like “Uncontrollable Urge” from our first record.

It’s been twenty years since Devo last released an album. To what extent do you think society has de-evolved in those twenty years?

It’s a Mike Judge movie now. It’s like the whole world’s kind of turned into Idiocracy, in a way. People make decisions based on anything but the facts. They have access to more information than ever, but yet they’re filled with more misinformation than ever. Just look at where the last twenty years have taken us, you know, with our own government. Things have just gone downward. Education is last in line for funding and bombs are first in line, once again. I think the dumbing-down of the planet is not hard to recognize.

Have you ever worried that maybe you’ve succumbed to de-evolution yourself?

Oh, I know I have. Certainly physically. It’s like—you know, sitting at a desk writing music for the last twenty years and [I] went back on a stage and realized it was a good thing that those yellow suits were so big. I’ve been losing weight for the last year or two and it’s hard when you’re old. It’s easy when you’re twenty.

I was listening to an interview with you and you were talking about how you were at the protest at the Kent State shootings in 1970. I see a parallel between the shootings and the Tasering of the guy at the University of Florida, which you make a reference to it in your song “Don’t Shoot (I’m a Man).”

I think what we learned and took away from being idealistic young people–who said, “You don’t have to napalm humans in my name over there in Vietnam! I don’t really think you need to napalm them and pay for it. I don’t think I want to be doing that. I don’t think I want to be represented like that. I think there’s other ways to do things”–we found out that rebellion could only go so far in a democracy. The ideal is that you could speak your mind. But in reality, it was given limitations.

What I think we took away from it was that rebellion was obsolete, and that the only way you really change things in our culture is through subversion. So we looked around and came to the conclusion that maybe Madison Avenue was the best at influencing people indirectly.

In terms of advertising?

Right. Unfortunately, most of Madison Avenue was for bad stuff. But the techniques were valid.

I heard you talking about that on NPR recently. You said you guys were inspired by commercials.

Yeah. When we were kids, we listened and watched everything. It wasn’t just like we listened only to, you know, radio—either FM or AM or pop or alternative, if there was such a thing, which I don’t think there even was back then. We listened to everything. We listened to film soundtracks. We listened to music when we were at the mall. We listened to music in elevators. We listened to music on TV commercials. And understood the validity of all of it.

What about commercials in particular interests you?

I just like the creativity that’s involved. I ended up working in commercials for a long time, or at least writing music for commercials just out of curiosity about the media. There was a commercial in the early 70s that I really liked, and I paid attention to, because it made me laugh. It was Burger King and they took Pachelbel’s Canon and turned this beautiful piece of music–one of the most beautiful pieces of music in the classic music world–and they turned it into, “Hold the pickles / Hold the lettuce / Special orders don’t upset us / All we ask is that you let us serve it your way.” That was successful. And then they proceeded to change that into a country-western version, and a folk version, and a rock version, and a funk, Motown kind of version.

Early on in our career, we made this movie called The Truth About De-Evolution. The Akron Art Institute showed our film. It’s seven and a half minutes long, it wasn’t very long. I remember this woman coming up being really upset, going, “I know what you’re doing! I can see what you’re doing!” And we were like, “Uh, what? What’s that?” She says, “I know what’s going on here! I saw subliminal messages. I saw the word ‘submit’ and I saw the word ‘obey.’” And she was really upset. She was agitated. And I remember Jerry [Casale, a founding member of Devo] and us going, “What a good idea! That’s great!”

When I started doing commercials, I used to put my own messages in them—and did it for twenty or thirty of them before I finally got bored with it because it was too easy.

Could you give me an example?

I got hired to do music for a soft drink that I thought was absolutely terrible tasting—and it was like almost pure sugar, anyhow. I put the subliminal message, ‘Sugar is bad for you.’ And in other commercials, I put messages like, ‘We must repeat,’ ‘Question authority.’

How would you do that?

You just put it right below the threshold of what people hear. They’re already listening for something when they listen to a commercial. Once you put lyrics or a melody on it, they’re following that. And so you can turn it up pretty loud.

So you would slip these lines into the jingle?

I put it underneath a cymbal or a horn riff or a guitar line or something, or a synth part that you would not right away go, ‘Oh, I just heard lyrics.’ You would be, ‘Oh, that was interesting,’ but not even recognize it. It’s not that hard to do, that’s the funny thing.

I know Devo has redone songs for commercials—like the “Swiff It” commercial for the Swiffer. Did you do anything with those?

We didn’t have to. To me, just redoing the lyrics on a Devo song was subversive enough. Because what it meant is, a kid who likes the song would go, ‘Lemme hear that.’ And then they’d hear the real song and then the real lyrics would become much more resonant. I always loved the idea of like taking our lyrics and distorting them for a commercial. Actually, “Whip It”—we have “Strip It,” “Slip It,” “Zip It,” “Swiff It”… There were like eleven or twelve different “Whip It”s out there, where you put them on a reel and you have a really crazy six minutes of viewing pleasure.

Do you ever worry that, instead of subverting these commercials, you’re actually subverting Devo or losing sight of the de-evolutionary vision?

I’m not that worried about it. I know what you’re saying. I learned to deal with that a long time ago and never felt that way. I always felt like what we were talking about, if it had any meaning at all, it would be relevant when people came back to it.

And you’re right. People can say, ‘Oh, Devo! They’re not Devo—they’re De-ho. They just let anybody use their music.’ I’m sure there’s people that think that way.

I think of Andy Warhol, who was my hero when I was a kid. If he were still alive, I think he would get a kick out of our marketing focus groups that we did with this new album. I think he would love the idea of taking a pop song and turning it into a tool to sell stupid, conspicuous crap. Maybe it does make some people interested in Hershey’s chocolate or something else, but we’re taking a ride on that, too. Because the Hershey’s chocolate people have just embedded our virus into their product. That’s how I see it. I see the Devo virus has just been further insinuated into our culture.

And, I mean, you know what? On some level, kids will never think of Devo as anything other than a kick-ass band to dance to, or to skateboard to, or to make-out to or something. They might think of it just as that, on the lowest level. But there’s a percentage of kids, somewhere along the line—it may not happen the first time they hear the record—somewhere along the line, they’re going to be saying those lyrics, singing those lyrics at work in their head or something. And they’re gonna go, “What does he mean when he says, ‘We’re pinheads now / We are not whole / We’re pinheads all / Jocko Homo’? What’s that mean? What’re they talking about?” I’m patient. I think that’s the way you change things—I think it’s through subversion.

This interview originally appeared on CityBeat‘s blog, Lastblogonearth.com.

Antonio Jiménez of María y José; photo by Ricardo Aragón.

This article ran in the July/August issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

In Zona Centro, the downtown district in Tijuana, a city on the U.S.–Mexico border just south of San Diego, DIY-chic is all the rage. La Mezcalera, a mezcal bar and nightclub that’s regarded as the city’s own Studio 54, is decorated with Simon Says consoles and old LPs. Indie Go, one of four bars that sit in the hipster enclave Callejon de la Sexta, masks its plywood décor with deep-red lighting, a wall-sized mirror, and the all-encompassing thud of a techno beat.

As for La Bodega Aragón…well, it’s just DIY.

One Friday night in May, the tiny club’s walls were still sticky with wet paint. Bartenders served drinks in the kind of plastic cups you’d find at a house party. The P.A. system was scratchy; the microphone cut out intermittently. Worst of all, the lighting was installed incorrectly. Instead of lighting up the performers onstage, a machine’s flickering red, green, and blue lights blinded the four dozen college students in the audience.

But I didn’t come for the ambiance. At the invitation of Derrik Chinn, an American who lives in Tijuana, I came to see the Guacamole Music Fest, a two-day festival put on by the University of Baja California that played host to electro bands from across Mexico and Latin America, including some of Tijuana’s best up-and-coming acts.

Colorful lasers shot into the crowd. Gray smoke was ejected from a machine. Santos, an electronic dance outfit from Tijuana, broke down the musical formula invented by Nortec Collective—a world-famous assemblage of D.J.s and producers who mix techno with norteño, an accordion-driven genre popular in northern Mexico—to its basest parts: over a humongous four-to-the-floor beat, a young man used a laptop and a USB keyboard to fire off triumphant rave synths and snippets of accordion and tuba looped ad nauseam. As if that wasn’t enough, a live drummer added fills to the relentless groove.

When it comes to dance music, Tijuana’s claim to fame is Nortec Collective. Their mashups perfectly capture how the city’s disparate cultures often sit side by side, feeding off each other. On the opening track of Corridos Urbanos, a new album by Nortec’s Clorofila, the interplay between honking accordions and glistening synths mirrored the scene at La Bodega Aragón. In the club, young people played dance music on laptops. At the Hotel Aragón bar next door, guys in cowboy hats played tunes on guitars and accordions. Drink in hand, I freely traversed the two spaces.

But in the 10 years since Nortec first emerged, their romantic sound hasn’t evolved the way Tijuana has. Ten years ago, navy boys and college co-eds would flock here to get plastered at gaudy balcony bars. But since the September 11 attacks, tourist traffic has gradually waned. In 2008, at the height of the city’s drug violence, tourists deserted the city completely.

In their absence, locals have reclaimed the area as their own. Tourist bars have been colonized by hipsters. Shuttered gift shops and old storage spaces have turned into vintage clothing stores and bars. And venues like La Sexta House of Music and La Bodega Aragón are supporting a burgeoning local music scene, with bands like Santos capturing the rawness of it all.

By all accounts, the hipster transformation began with a mezcal bar.

In 2008, rival drug cartels were fighting a savage war on Tijuana’s streets. Victims were being decapitated or castrated. Their tongues were being cut out. The really unlucky ones would be stuffed into vats of acid.

The violence had a chilling effect on the city’s thriving nightlife. High-priced clubs and restaurants became magnets for kidnapping and violence. Locals would stay home. Or they would hang out at bars in the city’s red-light district, where they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves. Along Avenida Revolucion, the main tourist drag downtown, there were no gringos to be found.

As the months wore on, Tijuanenses eventually grew tired of staying cooped up inside, club owners and residents say. When La Mezcalera opened its doors on Calle Sexta near Revolucion in January 2009, it hit a nerve. The bar quickly took on a diverse clientele. When more and more patrons began asking for drinks besides mezcal and beer, the bar’s owners emptied out an old storage space adjoining the front room, painted the walls, added a disco ball, and opened up an incredibly chic, if modestly-sized, nightclub.

Within a year, according to Sergio Gonzalez, a co-owner of La Mezcalera, over a dozen bars opened in the area.

“Without realizing, I think they began a revolution in Tijuana’s nightlife,” Lorena Cienfuegos, the co-owner of Indie Go, told me. “We started consuming music from our country, rather than importing it. We started going out—that was something we were [previously] afraid of because of the violence.”

Tijuana may be a vice city, but musicians and club owners say it’s a conservative one.

“In general, Tijuanenses tend to play it quite safe when deciding which shows to attend,” Moisés Horta, who plays in the band Los Macuanos, told me via e-mail. “It’s never really been an issue of musical quality so much as production value. The undecided spectator will more often than not lean toward the party with the biggest budget, the glossiest flyer, and the swankiest venue.”

When I visited, La Bodega Aragón was anything but swanky—and the very antithesis of big-budget. On the second night of the Guacamole Music Fest, Antonio Jiménez of María y José, a solo electronic project, sounded like a lo-fi Panda Bear as he sang casually over sample-driven Latin grooves and simple synth melodies playing from—what else?—a computer.

In the same way that downtown’s DIY-chic runs in the opposite direction of the gaudy bars that used to define Avenida Revolucion, acts like María y José are running away from the overblown raves that have defined electronic music in Tijuana. Three years ago, Jiménez and the guys who would later become Los Macuanos—Moisés Horta, Moisés López, and Reuben Torres, all in their early 20s—started throwing “No Rave” parties in Tijuana and Chula Vista, a U.S. city just south of San Diego, where they played minimal house, funky no-wave, and “random noise,” Horta said.

“At that time, electronic music in Tijuana consisted of massive cash cows masquerading as raves, with D.J.s you’d never even heard of and music you couldn’t care less about,” he wrote. “So our response, naturally, was to create our own scene.”

María y José’s song “Espíritu Invisible” brought their scene to a new level. The song’s hypnotic groove and darkly spiritual lyrics—“And where did your great God go? / He took everything and left you the pain,” Jiménez sings in Spanish, as I’ve roughly translated—inspired them to be more personal and regional. The results show in El Fin Mix, released online by New Other Thing, in which Los Macuanos offer up danceable yet dark grooves laden with Afro-Cuban horns and Latin rhythms.

At this point, whatever they’ve created is still in its infancy, Horta says. But with homey electro bands like Tijuana’s Ibi Ego and Aguascalientes’s Capullo on the scene, something refreshingly un-electro-trash seems to be growing.

It certainly helps that there are new venues downtown.

“The proliferation of venues has definitely afforded more options, not to mention the fact that you have a large cross-section of your potential audience cramped within a relatively tiny radius,” Horta wrote to me. “There’s a high possibility that drifting spectators might accidentally come upon your show and become hooked as a result. Of course, there’s an equal chance that people might just wander out in the middle of your show. But in general, I think the possibilities are more beneficial.”

Calle Sexta, a bustling street that cuts through Revolucion, forms the center of Tijuana hipsterdom. At the corner of Revolucion and Calle Sexta, La Sexta House of Music books bands and D.J.s. Just down the street, La Estrella, one of the city’s oldest and most cherished clubs, sits right next door to La Mezcalera. Across the street, there’s the longtime hotspot Dandy Del Sur. A short walk away, the cozy alleyway Callejon de la Sexta is always overflowing with young hipsters.

Tijuana’s violence has dropped significantly since January, when federal police captured Teodoro Garcia Simental, a ruthless crime lord responsible for much of the violence. Now, hipness is expanding beyond Calle Sexta.

One sunny Saturday in June, I walked around the area surrounding Avenida Revolucion with Jason Fritz, a graduate student at San Diego State University who lives in Tijuana. A pitiful donkey painted with zebra stripes was lounging on the street—as it has been for as long as I can remember. At pharmacies, salespeople in white lab coats hawked discount drugs. Aside from that, though, this wasn’t the same Avenida Revolucion I remember from my childhood.

We checked out vintage clothing stores. We ate at a gourmet hamburger joint. At a cavernous mall once filled with indistinguishable gift shops, a painter worked in his studio, a graffiti store had designer spray cans on display, and a barista at a quaint café was making cappuccinos.

On the corner of Revolucion and Calle Sexta, La Mezcalera’s Gonzalez and his business partner, César Fernández, were overseeing the construction of a ’60s-themed diner. Construction workers were putting up posters of Andy Warhol–style Campbell’s Soup cans labeled “Pozole,” referring to the popular Mexican stew.

Around the corner we ran into Tony Tee, a local promoter, who showed us around a sleek new club he was designing called Revue, which was quite the departure from the garish balcony bars of tourist-era Revolucion. Inside, I admired a spacious D.J. booth that was under construction.

Tee was feeling optimistic.

“Instead of trying to attract the tourists, we’re gonna attract locals,” he said. “But you know what’s going to happen? The tourists are going to come, too.”

Photo by Maria Maria Photography.

In the year since the breakup of his old band, Grand Ole Party, John Paul Labno’s proven to be an unstoppable force. Along with his girlfriend, Sasha Pfau, he’s the creative force behind indie-soul band The Hot Moon. He plays tenor sax in Mr. Tube & The Flying Objects, a quirky funk outfit headed by Pall Jenkins of The Black Heart Procession. To pay the bills, he serves coffee at Gelato Vero, the café next door to his Middletown apartment. In his off hours, he writes songs for a new solo project called Vegetarian Werewolf.

• Published: 06/15/2010
• Other Stories by Peter Holslin

This article ran in last week’s issue of CityBeat.

Bates, a 30-year-old marketing specialist who works part-time for the online personal radio outlet Slacker, says he’s not bitter, but he doesn’t have much hope for the future of radio. In an interview with CityBeat last Sunday, Bates talked about the Morning Show‘s early days, the radio industry’s business model, and how it can compete with a legion of iPhone apps.

How did you get involved with 91X?

Well, they’d offered me a job when I was still up in Boise [Idaho, where he was program director and brand manager for KQXR 100.3 FM], and I said ‘No.’ Because my perception at the time was that 91X was in bad shape, which it was. And when I moved to town [in 2006], the people who were running the station at the time [Finest City Broadcasting, which had recently bought the station from Clear Channel] hit me up and said, ‘Hey, let’s just talk. I’m interested in what you’re doing over here. Maybe can you develop some content for us as well, on the side?’ I started having high-level conversations with them about where that station can go. They recognized that, for the better part of the last decade, that station had been a non-issue for most people—you know, as a result of being owned by Clear Channel, being programmed from out of the city, voice-tracking, and all the other terrible things you hear about radio consolidation. They were really committed to rebuilding 91X’s brand.

Everyone knows 91X. It plays music, you tune in, you tune out; it’s there. Certainly not what it used to be, though. As far as being active in the community, as far as what it represents to this generation, it’s just sort of a shell of its former self. And they recognized that. They said, ‘We’re gonna fix this. We wanna take our listeners and turn them into enthusiasts. We want to develop some good will in the community. And more importantly, we want to embrace emerging tech. Rather than being reactive to all these challenges—i.e. Pandora and Slacker and satellite radio and God knows what else—we want to be pro-active. We want to be a leader when it comes to incorporating emerging tech and emerging content delivery platforms. We want to be involved in peoples’ lives in our communities again.’

I put together a presentation; I put together this whole sort of definition of what that would be. And then they went out and they tried to find a show. And then a couple months later, they approached me and said, ‘We can’t find anyone to do this. Do you want to do it?’ My passion is music first and secondly getting cool ideas, cool products—I know it’s cynical to say music is a product, but it is—into the hands of the people who are going to appreciate it the most. And this was just another one of those challenges. From a 91X standpoint and a show standpoint, they wanted us to build a community again. 91X did not have a community for a long time.

So how do you feel the show went?

This was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Because I just told you all this aspirational stuff—what we wanted it to be, what we hoped it would be. When you get in there, and you’re generating five hours of original content every day, and you’ve got four people involved, sometimes. … Lowest common denominator radio, the Howard Sterns of this world, that’s the easiest thing to do. You talk about cargo shorts and sandwiches and boobs. That’s universal, right? We really, really did not want to do that.

When I signed on, I said, ‘You gotta give me two years. You have to give me guaranteed, no matter what, two years or you pay me. Even if you want to get rid of me. Because it’s not going to be good.’ And it wasn’t. It really wasn’t, initially. The community that has been with us from day one and is still with us today—I have no idea why. And I’m so grateful, because it was terrible. In reality, it took about a year and a half before it really started gelling.

Why did it take so long for the show to come together?

When I initially put the show together and was given the leeway to hire a cast, as it were, I said, ‘I will take inherent intelligence over radio experience.’ In fact, I did not want to bring in a bunch of radio people to do the show with me, because when you do that, you end up with what you’re accustomed to for morning radio—a cackling female sidekick and the big, dumb misogynistic guy. These are all pretty established archetypes and I wanted to avoid all that. What I did was I found the smartest kid that I could find, regardless of radio experience—and I was given leeway from the first company to do this—and I said, ‘We’re gonna create something from the ground up, organically.’ These kids [Morning Show crewmates Carlos Montoya and Sammi Skolmoski] are smart enough to make it happen; it’s just a matter of getting that sort of inherent radio skill set. It’s like playing in a band. You have all of these different instruments and it takes a lot of practice in order to create something cohesive. In our case, we were doing all of our practicing live on the air.

Could you give me an example?

There was a bit where I brought on a guy from Indianapolis when the Chargers were playing the Colts in the playoffs, and I was gonna try to do like this sort of old-school wacky radio bit where it’s like, ‘I bet you the Chargers are gonna win!’ and we talk smack to each other and make some sort of bizarre, weird bet. It was miserable. I was never able to step outside of myself and turn that little voice in the back of my head off that was saying, ‘Wow, this sounds really dumb’ and just go over the top and be like, ‘You’re going down! F you!’

Do you think the show was successful?

Not fully, but to some extent. The initial plan that I put together—we were only able to execute on probably 50 percent of it. I’m not bummed about that. I mean, it’s expected. It happens on any project.

What wasn’t executed?

The whole web presence, you know, to where we turn this portal into a true lifestyle portal as opposed to a place where you go to find out what we just played or where the DJs are. Where we’re generating content, where we are using this brand as 91X and driving people to the website to get their content. To make 91X.com a lifestyle content distribution system and to slowly but surely work towards the radio signal becoming less important to the whole.

Also, the second part of [the show] was the community building aspect. We created—or at least latched onto a number of communities. We created this huge niche for ourselves and a home for people who were fans of drinking and eating locally, you know, whether it be slow food, community agriculture—CSAs, community supported agriculture—or whether it be craft beer. We created a fan group around the Chargers because we recognize how important the Chargers were, but we also recognize that 91X fans aren’t going to be the, you know, hoo-rah, high five jersey-wearin’ dudes.

So, in that sense, the show was successful.

Oh yeah. The community-building aspect was incredible. We got people engaged, there’s no doubt about it. Was it tens of thousands of people? No. Was it thousands of people? Absolutely. We created a community where people felt involved, people felt valuable, and people felt like they were involved. It’s not like, ‘We wanna recruit you to come represent 91X!’ It’s like we’ve created this community and 91x happens to be the umbrella.

One of the things we did is we responded to every single piece of correspondence we ever got. Ever. The first week that I was unemployed, I wasn’t filling out unemployment forms. I was literally just responding to e-mails and phone calls. That’s all I did, eight hours a day, for about seven days. I’m still not completely caught up. We literally received—probably not tens of thousands, but definitely thousands of e-mails, of phone calls. Our Facebook page grew exponentially after we got fired.

What I want to do with that correspondence is just thank them. Because this was an unlikely experiment with a bunch of unlikely people. We’re not lifelong radio guys. We’re not Mikeys, we’re not Jeff and Jers. And so, for the old 91X organization to take a risk and say, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna try this,’ that was one thing. But then for the community to say, ‘We’ve got your back,’ that was something entirely different.

You say this was an experiment—it must’ve been in the back of your mind this whole time that it wasn’t gonna last.

In December, the company that we were working for, all of our people, the people who brought us in to support us, they went insolvent. And it was purchased by a new company [Local Media of America], which is locally based but is staffed by ex-Clear Channel people. I went in optimistically, but it became apparent to me, starting back in January, that this was going to be over this year.

They never moved us in. They never built our studio. They never gave us an office. We were never introduced to the guy who runs the place. But more importantly, I talked to the programming guys and I got an idea for what their philosophy was—and I’m not saying it’s the right or wrong philosophy, but it was completely different than what we’re doing. It was diametrically opposed in almost every way to what we were doing. It’s like a jukebox. There’s two full-time employees that work there, so their overhead is incredibly low. So they’re gonna keep overhead incredibly low, run a real tight ship and not really generate any content, just play music.

They cut a pretty good chunk of payroll when they got rid of us. I don’t know if it’ll work ratings-wise. But financially it will work, because even if they get lower ratings than less advertising, they still have less overhead now. And less to worry about. Less letters, less polarizing stuff, less activity, less being out on the street, less community-building exercises. These are all things that cost money. I mean, it’s very easy to load songs in and play them, and it’s inexpensive.

What do you want to do now?

There’s all kinds of stuff I want to do. I want to restore classic motorcycles, turn them into cafe racers and sell them. I want to get involved and explore the scalability of community-supported agriculture and local food and slow food. Those are all things I wanna do and I will do. What I’m going to do is, I’m going to get a job. I have to. I have a mortgage, and a baby, and a wife.

I don’t want to be so presumptuous to say that I’ve already been hired, but—people have reached out. I’ve been a lot luckier than most, because there’s plenty of other creatives out there that are equally, if not more, talented than I am, but they haven’t had the name recognition that I’ve had. And as such, I’ve had organizations reaching out to me.

Are you going to stay in the media industry?

What I’ve done in the past is what I’m gonna do again. I’m a brand manager. I deal with product management, music management and action sports, as well. There’s a lot of action sports here and there’s a lot of those people I already talked to, as far as in San Diego. That is an option. I’ve got several different options, nothing that is solidified yet.

What’s going to happen with all of the 91X stuff?

This comes with a caveat. I am extremely hesitant to latch onto what we did at 91X because it smacks of the jock reliving his high school football days. This is something that we did and it’s done. I’m not going to go out for the next two years and milk what we did as a radio show to try to maintain a public profile. I’m not gonna do it. I’m gonna move onto my next project.

Now, with that said, I’m also really hesitant to completely forsake this community that we’ve built. We’re going to continue to do a segment we did called “Beer for Breakfast.” Once we settle down here and we return all our e-mails and everything and I get my full-time employment situation sussed out, we are going to do a weekly Beer for Breakfast—for lack of a better word—podcast. Five minute, hi-def video. And it is going to be distributed nationally and it is going to be 100-percent San Diego focused. On San Diego craft beer, making people aware of the craft community here in San Diego, because it’s grown to the extent that it’s of interest to people outside of San Diego.

How do you feel about the state of radio in San Diego? It seems like it reflects what’s going on in radio in general.

This thing is, I’m out and I’m happy that I did it. It’s really easy once you’re out to sit there and be an armchair quarterback and say, ‘Well, this is where they’re messing up.’ But it’s apparent to anyone who listens to the radio that radio is becoming less relevant as far as a medium to get music discovery or information. And what it has become is background.

Look at what happened to Dave, Shelley and Chainsaw on KGB. There’s no reason to get rid of that show other than financial, you know what I’m saying? That show is such a huge part of the community. They did well. They were good people, which you don’t meet too many of in radio. They were the gold standard in this market. And their radio station has found it to be more valuable to cut that overhead from that radio show and play music and deal with the revenue that they’ll lose. They’ll probably come out ahead, because the overhead’s gone.

In this medium of radio, just the medium—forget the San Diego market, forget the business, forget the ownership group—this medium and the revenue model is inherently flawed. The methodology that goes into measuring audience in radio is flawed, and the business model is flawed. And they know it is. I’m not saying anything new. So when that’s the case, you have a choice. You can innovate. You can be proactive. Or you can shrink. You can survive and be reactive.

The medium needs to figure out how to be competitive in the digital space. It needs to figure out how to be as compelling and as ubiquitous as any other alternatives. Because, look, I can get anything that I want on my phone right now. If I want to listen to This American Life, I’ve got an app for that. I can listen to the archive of the show going back to the ’90s. Public radio is doing a great job of remaining relevant, as a whole. If I want to listen to any NPR station in the country, these are the NPR stations in Alaska and I’ll show you what they’re playing. If I want to hear just a song, any song right now, I can pull it up on Rhapsody and pull it up right now. Any song I want to hear. If I want to hear radio, but not radio that’s homogenized and run through research and corporate playlists like you hear on the radio here, I can just fire up Slacker. Mobile is the key. Ubiquity and mobile. And right now, radio is neither of those things.

If you could imagine the ideal radio station for San Diego, what would it be? How would it compete with all of these different apps?

You know, it’s hard because that would require something different than what we’re talking about. That would require the building of a brand from ground up.

91X has a brand that’s three decades deep. People from 50 to 10 know what 91X is and probably have it on their preset. This is a brand that has been built that is not being utilized. So if you were to take 91X and turn it into something more relevant, I could tell you about that. But as far as starting a radio station from ground up, that’s not a good model. Why would you do that? I mean, there’s no point. I wouldn’t start a radio station from the ground up. I would start a website with, you know, a lot of content outreach. I would make it hyper-local, hyper-focused, and I would be generating a ton of unique content—not making it a static stream, but making it completely dynamic. And I would market it to San Diego as something for San Diegans, and I would make sure they could get it wherever they were—whether it be on their Xbox and make it part of the dashboard on the Xbox or the PS360, or the PS3 rather, or on your phone, on any mobile device.

So, what do you feel is going to happen to radio?

Ten years from now, if you asked me to speculate, it’s going to be valuable because of its bandwidth. It’s going to be valuable to push real-time traffic data to GPS units and dashboards. It’s going to be valuable as bandwidth and not so much as a community service. Because again, it all comes back to mobile ubiquity—and I have all of the community information that I need at my fingertips right here [points to iPhone].

This interview was published on CityBeat‘s blog, Lastblogonearth.com.