Crisis 6: Every Community Radio Station Will Eat Its Children (From 6 Crises: Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)

My last few years at the station resembled the early history of the Soviet Union, with myself playing the part of Kruschev, the earnest, well-beloved member of the Politburo who couldn't understand why people kept getting arrested and why Comrade Stalin's eyes twinkled whenever he was asked about it and why anyone would want to live in Moscow anyway...

Of course the station never controlled a country of millions, but the staff and volunteers would fight over whatever the station did control just as tenaciously as if it was a large country of millions, and would intrigue and scheme and complexly maneuver as if cabinet posts and dachas and nuclear weapons were at stake...

But what was really at stake was Air Time. Air Time is a special thing when it Belongs to You, when you sit in the chair in the on-air studio and for 60 or 180 or 240 minutes have absolute power over everything that people hear on that bandwidth, and people know your name, and they know your music, you are an absolute monarch and the listeners are your honored guests and the musicians are your glittering courtiers that you call up at will, to entertain your guests...well, obviously it's good for the ego.

I'm not saying it's a bad way to be, to love the Air Time. It takes a certain personality to really love it, to love the absolute control and the attention and to pour everything they've got into those 180 minutes to make it as perfect as it can possibly be, and it just so happens that those kind of personalities don't get along with each other or usually anyone else. They especially don't get along with anyone who tries to tell them what to do with their 180 minutes of absolute monarchy, ie the staff.

I myself experienced the rush of Air Time on a few rare occasions. Many things had to go wrong before I would be shoved into the studio; the usual program host would call in sick or drunk or confused, which happened fairly often, and if Stan had some time, usually at least a day but sometimes only a few hours, he would call his usual reliable substitutes, volunteers with flexible jobs or no jobs or who had no show and would take any opportunity to get on air or who were just good soldiers and soft touches and really wanted to help him out of a jam, and if that small handful of reliables every once in while failed him and then he would ask Annette the PA Director and if she had meetings he would with an extremely sour look on his face go in an do the show himself and on the rare occasions that everyone was gone Stan would poke his head into my office and with his voice cracking with weariness and strain and on the brink of quitting he would say; "You feel like doing Global Gumbo?"

And a part of me would weep and another part would secretly revel in the glory until about two songs into my stint I would realize with 40 seconds to go in the second song that I had no idea of what to play next and then I had to go on air and then the phone would ring and at that point I would surrender the glory and begin methodically searching the world music CDs on the rack for long tracks, the longer the better, that I could use to fill the time and establish a calming space for myself to enjoy the show without having to open and close the CD players and fiddle with the switches on the big board every two minutes like you have to do when you fall prey to the cursed 3 minute track rule of Good Radio Programming that the staff teaches to all the new young volunteer djs because they're suckers! After a while I began to relish the opportunity of creating the Perfect Global Gumbo program, consisting of eight 15 minute tracks by Krishna Das or David Arkenstone with some Peruvian flutes thrown in for variety.

We had years of staff solidarity after Linda and Bart had been driven out, and the krcl board members were our friends and fellow-travelers and sometimes difficult to tell from volunteers. This was the Old Board I'm talking about, very similar to the High Elves from the First Age of Middle Earth, the aging hippies who started the station and were still around and still on the board 20 years later and remembered Betty back when she was just another staff flunky.

For Example. At one point or another Betty decided to put the kibosh on a monthly live-remote that the station did from a local bar ("private club for members and their guests," in on-air speak). I'd helped with the remote a couple times and enjoyed it because I never had to do anything but help Brad, (name changed) one of the engineers, with the equipment and Brad didn't need any help with the equipment so I didn't really have to do anything but watch Brad work and then sit with Brad and eat free bar food with him and try to shout conversation at each other over whatever live music we were broadcasting that night. I enjoyed helping until for a reason which I'm ashamed to say I've completely forgotten, I had a falling out with the owner of the club, the man who'd provided the free food. Anyway, for a while we didn't speak to each other and when he'd come strolling into the station with his miserable little monthly donation that was far less than the business we'd provided him with the free advertising, he'd do so in stony silence, and I would receive the payment without thanks.

This feud had nothing to do with Betty's decision, I'm sorry to say. She just thought he should be buying underwriting or paying more or something, I didn't really pay attention. She took the issue to the Old Board, and angered many members of the greater KRCL community, who waxed very poetic about all that the live broadcasts - from that particular bar in particular - had done for Utah and humanity and civilization in general. And no one waxed more rhapsodic and poetical than the owner of the bar, who happened to have many friends on the Old Board, and who had actually once been a member of the board. And Betty suffered an adverse vote. The live remotes continued.

Betty took the adverse vote to heart, to a degree that surprised me - she described it as if it had been a physical beating. It was to be the last adverse vote she would endure from the Old Board or any board. Steps were taken, Term limits introduced. The Old Board voted itself wearily, gratefully, out of existence, and joined Gandalf on his faire Elvishe boate, which did gentlye sail out of the intermountain West.

The Staff vs. Board fight thus eventually ended with the Board conceding greater disinterest, leaving the Staff to fight the Volunteers, and some of the staff to fight some others of the staff, and some of the volunteers to join some of the staff when fighting other staff but not the staff person they happened to be auditioning with for a weekend slot, and some of the volunteers to fight other of the volunteers especially the volunteer whose show had followed theirs for ten years and who they had had to see every week and use the microphone right after and who left their CDs and crap everywhere and who therefore they didn't talk to and hadn't spoken to for years of coming in every week and not talking to in icey silence for so long that there were armed guards and dogs and electrified fences and searchlights along the boarder between the two programs and any incursion of even 20 seconds or so of one program into the time slot of the other resulted in alarms and lights and exchange of gunfire and tanks rolling and generals dragged out of bed and hysterical phone calls to the president from submarines and secret airbases.

All of which made for great stories at the staff meetings, with Annette doing her dead-on imitations of preposterously outraged volunteers and Stan and Betty and Barbara and Anita and I howling with laughter and shaking our heads sadly and rolling our eyes heavenward over those crazy feisty volunteers...

Until the staff itself began to grow increasingly impatient with Betty's long-time monopoly of power, and began to complain to each other and intrigue and rage impotently, like heirs of some rich miserable old miser who've put up with the old man for years in the common belief that he can't last much longer until they start to notice the wrinkles in their own reflections and each wonder my god am I going to spend my whole life waiting for him to drop? And staff groups formed and re-formed and drove a Development Director out and people began to quit and the staff complained to the board president and he wept and shook his fist at the sky and said something would be done and the board, which had long since been effectively gelded and could no more remove Betty than a bunch of Cardinals could remove the Pope, met with Betty and advised her to be more careful about who she hired in the future...

At some point in all this intrigue I realized that I was actually not Kruschev, I was in fact a spy, a double-agent working among these commies and talking about peace and flowers and world socialist utopia, yuck yuck yuck, oh those aging hippies, and then going off to report their plans and secret codes and military numbers to my secret masters in some secret base underground somewhere...

Even if I had no secret masters in a secret base I could still be a spy and make careful reports of everything I saw in the hopes that someday highly-developed super-wise beings would come along who would find my notebook and peruse the reports and use the knowledge gained therein to take over all the community radio stations and lead the country and the world into an era of peace and cultural awakening through community-supported local media outlets...

Crisis Resolved: I got another job and thereafter interacted with my friends from the station in a more relaxed and carefree manner without having to spy on them.