Right now I can think of nothing grander than this: driving through a sun-drenched, unspoiled, California coastal valley eating a duck-liver pâté on foccacia sandwich, listening to Slim Harpo’s “Scratch My Back,” and at the same time being given a neck rub by a sloe-eyed, half-Brazilian, ex-photographer’s model named Luchita with a bad attitude, a smart mouth, and who claims to have once worked as a backup singer for Julio Iglesias.
The two of us are on a fact-finding expedition to Philo, California. At first, Luchita hadn’t wanted to come; she knew I was researching a magazine article, and she’s still a little peeved at certain references I made to her in a profile of Lola Falana I wrote some months back. But she knows I like her company, and that this article is important.
“You can’t just put me in this one,” Luchita scolds. “You need a signed release or something. I could sue you if I wanted. When I get famous I want to be famous as a singer, not as some literary device.” She spits the word “device” at me as if it were a peach pit. “Whatever you do, just don’t mention my name in the article, okay?” She wags her finger at me. (Luchita can get terminally loud; I wonder if she was a religious zealot in her last lifetime.)
“How about if I don’t use your real name?” I ask. Luchita takes this proposal under consideration for three and a half miles and then sullenly agrees.
The town of Philo is located about one hundred miles north of San Francisco in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley, a valley so wholesome, verdant, and lush with vineyards and apple orchards that I’d like to suggest it as the location for David Lynch’s next television series. The town itself looks like it’s out of an old black-and-white horror movie — one of those places where an attractive young couple in a late-model convertible have car trouble. There’s a general store, a small post office, and a lumber mill that closed recently, leaving sixty people unemployed. Philo’s coffee shop, Janie’s Place, was pretty much the center of the community until a guy named Sean Donovan rolled into town.
Donovan, ex-marketing consultant, ex-wine broker, ex-youth hostel operator, and ex- a lot of other things, is some kind of a crazy. You can tell by the way he looks. He’s got thick glasses that magnify his untamable Irish eyes, and a curly, black, unexplainable haircut. He’s given to covering his ample belly with shirts that tourists would be ashamed to wear on Waikiki, and is a talking maniac and a laughing fool (he laughs like this: “Ha Ha Ha”). He also happens to be as sharp as a pine needle and refreshingly good-hearted.
We had planned to meet Donovan at the parking lot of KZYX radio. He’s the station’s founder and general manager. When he set out to create a community radio station in this rural, economically precarious town of 473, he had no radio experience, no funding, no savings, and not much of a plan. In little more than five years Donovan’s half-baked scheme has evolved from an impractical obsession into a viable (and vital) community radio station. Since October of 1990, Philo’s Grange Hall of the Aether, KZYX 90.7 FM, has been in full operation, using its 3,400 watts to fill the air over the North Coast and inland valley with an eclectic blend of ethnic and classical music, local politics, jazz, and rock. In so doing it has galvanized the communities that receive its signal, places peopled with a peculiar blend of bohemians, loggers, farmers, migrant workers, and transplanted, well-to-do urbanites.
While waiting for Donovan to show up, Luchita and I scramble through the forest surrounding the station, gathering mistletoe and the leaves of the California bay laurel. When we spot his truck coming up the long, gravel driveway, we stop our foraging and emerge from the woods to greet him.
As soon as he sees the two of us, Donovan slides the vehicle to a halt and leaps out of the dented red cab. We’ve met only twice before, but he gives us each a crushing bearhug (Luchita’s lasts a little longer than mine). He cannot suppress his delight with his success: “It’s a hit, it’s an unmitigated hit!”
The man doesn’t talk, he broadcasts. He transmits enthusiasm and ideas at full volume, morning, noon, and night, to all within earshot. He is a radio station. “We have 106,000 people — different people! — listening to the station every week. Commercial stations in Sonoma County would kill for that kind of audience! We’ve received more than 1,000 letters so far. I’m starting to feel good about it but I’m not smug yet. When you start to feel you’re doing a good job, you probably aren’t.”
My idea was to come up to Philo and write about how great it can be when a crazy-like-a-fox visionary gets a community to pull together and create an effective, lively electronic forum, such as a listener-supported radio station. But on the way up, Luchita, who’s nine and a half years my junior, lectured me mercilessly about the shallowness of my populist values. “Come on,” she said, “it’s like Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting playing milkmaid at Versailles. If these people were really so committed to Jeffersonian values they’d go do it in Mississippi or El Salvador or Bensonhurst. This is the goddamned garden of Eden.”
It was a glib, shortsighted assessment but I didn’t have the energy to argue. Instead I looked out the window at two sheep staring uncomprehendingly at an apple tree and promised myself that this was the last time I’d bring her along on such a trip.
However, once in the intoxicating presence of Donovan, Luchita makes a sea change, shedding her neoconservative stridency. She can’t resist the radio-mania contagion. “So did you think it would be such a success?” she chirps.
“Yes. I thought it would be just what it is,” Donovan says. “From the very beginning we set reasonable goals and we achieved them in the time that we said we would. We now have fifteen hundred subscribers to the station — that’s astounding. We send each one a thank-you letter. I want lots of members. If ten people would write me checks for the same amount of money as the fifteen hundred do, I’d still want the fifteen hundred. It’s not the money, it’s the fact that there are that many people feeding into the system.”
The type of broadcasting Sean Donovan’s doing in Philo started a few years back, when people got fed up with turning on the radio and finding nothing but coffee-soaked boss-jocks shrieking about what was happening at the local speedway on “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!” followed by two minutes and fifty-nine seconds of the 1910 Fruitgum Company singing “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I Got Love In My Tummy.” A couple of decades ago, “alternative” radio was a vital broadcasting experiment. But then all its revolutionary promoters calcified and decided they’d rather have food processors, Weber barbecues, and stable jobs; now, alternative radio is just another format with its own “stars,” like that dull, overrated Garrison Keillor. Donovan, however, living in an isolated valley as he does, has been able to avoid the creeping complacency and lust for comfort that have afflicted the rest of his generation. “I dunno,” he says. “I just never felt this passionate about a job before.” Much like the Indians of Tierra del Fuego, who maintained an almost disease-free society until they were visited by civilization, Sean Donovan has successfully launched Radio Brigadoon in the rarefied atmosphere of the Anderson Valley. The rest of us, our pasts lumped up in the toes of our socks, can only stand in faded full color, waving in slow motion like the people in the opening sequence of Blue Velvet as the parade of our ideals goes by.
Luchita and I have a powerful hunger, and as it’s nearly noon, Donovan’s ready for his first beverage of the day. The three of us pile into my car and leave the isolated house the station uses as its studio to search the countryside for a hamburger and some of the local Boont Amber beer. I drive; Luchita and Donovan talk.
“A lot of people move up here saying they want to get away from it all, but they have no idea what that really means,” he says. “Well, what does it mean?” Luchita says. She’s cranky all of a sudden, and I don’t know why.
Donovan is the soul of good cheer. “You know, the first year you move up here you go to San Francisco ten or twelve times, the second year, five or six times, the third year, not at all. We broadcast just enough of a network mix (including programming picked up from National Public Radio) that it’s reconnected people to the outside world.”
“Tell Sean about auditioning for Julio Iglesias,” I prompt Luchita.
She catches my eye in the rearview mirror and shakes her head. “No,” she says. Donovan looks back at her, obviously disappointed.
“He just wants me to talk about it so he can write about it in the article,” Luchita says. “I’ll tell you about it later when he doesn’t have the tape going.”
Luchita’s starting to get on my nerves. I brought her up to this beautiful valley, arranged for accommodations, am paying for everything, and she can’t even be cordial. By acting like a jerk, she’s putting the whole article in jeopardy (along with my big break as a writer). Still, I’ve got to get enough out of Donovan for a story, so I’m not going to waste time having a confrontation. “I’ll get even with her later,” I tell myself.
We pass a recently flattened skunk now permanently asleep on the double-yellow line. “I like the smell of skunk,” I say.
“That’s because of the pheromones,” Donovan replies. “The scent is very close to perfume.”
Donovan’s the non-sequitur king, prone to launch into radio talk no matter what subject is on the table. He does so now without taking a breath. “One of the things I like best about the station is that we tend to stay away from people with previous experience. You listen to Lester’s show — he’s on tonight. He’s a logger. He’s Lester the Logger and he likes the Beatles, and he likes the Bee Gees, and he likes Peter Frampton. So he plays the Beatles and the Bee Gees and Frampton. Also,” says Donovan, leaping merrily onto another train of thought, “I’m not fastidious about scratched records. Hell, my records at home are scratched, ’cause I play ’em a lot.”
“What’s so good about that?” Luchita snaps.
“Then there’s our engineer, Ron, who does a blues show. Ron’s a fabulous saxophone player, but Ron is such a bad disc jockey, he’s so bad that he’s unbelievably good. He breaks every rule there is. He shuffles papers, he hits the mike. But he pulls it off, because he’s not trying to put you on. And he knows his music. God, does he know his music.”
It seems like we drive forever. I’m getting nervous because Luchita has the metabolism of a hummingbird, and when she goes without food for very long she becomes quite unpleasant. The darkening of her mood over the last few minutes makes it clear that the end-time may soon be upon us.
We finally pull into the dirt parking lot of The Floodgate, a small roadside cafe a few miles north of Philo. “Mother McCree!” Luchita exclaims. “Was this the closest restaurant?”
As I feared, the beast of the food chain is now among us. “This is fine,” I tell Luchita in an oh-so-soothing tone. “This looks like a good place, and there aren’t too many people here so we’ll be able to get waited on quickly.” I’m trying to keep things upbeat, cheerful, but Luchita is having none of it. She burns a hole in me with her Children-of-the-Damned eyes. “Get me food now!” the beast’s eyes say. I’m silently praying to God that the place is open and that they have plenty of whatever it is Luchita is hungry for. Otherwise we might all be banished to the cornfield (or in this case the vineyard) like the adults who ran afoul of the supernaturally powered little boy in that old “Twilight Zone” episode.
Donovan is oblivious to Luchita’s mood change. He’s already chatting it up with Frank, the owner of the restaurant.
“Is it too late to get some lunch, Frank?”
“Absolutely not,” Frank says. Frank’s got the steady, confident manner of a man who always says what he means and always means what he says.
When you run a radio station in a small town, everyone is a critic. KZYX is playing on the restaurant sound system. Phaedra is doing her Saturday afternoon jazz show.
“She’s doin’ a nice show,” Frank says, without looking up from the peas he’s shelling. “I like her better than the other gal you have on Saturday afternoons. I can’t remember her name. I mean, I’m a great jazz lover but her stuff is a little too avant-garde, funky. I don’t like that fusion stuff.”
“You’re showin’ your age,” Sean says.
“Yeah, and I’m proud of it, too,” Frank replies. “I was born and raised at a time when Benny Goodman was king.”
We’re seated by the maitre d’, Frank’s aging dog. We order a couple of Boont Ambers, a Buffalo Burger, and vegetarian lasagna for Her Snappishness.
A small winged insect alights on the lip of Donovan’s beer glass. “What kind of animal is that?” he asks.
“That’s not an animal,” I say. “It’s a bug. It’s either a bug or a very small dog.”
“Ha Ha Ha. Sit! Roll over!” Donovan bellows at the poor thing. “Ha Ha Ha.” The startled creature flies off to the safety and quiet of the nearby woods.
Luchita looks at Frank’s dog. “I wonder if dogs miss not being able to read,” she says.
This is typical of the kind of abstract, melancholy speculation Luchita is likely to voice when her blood-sugar level starts dropping. Mercifully, the waitress brings some bread to the table. Our little South American songbird slathers butter on a piece and tears into it as Donovan launches into his next discourse.
“I think KZYX has become a radio station for the rest of us. At our fund-raising marathon, for the very first time in my life, I was struck speechless. There were people at the station all night long — five hundred or more people — coming and going, parties, seven bands showed up. That’s what a radio station can do in the community. It’s a miracle. But I let others run the marathon. They took the station out of my hands and put it into the hands of the people of the community, and the community took ownership at that time.”
The waitress brings our food. Luchita wolfs down the lasagna in four minutes and then gets up to go.
“I want to talk with Sean for a while longer,” I say.
“I’ll wait in the car,” she says and storms off.
“I don’t know what she’s in such a mood about,” I say to Donovan. “I think she’s just tired. Anyway, what’s next for you and the radio station?”
“I’ve been trying to get Native Americans to participate in the station.”
“Got any takers yet?” I ask.
“Got some nibblers. I’ve gone to a couple of meetings. Day one they laid the guilt trip on me, placed the sins of the past at my feet. And I said, ‘Hey, come on, I’m Irish, Cromwell was kickin’ the shit outta my folks. But look, right now we have a radio station. You guys want to come down and play?’ ”
We pay the waitress and walk out to the car. Luchita’s lying in the back seat, a sweater over her face, both feet stuck out the window. “You okay, Luchita?”
“Yes,” she says.
“We can put you up at our place,” Donovan says.
Luchita lifts the sweater from her eyes. “First can we go for a walk in that meadow behind the radio station?” she asks me.
“Yeah, why don’t you two do that,” Donovan says. “I got some things to take care of at the station. Then we can go over to my place.”
As we turn into the station’s driveway, I see a young boy standing in the orchard wearing safety goggles and operating a weed whipper. Another vision out of a David Lynch movie. The sight puts me in a grim mood. We park the car and Luchita and I walk up a dirt road behind KZYX to a splendid meadow filled with ancient oak trees and swaying grass. Two deer stand on a knoll watching as we make our way to a log near the middle of the field. The sun comes through the trees, dappling our faces with light.
“It doesn’t get better than this,” I say. We reach the log and sit down. I put my arm around Luchita. She moves away. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Well, I dunno. I guess I just figured something out.”
“And what’s that?”
“I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“What!” I jump up and stand in front of her. “You choose to tell me now? When I’m right in the middle of doing this story?”
“I mean, there’s somebody I’ve been seeing, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Well, yeah, there is,” she says. “I want to drive back to the city now.”
We walk back to the station and I explain to Donovan that we need to leave. Luchita gives him a hug and then goes to the car. We both watch her walk away.
“No problem,” he says. “Come back any time. Listen, radio stations are just like love affairs.”
I don’t ask him to explain, but turn to leave.
“Wait. Let me read you something before you take off,” he says. Donovan pulls a dogeared book from the shelf. It’s Sex And Broadcasting: A Handbook On Building A Radio Station For The Community by alternative radio pioneer Lorenzo Milam. He holds it up and begins reading: “ ‘The need to communicate is as strong as the need to eat or sleep or love. We have come to a time when so many of the other needs have been met, and the driving force to be heard must be met in the same way. A radio station should not be just a hole in the universe for making money, or feeding egos, or running the world. A radio station should be a live place for live people to sing and dance and talk: talk their talk and walk their walk and know that they (and the rest of us) are not finally and irrevocably dead.’ That sums it up,” Donovan says, looking at me. “Oh, but here’s how you should end your article. Tell ’em that if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t.”
“I feel dead,” I say. Donovan pats me on the shoulder. We shake hands and I head for the car and the long, long, long drive home. Once on the road I flip over the Slim Harpo tape. The first song is “Rainin’ In My Heart.” Maybe Jung was onto something with that synchronicity nonsense.
We drive for nearly an hour before Luchita speaks. “Did you get enough material to write the piece?”
“Oh, I think so,” I say.
“Are you mad at me?” she asks.
“No,” I lie.
“You still promise not to mention me in the article?”
I look over at her, look deeply into her eyes. “Yes, Marcia,” I say. “I promise.”
This article first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner’s IMAGE magazine.
— Ed.
