40 Watts From Nowhere: A Journey Into Pirate Radio
By Sue Carpenter
Scribner, 225 pages, $23
Radio has been in the public eye a lot of late, with the removal of shock jocks like Bubba the Love Sponge and Howard Stern from the airwaves, and the low rumblings of congressional outrage over alleged indecency in the media, an issue that seems to get raised only in election years. From where I sit, however, the outrage cuts both ways, and I don’t mean the content of controversial shows.
What, after all, is more obscene than the multibillion-dollar giveaway known as the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to the virtual monopolization of many media outlets by deregulating restrictions on corporate ownership, while making it nearly impossible for independent operators to get on the air?
“[N]ow all the stations are silenced,” The Clash sang in the late 1970s, “’cause they ain’t got a government license.” A generation later, that refrain would come to resonate in the proliferation of small, unlicensed radio stations, many of them in California, which sprang up in reaction to the great telecommunications giveaway. “So what if I don’t have a license to operate?” Sue Carpenter asks in “40 Watts From Nowhere: A Journey Into Pirate Radio.” “I just couldn’t scrape together the $100 million I needed to buy my way onto the FM band in L.A. It can’t be so wrong to co-opt a little underutilized air space so music lovers can show off their record collections. It makes no sense that it’s illegal.”
“40 Watts From Nowhere” is a highly readable, even breezy account of Carpenter’s three-plus years as an illegal broadcaster, first with San Francisco’s KPBJ and then at KBLT in Los Angeles, where she earned indie-rock cult status before being shut down by the FCC in 1998. Although her involvement with radio quickly became all-consuming, Carpenter–now a feature writer at the Los Angeles Times (a Tribune Co. paper)–initially saw it as a lark, a way to give some focus to her life. As a San Francisco legal secretary, she’d been doing little more than drifting, hanging out and going to clubs. “The more I think about pirate radio,” she says early in the book, “the more I like the idea of creating something unique and totally my own. I need to make a radical shift to get myself out of this rut I’ve been living in.”
For someone interested in pirate radio, the Bay Area in the mid-1990s was a kind of mecca, a hotbed of radio radicalism. At the center of the action was Stephen Dunifer, whose station, Radio Free Berkeley, was waging legal war against the FCC. Dunifer, Carpenter explains, “knows the legal system well enough to understand that his case won’t be decided for years and has taken advantage of the judicial lag time to jump-start an illegal-radio revolution. He designs his own transmitters and sells them to aspiring pirates around the country.”
Eventually, Carpenter bought a Dunifer rig and began broadcasting out of her apartment, airing an eclectic mix of punk, rock, ’60s soul and even Mel Torme. When, after a few months, she was offered an editorial job at a small southern California music magazine, she shuttered the San Francisco station, packed her transmitter and set up shop in Los Angeles.
It is there that Carpenter’s story really takes shape, as she uses her new station to carve a place for herself in a landscape she can’t comprehend. “I feel completely out of place in this city,” she laments. “Los Angeles is hideous, with its endless strip malls and stucco, perma-haze and freeways. That’s to say nothing of the people. All I can see are the stereotypes. Men who could bench press their pickup trucks. Women whose bodies are so skinny they could slide through doors without opening them, assuming their breast implants didn’t get in the way.”
Still, as the book progresses, Carpenter lays down roots in spite of herself, as KBLT becomes a community of its own. That’s a particularly compelling aspect of her narrative, the way the station functions as a cultural magnet, pulling in deejays, bands and listeners, all united by a common bond. At times this even leads to a blurring of boundaries, with Los Angeles punk icons Mike Watt and Don Bolles hosting programs, and industry heavyweights like Howie Klein, president of Reprise Records, or Liza Richardson and Trish Halloran of KCRW, Los Angeles’ biggest NPR affiliate, stopping by to do guest spots.
“True music lovers,” Carpenter writes, “are attracted to the station for what it represents: absolute freedom. KBLT is the only station in L.A. where DJs can play anything and everything they want.” By the end of the station’s run, this means more than 100 deejays, each with a two-hour time slot, broadcasting 14 hours a day, seven days a week. “We now have entire shows devoted to country, jazz, Latin, soul, lounge, bop, folk, punk, rock, jungle, dance, pop, kitsch, French, and gospel,” the author crows, “as well as shows that mix any or all of the above. I couldn’t have programmed the station better if I tried.”
What’s charming about all this is Carpenter’s enthusiasm, her wonder at the station’s popularity. That gives the book an openness, drawing us to the personal story and the larger questions underneath. I’m not suggesting that “40 Watts From Nowhere” is in any way a diatribe–although Carpenter does make clear where she stands. It is, however, very much a book about freedom, about the value of identity, of autonomy, of taking risks in the name of fulfilling oneself.
The message is so strong that it overcomes the book’s occasional lapses, most notably Carpenter’s tendency to sketch characters too broadly. The deejays, for example, are an amorphous blur, and even the most central figures–like the author’s boyfriend, Jay–seem slightly hollow, drawn in two dimensions, if at all.
Yet in the end, that seems oddly appropriate, for the real protagonist is the station itself. Carpenter, after all, is trying to create a collective personality based on mutual trust and passion, an alternative to the mindless buzz of commercial radio, “where the playlists are about as long as my thumbnail and ads get as much airtime as the music.”
Although KBLT is not overtly political, the existence of the station ties back into the idea of the airwaves as a public trust, owned by the citizens and reflective of the culture of which it is a part. Radio, Carpenter tells us, “should be tied to its community . . . it should uplift its listeners by airing music they might not know they even want to hear.” This is an essential point, for it suggests that rather than a form of theft, pirate radio is a way to “do” democracy, to offer a more diverse range of voices than the FCC allows. In that regard, it’s a quintessentially American activity, progressive and populist–revolutionary even, in the most liberatory sense of the word.
Of course, the trouble with such a reading is that the FCC doesn’t see it that way, either now or then. Because of that–and despite the thrill of Carpenter’s cat-and-mouse games with the authorities–“40 Watts From Nowhere” can’t help but raise serious questions about corporate media ownership and the effect it has on what we hear. With only a few conglomerates owning so many stations, it’s inevitable that unpopular voices will be shut out, that vague standards of propriety will restrict the free flow of ideas. Such matters are at the root of the current uproar over alleged indecency, just as they were central to the rise and fall of KBLT.
