Charlie Goodman (CG): You're on Excellent Radio here in Grover Beach, California ...
Stephen Dunifer (SD): Charlie, what are the overall goals you're trying to accomplish with Excellent Radio; and, how are you going about accomplishing them?
CG: Well, we took our queue from what you were doing at Free Radio Berkeley and we wanted to take it another step by actually showing how a micropower radio station could be a tool to refabricate the community. We sprung off of a show called "Father of Lies Versus the Mother of Invention."
SD: You may want to explain that one a little bit.
CG: The "Father of Lies" was a fictitious planet that was ruled by a television. We saw micropower radio as the answer to the social breakdown caused by the "Father of Lies."
SD: In terms of re-fabrication, perhaps you could give us examples of things that happened here on the station that have helped re-fabricate the community and bring it together to explore issues and find some sort of common ground.
CG: The first thing that micropower radio does is evens the playing field. We are right here on Grand Avenue and the door is always open so that we can just draw anybody in off the street. Indeed, that's how the radio station really got going. Very quickly we realized the quickest way we could be valuable was to look for the problems in our particular town and try to figure out how a micropower radio station could solve them. One big problem we have around here is getting a school bond passed. The local high school has about three times more people than it can stand, but we watched a school bond issue get defeated over and over. It was necessary really to hear from the kids and their parents as to the impact of that vote. We asked people what was wrong with the town, and how could a micropower radio station help. We then made an offer to the city to broadcast their city council meetings. We are particularly lucky here in that there was a feeling by the city council that they wanted their meetings more public and they wanted participation, so ...
SD: I understand there was a rather humorous moment where they actually asked for the opinion of the city attorney because of the station not being licensed by the FCC.
CG: They wanted to know about their liability, yeah.
SD: Right and what did the attorney say?
CG: He seemed to feel it might even be illegal not to accept an offer to broadcast the meetings and that the issue of whether or not they were violating the law was moot.
SD: I understand there was also a problem between skateboarders and the city government that the station helped resolve in an excellent way.
CG: I think we are still resolving that issue. It was the first time that young people and old people alike started to actually talk about what their needs were in the community. I think it kind of turned some heads around a little bit in that there were eloquent people on skateboards. Up to that point, I think it was looked at as just a youth sport rather than as a social activity having some thirty or forty years of history. So, they formed a task force and a group to raise money and consciousness about skateboarding, and to look at recreation, and how skate parks could be money well spent.
SD: Perhaps you could describe briefly the type of programming that you present to the community and, what the process is for people coming on the air. How do people find you and become part of that process?
CG: Initially, it seemed like my wife and I spent thirty-six hours a day here even though we were only on from noon until nine or ten o'clock at night. At first we were doing the programming to attract attention. We made sure we played absolutely nothing that the other radio stations were playing. Sometimes I would play the same song over and over for three hours because it gave me energy, and it attracted people here after they realized that this wasn't just another commercial station. My old friends from my National Public Radio days, when I did reggae, African, and avant garde shows, started coming out of the woodwork again to share a diversity of culture and music. Then some of the other folks that I knew who had an interest in the environment started to come together. Then, the talk shows and the nutritional shows started to build.
Right now we have a pretty hot line up full of old time DJs that are known the world over. They are real musicologists, who share what they have with no reluctance whatsoever. It's not an ego thing. It's much more of a giving thing. Now they're teaching young people. I'm really proud of the musical line-up that we have here. I'm also very proud of the fact that the Spanish-speaking community has come forth and really turned the station around. Alex and Maria come in with the best of salsa tropical and cumbia every weekday morning from seven 'til twelve. They started out with a Thursday slot that was only a three hour show and they were always asking me, 'When are we going to get some more hours.' At that point we had all our nights taken care of and they said, 'Give us the mornings.' Every single morning the phones are ringing off the hooks and they are doing dedications. I've had so many people come up to me that I don't even know and say, 'Your station plays great music.'
SD: What about news and public affairs, what are you doing in that direction?
CG: We are able to rebroadcast alternative radio tapes from up in the Bay Area. That really helps us to stay more relevant, and it helps to back up many of the local shows that have the same concerns. We also have been bringing on people from the air and water quality boards. You notice that we are surrounded by pollution from UNICAL and some of the biggest spills in history are underneath ...
SD: I saw one of UNICAL's "green washing" ads in one of the local weeklies ...
CG: Yeah, it's pretty sad, more corporate bread and circuses rather than facing their responsibilities. This station has had the effect that the good people on the public boards now feel like they have the ear and the backing of the community. So they are taking those extra steps and really holding polluters to the law. It is much easier to do that if more people become informed about something like methylbromide. We actually had an interesting little case where we were on the air talking to somebody from the air quality control board and in comes a guy, I believe from up around Richmond, where they had just had a release that caused a fire. Are you somewhat familiar with that?
SD: Oh yeah!
CG: And the community, rather than take the word of those government officials for what was coming down wind, bought their own machine to do some testing this summer on our own methylbromide situation. It all just happened spontaneously. He was in here looking for one of the hosts while on the radio we had somebody from the air quality board. They started talking and he offered to show them how to use this machine which was cost effective because you don't need lab work done and you don't need manpower hours. They got together and did a demonstration later. Evidently UNICAL was listening and they had actually bought a machine that they didn't know how to use. They ended up paying this guy to show them how to use it [Laughter]. Ultimately, he showed that there was large overspray down further south in Ventura county. Locally here, we were starting to find out just how many residential areas were actually in this overspray area. So, you never know who might show up here or what kind of effect that person might have.
SD: Right.
CG: We're doing the work that journalism used to do. So much of that is excluded now that it's pretty easy for us to have a big effect by comparison.
SD: When you mention the job journalism used to do, I think of the CIA-Contra/ cocaine/ crack expose where the San Jose Mercury is the only paper that's really trying to do an investigation. All the 'trained dogs' of the Establishment are just barking on command, that is the Washington Post, L.A. Times, and the New York Times. There is a major gap in any sort of investigative or advocacy journalism. There is so much that is kept below the surface and instead we just get essentially tabloid journalism whether it's in print or broadcast media. Do you feel that you are able to counter that with what you are doing here?
CG: Oh, absolutely! This Friday we ran a show that was called 'Violence: Reflections of a Voiceless Community'. It's pretty obvious that if you don't have a voice on the radio or in the press, the only way to get attention is to blow up buildings and release a statement. We didn't really want that to start happening in our community, and I think it was inevitable watching how the Telecommunications Bill was squeezing us all out of a voice. So, we started that show with the idea of diffusing anger and giving people an opportunity to peacefully solve problems. We found ourselves discussing the parallels between our situation and that of Germany and the rise of fascism where scapegoating was used to play people off against one another. Sometimes, we'd get so bummed out by our own discussions that we had to take a break and just watch cars go down the street and comment on them. After a while, we had to figure out how we could, as individuals and as a community, empower ourselves if we were just civil to one another. That would be the beginning of it. Then to understand that we are all in the same pile of people no matter who we were IDed as; and, we needed to get along because those that were taking the power from us were not about to reverse that situation.
SD: What plans do you have for the future of the station? Where are you going from here?
CG: I gather a lot of hope from some of things you are telling me that are available technologically. We have access to the Internet here. With as many other people doing micropower radio, we feel like our work is not in vain and is exploding in many different areas all at once. Our hope is to inspire people to recognize what a great tool radio can be. I don't think we ever thought we'd be on over a year and a half now. We got our letter from the FCC within a month and I don't think any of us really thought that this station would be here today. We just hoped we could pass on the idea that radio can be a great tool, and that communities with limited budgets should be looking at it as a pragmatic way to restructure for the future.
SD: You did also receive a visit from the FCC as I understand it, correct?
CG: Yeah, we did and it is strange how that worked out. We filed a Freedom of Information Act afterwards which filled in the questions we had about the complaint. What we found was that the complaint itself was a year old and that nobody had actually checked it out. Supposedly, we were blocking communications with Search and Rescue, which was pretty bogus. We checked it out with Search and Rescue to see if this was really true and nobody would respond. There wasn't any real complaint from them. We found it was about radio phones within this one block residential area where they are certainly not going to be doing much Search and Rescue. We might have broken into the communications of somebody's mobile communicator or something. So, we sent back east for a particular filter that would take care of this and we went off the air after we did the last city council meeting to show that we were more than willing to comply like any other radio station. We put in the filter which cleaned up the problem and then we went back on the air. When the inspector from the FCC came, he wasn't impolite at all. We had a good discussion, but he told us, 'Hey, buddy, you know they're selling off the air waves and that's a fact of life and you better get used to it.' We tried to explain that the Disney Corporation didn't actually live here, and that as a matter of principle that we were going to have to stay on the air. We've been broadcasting ever since.
SD: No further interaction with the FCC?
CG: No, other than the report from the FCC agent that he had come here and what little analysis he had done. It was strange because he didn't actually run a test to see if we were interfering with anything; and, the tests that he did make were without the new filter or even without the filter that came with the unit in the first place. We made a response to the letter through our attorney, Alan Korn, part of the National Lawyers Guild, saying we wanted to wait until the test case with Free Radio Berkeley had gone through the courts.
SD: It's not going to be resolved for the foreseeable time that's for sure and I think this is really giving all of us a breathing space to continue to grow and develop these stations and put more on the air. What is really critical in this whole thing is to reach a certain point where there are so many people on the air doing all kinds of creative things and these things become so much a part of the community that it's going to be hard for the FCC to extract them. Do you think the community would stand up to support and defend the station if the FCC really acted in a heavy manner?
CG: I know they care about the station. As to whether people would get off their butts and actually take a stand, I don't know. Certainly, there would be a recognizable void in the community if we weren't broadcasting. Micropower radio is better than a third political party when it comes right down to it because the programming is not just a matter of sound bites. It's way beyond putting another icon out there in front of us to vote for and us not taking responsibility for our own lives. So, I couldn't predict what might happen, but, it seems to me there would be an outcry.
