Page 31 - the NOISE October 2012

“A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.”
Maybe if we yell loud enough, they will hear us.
— TBZ
Hoots and Hellmouth
Salt
sonaBLAST
jjjj
REVIEW’d
— Lester Bangs
where the dish is.
The main amplifier is the same kind of receiver I have for my
stereo at home (meaning nothing fancy). There’s two turntables, a CD player, a dual cassette deck with one of the doors missing, a two channel DJ mixer with a cheapo built-in microphone, and a four-way junction box that includes an 1/8 inch plug for an MP3 player or laptop. Except for the transmitter and the dish, all the equipment could have been found at Savers or Goodwill or a ga- rage sale. A lot of it is held together with duct tape.
How do you know you’re on the air? Well, you simply tune the station in on a portable radio/CD player, the kind with two inch speakers that ten year old girls get for their birthday, and crank that sucker up. Not too loud, or the mic will start feeding back.
The entire operation gets its juice from a single power strip (piggybacking a second one) with an adaptor on the end go- ing into a two-prong wall socket. That’s it. The whole damn sta- tion. The first time I came in there, the plug was hanging out at a 45-degree angle. I rigged it with some duct tape so now it sits full in the outlet.
Technophobes have better stereo setups than this. Everything looks like it might fall apart at any minute. Sometimes it does.
THIS IS HOW EASY IT IS TO GET ON THE RADIO.
75% of the time, KWHY doesn’t exist. If you try finding it when the sun is up, you just get static because the transmitter is off. The earliest any program starts is 6PM. The broadcast day ends when the beer is gone or when the DJ is too loaded to operate the equipment anymore. There’s some REAL weirdos on here. I think I recognize a few of their voices, but I can’t be sure.
Like I said, KWHY’s wattage is so low the FCC has no jurisdic- tion over it. That means we can play and say whatever we want. The first time I uttered the f-word on the air was truly liberating. I immediately said it six more times in a row, just because it felt so damn good. The novelty hasn’t quite worn off yet.
Wednesdays are my night. I cart over about 30 LPs and a handful of CDs from home. I’ve always wanted to hear bands like Husker Du, Mission Of Burma, Big Black, Fugazi, Drive Like Jehu, The Melvins, Guided By Voices, Skinny Puppy, Bastro, The Fall, Gang Of Four, and Pere Ubu on the radio and now I’ve made it happen. Sometimes I talk, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes the albums skip really bad. Sometimes the needle gets all fuzzy and you have to lift it off the record and go brrt brrt with your finger and put it back on.
The other week I played nothing but Frank Zappa for four solid hours. It was awesome. I’m thinking of bringing in Live At Carn- egie Hall 1961 by Lenny Bruce and spinning the whole thing, all six sides. Maybe follow it with some Lord Buckley. It really frees you up when you realize no one is listening except maybe the other DJs. Perhaps that situation will change.
I invited John Abrahamsen over to take a look at KWHY’s setup because I knew he’d get a kick out of it and he sure did. He said, “Well, this just proves you don’t need hundreds of thousands of
dollars to run a radio station!” And he’s right.
Radio Free Flagstaff and KWHY may have radically different
Hoots & Hellmouth; Yellowcard
approaches, but the intended result is the same: to let the voices of our community be heard. No matter how incoherent they are. Except for KZXK (98.9 FM), all of Flagstaff’s radio stations are cor- porate owned. That means they are all driven by one goal: profit. None of them are interested in doing anything beneficial for our city. But some of us are. And the best way to get the ball rolling is when there’s people behind it.
The best way I can describe this somewhat diverse and very solid album would be to compare it to G Love and the Special Sauce, but with no attempt at funk, and with the caveat that if G Love played good music, rather than the swill he pedals to the barefooted and smelly masses.
G Love’s bland version of what he calls funk is pretty much the apex of what this reviewer would call bad and not bad as in good, just straight up, turn that sh*t off right now bad.
Hoots and Hellmouth definitely have similar sensibilities. The stuff that crowds in Flagstaff and Northern Arizona seem to gath- er for- acousta-folk that’s vaguely indie, or at least the kind that states Modest Mouse as an influence just for that credibility, but have far more in line with oh, Lenny Kravitz of something. John
Mayer? I don’t know.
Yellowcard
Southern Air
Hopeless
jjj
— FC
Remember that place off Ocean Avenue? Yeah, you do. Well after a two year hiatus and a mediocre album, Yellowcard is back perhaps better than ever. Their latest, Southern Air, is truly a phe- nomenal endeavor from a band whose mainstream success was unparalleled at the might of their power in 2003. Their latest comes in the form of a nostalgic white knight, willing to defend those requesting from the demons of Dubstep that have been invading the music scene since Sonny Moore shaved half his head, seemingly swapped his one ‘Y’ chromosome for a second
‘X’, and took on the stage name Skrillex.
Southern Air is a somewhat misleading name, along with the
album’s heavenly bridge to southern-dome cover, as the album’s tracks have about as much twang as Pavarotti. Yellowcard went with the ever-resilient ten-song-release technique, and the al- bum’s almost 40-minute length is fitting.
The album’s first track, “Awakening,” is a high powered and surprisingly touching song, a requiem for the dream singer Ryan
>> ContInuEd on 32 >>
thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news magazine • OCTOBER 2012 • 31