Music Picks May 25—May 31, 2016

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Music Picks May 25—May 31, 2016

 

WEDNESDAY 5/25

ROCK

LA CERCA

A Tucson, Arizona-based rock ’n’ roll outfit, La Cerca pulls in elements of ’90s-era indie rock, lo-fi soul, classic rock and jazz to make something that sounds like it was created during a time when Pavement, Built to Spill and Sonic Youth were the reigning tastemakers. With distorted guitars, melodic and sweet vocals, and catchy hooks, these guys are a throwback to all that was good about the alt-rock underground. Their 2014 album, Sunrise for Everyone, which was recorded in Tucson’s famed Waterworks Studios has been called the band’s “grand statement and masterpiece.” CAT JOHNSON
INFO: 9 p.m. Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $8. 429-6994.

THURSDAY 5/26

FUSION

TODD MOSBY & THE NEW HORIZONS ENSEMBLE

Described as a genre-defying guitarist, composer and improviser, Todd Mosby blends jazz, bluegrass, folk and the classical music of North India into an otherworldly sound. A virtuoso artist, Mosby plays the Imrat guitar, a 20-stringed hybrid of the guitar and sitar, and is the only guitarist to be included in the famed Imdad Khani Gharana, India’s royal family of ustadt sitar dating back 500 years. Mosby’s New Horizons Ensemble comprises Grammy-nominated fretless bassist Michael Manring, celebrated multi-instrumentalist Premik Russell Tubbs, and Grammy-winning percussionist Jeff Haynes. CJ
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Don Quixote’s, 6275 Hwy. 9, Felton. $12/adv, $15/door. 335-2800.

FRIDAY 5/27

SOUL

SOUL TRACK MIND

Donovan Keith was a clean slate when he arrived in Austin in 2008. Up to that point, he’d never fronted a band, and couldn’t play an instrument. But in no time, he and a group of musicians he’d met were the hottest soul revivalists in the city. Rather than going for sweet soulful ballads or funky dance jams, they harken back to the hard-edged, horn-driven R&B sound, mixing in just a dash of blues, funk and pop while they’re at it. It’s catchy and accessible for folks who are keen on ’60s R&B, but don’t like to dig through crates. They’re like the Black Keys version of classic soul music. AARON CARNES
INFO: 9 p.m. Pocket, 3102 Portola Drive, Santa Cruz. $10. 475-9819.

REGGAE

STEPHEN “RAGGA” MARLEY

Bob Marley had a lot of kids. Ziggy has been the most visible, but there are several other talented Marleys out there. Stephen “Ragga” Marley certainly deserves the attention he’s been getting. Son of Bob and Rita Marley, he’s racked up several Grammy awards, and his special skill is something he didn’t get from his father—he’s a ragamuffin master. For years, Stephen had been involved with other Marley projects, but it wasn’t until 2007 that he released his own solo record, Mind Control, and it rightfully soared to the top of the reggae charts. AC
INFO: 9 p.m. Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $28/adv, $32/door. 429-4135.

CLASSIC COUNTRY

CAROLYN SILLS COMBO

Local powerhouse Carolyn Sills is the real deal of throwback country music. She has enough soul, heart, style, and swag to convince audiences and listeners that they may have been transported to an era where country swing ruled the waves, juke joints were the place to be, and heartache had a kick like a mule. On Friday, Sills and her combo of ace musicians drop their new album, Dime Stories Vol. 2, a record packed from start to finish with all the lonesome wails, tongue-in-cheek humor, and late-night reflection you’d expect from a classic country gem. If you’re a local roots fan and you haven’t yet heard Sills, it’s time to get tuned in to one of the most exciting acts around. Also performing: Miss Lonely Hearts and the McCoy Tyler Band. CJ
INFO: 9 p.m. Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $12/adv, $15/door. 423-1338.

FRIDAY & SATURDAY 5/27 & 5/28

SKA

ENGLISH BEAT

English Beat has been coming through town a lot lately. Maybe it’s because Dave Wakeling, the leader of the English 2 Tone band (part of the U.K.’s late-’70s ska revival movement) lives in California now. And man, he has been having fun lately. It doesn’t matter who’s backing him, Wakeling brings the infectious ska dance party spirit of English Beat’s phenomenal three albums to life on stage. Compared to other ska bands from their era, English Beat dipped much more heavily into the New Wave realm and wrote some of the best pop songs of their time period. AC
INFO: 9 p.m. Moe’s Alley, 1535 Commercial Way, Santa Cruz. Fri: $23/adv, $28/door; Sat: $25/adv, $30/door. 479-1854.

SATURDAY 5/28

JAPANESE FLUTE

JOHN KAIZAN NEPTUNE

The Japanese end-blown wooden flute known as the shakuhachi possesses an instantly recognizable sound that evokes sylvan settings, wind-rustled leaves and timeless reveries. But in the hands of John Kaizan Neptune, the ancient instrument takes on countless new identities. Born in Oakland and now based in Japan, he’s become one of the world’s most respected shakuhachi practitioners, and for this Japanese Culture Fair of Santa Cruz fundraising concert he’s performing with a stellar cast of musical explorers similarly versed in Japanese traditional forms, jazz and improvised music. He’s joined by drummer Robert Belgrade, koto master Shirley Muramoto, Eien Hunter-Ishikawa on xylophone, and Kyle Abbott, an evangelical champion of the shamisen, a traditional Japanese three-string lute. ANDREW GILBERT
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $20-$40. 427-2227.

MONDAY 5/30

REGGAE

GONDWANA

Featuring nine musicians, it’s no wonder Chilean reggae artists Gondwana named their band after an ancient, pre-Pangea supercontinent. For almost 30 years, the group has embraced a strong path of peace and love, spreading the word of Jah through a mixture of Latin and reggae melodies. Not only will they get the crowd dancing, but their message of love is sure to fill plenty of hearts. MW
INFO: 9 pm. Moe’s Alley. 1535 Commercial Way, Santa Cruz. $20/adv, $25/door. 479-1854.

IN THE QUEUE

HAPA

Long-running Hawaiian fusion outfit. Wednesday at Kuumbwa

FATHER

Atlanta-based rapper and head of Awful Records. Wednesday at Catalyst

ONE LANE BRIDGE

Acoustic trio comprising William Coulter, Aria DiSalvio and John Weed. Wednesday at Don Quixote’s

LFZ

Guitar-based, experimental, improvisational, electronic project. Thursday at Crepe Place

MUSIC AND COMEDY

Standup comedy meets music with Richard Stockton, Cynthia Carle and Daniel Cainer. Sunday at Don Quixote’s

Be Our Guest: Redwood Mountain Faire

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Be Our Guest: Redwood Mountain Faire

 
The Redwood Mountain Faire is an annual highpoint of our local mountain music scene. Founded in the early 1980s, the faire brings together funk, roots, blues, rock and more for a laid back, family-friendly gathering of friends, food, drinks and grooves. This year’s fantastic lineup includes Orgone, Hot Buttered Rum, Scott Pemberton, Dead Winter Carpenters, Harpin’ Jonny, Pawn Shop Soul, Yarn, B-Side Players, and Rainbow Girls. As ever, proceeds benefit dozens of local service organizations doing tremendous work in our community. 

INFO: 11 a.m., Saturday and Sunday, June 4 and 5 at Roaring Camp, 5401 Graham Hill Road, Felton. $20-$45; kids 12 and under are free; parking: $5. More info: redwoodmountainfaire.com
WANT TO GO? Go to santacruz.com/giveaways before 11 a.m. on Friday, May 27 to find out how you could win a pair of tickets to the show.

Love Your Local Band: Miss Lonely Hearts

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Love Your Local Band: Miss Lonely Hearts

The Northern California country scene is a small, tight-knit group of individuals, and in the past five years, locals Miss Lonely Hearts have been among its biggest boosters.
Now on the cusp of releasing their fourth album, Lost Highway, they’ve not only expanded their own audience, but have also worked hard to bring in touring country acts from outside the state. Not the big, polished country radio bands, but the ones putting out real, raw country.
“Current modern country is so abysmal. It’s closer to Janet Jackson than it is to Alan Jackson,” says frontman Wyatt Hesemeyer. “In Oregon and Washington, there’s more reception for country music, but California is pretty dry. We’ve been doing our best to make events where people can see that country music is fun and worth going out to.”
Miss Lonely Hearts’ latest record clearly demonstrates both their love for traditional, honky-tonk-influenced country, and their unique take on the music. Their first three records focused on original music, but this one is all covers, as they wanted to document the classics they’ve been playing at shows since their formation. That includes songs by Merle Travis, Johnny Cash, George Jones, and even a countrified version of Judas Priest’s “Breaking The Law.”
They don’t just play these songs straight up, but give the music, like their own original country tunes, a darker tone.
“We’ve really tried to bring out a lot of the darkness of these old songs,” Hesemeyer says. 

INFO: 9 p.m. Friday, May 27. Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $12/adv, $15/door. 429-4135

What’s your theme song?

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What’s your theme song?

““Love and Happiness” by Al Green. What more could you want in life?”

Margalete Ezekiel

Santa Cruz
Teacher

““China Cat Sunflower” by the Grateful Dead. Because it says everything and nothing at the same time.”

Courtney Webb

Santa Cruz
Chocolatier/Batik Artist

“My [own] song “Paz y Libertad.”  Pete Seeger used to sing it. It’s about peace for everybody. ”

Jose Luis Orosco

Santa Cruz
Professional Singer/Educator/Author

““Born to Be Wild.” Because you should never let go of the wild. You should stay wild.”

Beth Regardz

Santa Cruz
Cabrillo Faculty

““My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. Damn right, it’s better than yours.””

Greg, Zach and Ava Orse

Santa Cruz
Ag Worker

Pour Taproom Opens in Santa Cruz

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Pour Taproom Opens in Santa Cruz

Yogurtland built an empire out of the simple fact that people want to serve themselves exactly what they want. So when is a bar going to apply that model to beer? How about now?
Pour Taproom, which opens on Saturday, May 21, in Santa Cruz, will do exactly that. Pour will have 60-plus beers and eight wines on tap (and craft root beer for kids). Plus, they’ll be serving excellent food to go with them. GT spoke with co-owner/operator Christopher Jonathan Reno, who explained the seemingly sci-fi process and the best way to enjoy self-service beer.
Why would someone want to pour their own drinks?
CHRISTOPHER JONATHAN RENO: Everyone that goes to a bar has fantasized about pouring their own beers. I have. It’s not just filling up a whole glass. It’s pour as much as you like, as little as you like. If you want to just grab a couple drops, you can. If you’re absolutely repulsed by a beer, you don’t have to sit there and keep drinking it. The whole thing is predicated on tasting, just testing quality over slamming quantity. You get a chance to try a bunch of beers you wouldn’t normally be able to sample in a small scale.
Should people mix flavors like they do at 7-11 with their sodas?
I’ve done that before, and it’s a blast, where you can throw several different flavors in. I’d be interested in seeing what an Old Rasputin with a dash of Framboise [wild raspberry Belgian beer] would taste like. That would be really fun. It lets you do things you can’t do at a traditional bar.
How does the whole process work?
Once you walk in, you hand over your vitals. What your ID does is it allows us to scan the bracelet. Once you have that on you, it basically gives you access to be able to taste 32 ounces. Once it hits that 32-ounce limit, you come check back in. It’s a free-range tasting thing where you don’t have people running around the hall drinking three gallons of beer. Once you have your bracelet, you go up to the wall. Each beverage has a screen above it with the beer, the style, the specs, and the taste profile. There’s a little Pour Taproom logo burned in on the screen frame. That activates the tap handle. It logs how many ounces you’ve poured, of which beer. At the end of the evening it’ll show exactly everything you’ve had to drink.
That’s way more sci-fi than I imagined.
Once the novelty of the screens wears off, you kind of forget about the whole tech aspect of it and you’re left with the beers. It allows the traditional bartender to be out on the floor, helping people out. It’s not like I’m getting rid of bartenders. I’m moving them. I don’t think it’s going to eclipse the traditional bar, and I don’t think it’s getting rid of the bartender.

Pour Taproom is at 110 Cooper St., Santa Cruz. 566-4948.

Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard’s Bold Petite Sirah

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Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard’s Bold Petite Sirah

Friends had told us about the new lighting in the Seacliff Inn in Aptos, so we decided to check it out. Local lighting artist Roy Johnson has done an incredible job, virtually transforming the bar and grill into a luminous wonderland. His circular display of fish in a sea of kelp is stunning.
And what better way to experience the new lighting than to head to Severino’s, the hotel’s restaurant, for dinner? Customers have the option of dining outside on a heated patio, where the garden and koi pond provide a lovely setting of peace and calm.
Severino’s wine selection includes several good local bottles. We chose a Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard Petite Sirah 2012, one of winemaker Jeff Emery’s full-bodied creations.
As a general rule, white wine pairs well with fish, but when I saw Emery’s Petite Sirah on the wine list, I simply had to have it with our calamari appetizer and my halibut special. My husband had ribs—a perfect partnership with the spicy Sirah, full of big flavors and bold fruit.
Emery sources his grapes from San Antonio Valley’s Pierce Ranch in Monterey County and turns them into a well-made Petite Sirah ($19.75) with “many layers of complexity including deep bush berries, exotic spices and hints of black pepper.” It’s not surprising, then, that the wine was awarded 90 points by Wine Enthusiast magazine. “We suggest giving it some time in a decanter to wake up everything lurking inside,” says Emery. “Or cellar it for a few more years.”
Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard and Quinta Cruz, 334-A Ingalls St., Santa Cruz, 426-6209, santacruzmountainvineyard.com. Severino’s Bar & Grill, 7500 Old Dominion Court, Aptos, 688-8987. severinosbarandgrill.com.

Farm-to-Table Dinners

The first in the summer series of farm-to-table wine dinners at Chaminade Resort & Spa is coming up on Friday, June 3. Enjoy a five-course meal paired with Equinox/Bartolo wines. Reception is at 6 p.m. and dinner at 6:30 p.m. Cost is $110 per person all inclusive. Other dates are July 8, Aug. 5, Sept. 9 and Oct. 7. Visit chaminade.com for info and reservations.

Film Review: ‘High-Rise’

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Film Review: ‘High-Rise’

Rumor has it that Tom Hiddleston will be the next James Bond. Too bad, in a way—Hiddleston is far too interesting and versatile an actor to be trapped in such a one-dimensional role. (Although, I was impressed at how Daniel Craig managed to revitalize the part, and the franchise.) But if Hiddleston does step into Bond’s Aston Martin, he probably won’t make too many more bizarro movies like High-Rise.
Not exactly another (dreary) dystopian future story, High-Rise is an allegory of class warfare set within a 40-story apartment building in a bleak London subdivision. Separated from its neighborhood by acres of parking lot and an expressway, the building’s community of residents has evolved organically—the rich at the top, the working class on the bottom. And with no outside interference, the community becomes a law unto itself: the law of the jungle, it turns out, as soon as things start to go wrong, from the ground up.
Director Ben Wheatley and scriptwriter Amy Jump adapted the story from a 1975 novel by J. G. Ballard, an author known for his experimental science fiction. Filmmaking team Wheatley and Jump adopt Ballard’s time period: the men sport unfortunate side-parted flips and bad moustaches, the women clomp around in platform pumps, and everyone smokes incessantly. Technology consists of shoulder-braced videocams and piano-key tape recorders, with nary a smart phone nor laptop in sight. The film is set squarely at the dawn of the Thatcher era in Britain, as the divide between the haves and have-nots begins to widen.
Into this peculiar world steps Dr. Richard Laing (Hiddleston), who moves into a slick concrete, stone and steel apartment on an upper floor of the high-rise. (Hiddleston, clean-shaven and short-haired, doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo about the ’70s look, except for a discreet flare to his suit pants.) Quiet and reserved (when not gleefully peeling the skin off the head of a corpse to expose its skull to his students), Laing gamely tries to “fit into his slot” in the community.
He’s befriended by sexy Charlotte (Sienna Miller), who lives on the floor above, and Wilder (Luke Evans, in possibly the movie’s worst haircut). A would-be documentary filmmaker, Wilder is a rabble-rouser who lives on a lower floor with his sweet, enormously pregnant wife, Helen (Elisabeth Moss) and their kids; when the swimming pool mid-level is closed to them, Wilder leads an army of kids from the lower floors to occupy it.
Soon, Laing is also befriended by the architect of the building, Mr. Royal (Jeremy Irons). At the top of the heap, Royal’s plush penthouse suite includes a rooftop garden the size of a football field, complete with sheep, and the white horse belonging to his wife, (Sienna Guillory), who likes to dress up as Marie Antoinette. Laing and Royal start playing squash together, and from his unique perspective, moving among the lower and higher orders (although accepted only grudgingly by Royal’s sycophants and henchmen), Laing realizes that the entire complex is some sort of weird psychology experiment.
We do, too. Which is not such a bad thing, but the middle of the movie devolves into a lot of rich-vs.-poor clichés (the rich discuss “Balkanizing” the lower and central floors to play them against each other). And as crises like malfunctioning trash chutes, power outages, and spoiling food at the in-house grocery start to affect all levels, relentless, primal violence and candlelit orgies ensue. (All the incidental naked bodies remind us of movies actually made in the post-code ’70s, when filmmakers showed lots of nudity just because they could.)
It would be one thing if Laing’s discoveries led him to some sort of action. But he’s happy to embrace the “weird hierarchy” of the status quo; he does, belatedly, draw the line, but otherwise abstains from moral judgment, and sleeps with whichever women make themselves available to him. We all devolve into our worst selves, if given half a chance, the movie argues, but the viewer is not quite invested enough in any of these characters to find this tragic.

HIGH-RISE 
**1/2
With Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Luke Evans, and Elisabeth Moss. Written by Amy Jump. Directed by Ben Wheatley. A Magnolia Pictures release. Rated R. 119 minutes.

Preview: Jo Baker at Bookshop Santa Cruz

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Preview: Jo Baker at Bookshop Santa Cruz

Jo Baker seems to relish finding uncommon roads through common territory. She’s perhaps most recognized for her novel Longbourn, which turns Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice upside down, following the servants who work for Elizabeth Bennet and her family.
Baker’s new novel, A Country Road, A Tree, follows avant-garde novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett into France during the Nazis’ rise to power, where he befriends James Joyce, works for the French Resistance, narrowly escapes the Gestapo, and emerges to become one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
While prepping for her reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Thursday, May 26, Baker talked to GT about her new book.
How did you get the idea for A Country Road, A Tree?
JO BAKER: I studied Beckett at the Queen’s University of Belfast; I’d been fascinated by his persecuted, battered characters and the strange, hostile landscape they existed in. My tutor mentioned that Beckett had been stuck in France during the war, and had had to go into hiding. It was like a light bulb going on—a modern light bulb, the kind that takes a while to warm up. That was 20 years ago. Then, maybe 15 years later, kids in tow, we were travelling to the South of France by train, and I realized we were following the same route that Beckett had taken when fleeing south to the Zone Libre. The sense of place, and of movement, connected with that old thought about Beckett’s characters and their world. That’s when it began to seem like a possible story.
What did you find compelling about Beckett as a character?
His moral courage. Faced with a series of impossible choices, he consistently chose to do what was most humane, just and courageous. He had an uncommon sense of self. Alongside that, he was good company. He had a talent for friendship. He liked a drink. There’s a temptation to “read back” from later work and assume that the man himself was as austere and challenging and dark as the work. That’s in him, but that’s not the sum of him. Also, his early work went barely noticed. He dragged around this sense of failure and got on with things. I recognized that.
How did you re-imagine Beckett’s voice and ideas in the context of known facts?
I used the prose, plays and poems, along with biographical information and the collected letters. My notion was to extrapolate from what he himself wrote, said, or experienced. Everything had to be potential, justifiable, not just my decision, but something that had emerged from what I knew about him. Also, I don’t name him. Unnamed, he seemed to be much more accessible.
What did Beckett’s life add to your sense of occupied Europe?
His war is on a very human level—struggling along with refugees, scraping by. But he is very much the outsider in this world; apolitical, peripheral. This is not his country, he is beyond the locked-antlers struggles of nationalism. That, I think, makes the story unique. That, and the fact that he would go on to write, after the war, the work that would win him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
It’s risky to write about people and events that readers already know. What attracts you to this approach?
As a novelist, I’m trying to tell a good story, but I’m also working out questions or niggles about another writer’s work. I try to be as thorough as possible with the research, and to use that research with a kind of imaginative honesty. If I manage that, then I can look myself in the eye.
What kind of peripheral research did you do for the book?
I read memoirs of the Occupation and Resistance, as well as a good deal of fiction of the period. I did a bit of pottering around the Paris neighborhoods occupied in the novel, and spent some time in Roussillon, where Beckett was in hiding during the last years of the war. I also—cleverly—experienced failure as a writer. And I’ve been broke. I’ve walked around in shoes full of holes because I didn’t have the money to get them fixed. I had no idea at the time how useful that would prove to be.

Jo Baker will read from and discuss ‘A Country Road, A Tree’ at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 26 at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz.

Take Back Gets Flak

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Take Back Gets Flak

Besides advocating to make Santa Cruz a safer place, Take Back Santa Cruz (TBSC)’s Facebook page has also been heavily criticized for the way posters shame and lash out at vagrants and anyone who’s been arrested—whether or not they’ve been proven guilty. But in their search for new offenders, TBSC members seemed to turn on one of their own last weekend, inflicting their trademark judgmental sarcasm on a trusted insider.
In a news story published Saturday, May 20, the Santa Cruz Sentinel updated readers on an infamous hash oil explosion that happened on Beach Hill nearly three years ago. Three of the four defendants in that case are pleading not guilty, among them James Burtnett, one of TBSC’s most high-profile members.
That same day, someone posted the story to the TBSC page, suggesting that members attend the court hearings in September, and people began sarcastically sharing their two cents, including posts like, “Is this one of those victimless drug crimes I’ve been hearing about?”
The post highlighting the Sentinel story has since been taken down, but activist Denise Elerick, a critic of TBSC, says the whole event goes to show that criminal suspects are innocent until proven guilty for a reason.
Burtnett, who faces gun and drug charges, could not be reached for comment. TBSC founder Analicia Cube says Burtnett never held a leadership position, and that she doesn’t know him very well. “We’re all imperfect humans,” she says. “We all make mistakes. James was obviously involved in this situation in my mind, but this doesn’t change whether someone can be involved in our community.”
Cube, who stresses that it can be difficult to run a Facebook group of 13,000 people, says a TBSC administrator took down the post because the thread was getting nasty, not because it was about Burtnett. Cube adds that she has grown tired of constant criticism directed at her and the group.
“I don’t have a personal vendetta against Take Back Santa Cruz,” Elerick says. “But I am frustrated with their golden persona. It seems like it’s waning, but I get frustrated when I see them on KSBW as if they’re some authority. They’re just angry parents.”

KUSP’s Last Stand

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KUSP’s Last Stand

After enduring a tumultuous several months, KUSP is still on the air through at least the end of June, despite an albatross of debt and massive staff cuts to the community public radio station.
“We are indeed still here and still broadcasting,” General Manager Alex Burke says with a confident smile. Unfortunately, she’s currently the only employee left on KUSP’s payroll.
“We felt it was important to keep trying,” she says. “We heard from over 1,000 people during our last [fundraising] drive. Since the start of our new format we’ve heard from over 700 new members, which is pretty exceptional.”
Burke—who previously served as the station’s operations director and has been with the station since 2008—appointed GM on May 6, as the station prepared its final live broadcast that same day.
The station, 88.9 FM on the dial, had been spinning positivity just two and a half months ago when it hired interim GM Bonnie Jean Primbsch, who has since been laid off along with five others. In the weeks leading up to those layoffs, KUSP wrapped up its Mayday Campaign, which launched April 1, aiming to raise a minimum of $300,000 but securing only $114,000.
“In public radio, people, listeners always hear, ‘We’re going to go off the air if you don’t donate,’” Burke says. “But we really mean it. When we get to zero cash, we’re done.”
With the grim June deadline quickly approaching, KUSP is taking drastic measures to keep the lights on and the music flowing. In essence, KUSP is trying to revive itself and painlessly put itself to sleep at the same time.
“What we’re doing now is a two-track approach, which may seem contradictory to some people, but it’s what we have to do,” says board member Stephen Slade. Elected in January, Slade served as the station’s news director in the 1980s and as its development director a decade later. “One is to see if we survive, the other is to sell the station.”
While volunteers and board members have been searching for the miracle donor, the Pataphysical Broadcasting Foundation granted the Board of Directors the authority to sell the station’s license if necessary. So far, no concrete offers have been made. Rumors swirled that KSCO owner Michael Zwerling was interested in purchasing the license, but he denies it.
“I would prefer to help KUSP by underwriting local programs like it used to broadcast,” Zwerling wrote GT in an email.
The last few years saw several managerial shake-ups and a growing debt resulting primarily from programming fees to play NPR programs. KUSP is $780,000 in the red, with $450,000—roughly 58 percent—of that owed to NPR, American Public Media and Pacifica, a radio group based in Berkeley. “The handwriting has been on the wall for a while,” Slade says.
Last September, the nonprofit completely revamped their programming with a focus on music discovery. This meant cutting all NPR programming and choosing to air a mix of emerging musical artists with classic staples in each genre.
During the early stages of the change, they gained more than 700 new contributing members. However, it wasn’t enough. Since the Mayday Campaign ended, the station has raised an additional $10,000.
“We want to be able to say, ‘We tried to be stewards of the money we raised,’” says Burke.
Volunteers and former staff members have continued coming in to the station to help keep the airwaves alive. Burke may set the playlist for the day’s program, but several ex-programmers join her once a week to discuss their current favorite music and help choose which bands or songs to showcase.
“A lot of it isn’t Billboard hits, either,” she explains. “A lot of it really is emerging artists. We’ll pull stuff from bandcamp.com and play things we just discovered and love.”
“People are very passionate about it,” Slade says. “I’m pretty impressed how hard everyone is working and how stressed they feel about the situation we’re in.”
All of this begs the question: What can be done to save KUSP? Monetary donations, of course, are the first answer. However, the problem runs much deeper than that. The worlds of radio and music have changed immensely over the past decade, with more and more young listeners using online sites or apps like Spotify to find their music.
“I think [we] have to make it easy for a certain group of people,” agrees Burke. “You have to show them on their phone where they can get the app.”
Another part of the problem is how noncommercial stations operate in the increasingly cutthroat world of sponsored airwaves. Even now that the station is operating on a much smaller budget, the industry model of short-term emergency fundraising is not sustainable.
“I think it will be necessary for noncommercial, public stations to change their funding policy,” Zwerling says. “So that [underwriting] will become much less necessary to provide operating capital.”
Burke suggests KUSP could figure out alternative ways to raise money, such as regular fundraisers in the community or letting people donate at local stores.
“The organization needs to adapt to the current climate,” she says.
If KUSP, operating at $26,000 a month, makes it past the June deadline and continues to gain memberships, they will look into bringing back live voices from the community, in the hopes of rebuilding the programming they’ve been known for for the past 45 years.
“There’s a real potential to build a community of people who are excited about music and share it,” Burke says. “That’s why we do this.”

Music Picks May 25—May 31, 2016

Local music for the week of May 25, 2016
Read more

Be Our Guest: Redwood Mountain Faire

Orgone female lead
Win tickets to Redwood Mountain Faire at Roaring Camp June 4-5, 2016
Read more

Love Your Local Band: Miss Lonely Hearts

Miss Lonely Hearts plays at the Catalyst on Friday, May 27.
Read more

What’s your theme song?

Local Talk for the week of May 25, 2016.
Read more

Pour Taproom Opens in Santa Cruz

Be your own bartender at high-tech new beer spot
Read more

Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard’s Bold Petite Sirah

Winemaker Jeff Emery overachieves with 2012 vintage
Read more

Film Review: ‘High-Rise’

Class warfare runs amok in Ben Wheatley’s Ballard adaptation
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Preview: Jo Baker at Bookshop Santa Cruz

New novel ‘A Country Road, A Tree’ follows Samuel Beckett through World War II
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Take Back Gets Flak

On Facebook, Take Back Santa Cruz activists at criticize one of their own
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KUSP’s Last Stand

Public radio station works to save itself and prepare for a sale at the same time
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