The KALX holiday party is our Cannes, Met Gala, and Oscars for audiophiles of the East Bay. Celebrities, known by their DJ names, walk the linoleum floor into the venue. They sport their finest looks, mostly band t-shirts.
Inside, 50 of our DJs mingle under multicolored string lights. The Silver Hawaiian in a Black Sabbath T-shirt sits next to Control Issues in a suit and tie. “I honestly didn’t think that the station would be back so soon [from Covid.]” I overhear them say. I agree. It is the busiest I’ve seen our little hovel in the basement of this Berkeley academic building.
Framed platinum records hang on the wall, lined with tinsel. They are gifts from artists in appreciation of the station’s promotion of their work, which rose to fame when it wouldn’t be played on other stations.
I meet E-Lit, the programmer and mind behind Yo KALX Raps!, our bi-weekly Hip-Hop specialty show. He spends hours each week removing the expletives from new albums so we can confidently play them on air. Sly Ida hears of an interview I just did with the Bangladeshi DJ collective Bhai Bhai Soundsystem and recommends I check out the album 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat from our library. I quickly type the recommendation and send it off to Hasib, my friend with Bhai Bhai.
I talk to the station manager, Tim Lynch, about a show with this Argentinian-based Cumbia band I’m going to record. He excitedly shows me how to do multitrack recording using the new recorder we just got from listener donations.
A white elephant commences around a table of LPs and CDs. ec0fr3ak shouts, “Number one, come on up.” It’s a vinyl record by the Chainsaw Lullabies. The crowd’s decibel level changes as more numbers are called based on the popularity of the music or the station’s relationships to the band members. A Brian Eno album seems to be a crowd favorite. I originally picked up a Pentangle album (the British improv band from the 1960s), but it was quickly stolen. The second wrapped vinyl I chose has no artist name, but the cover is stamped with the block print of a misshapen bicycle wheel.
Lance D’Amour, in a Double Dare game show T-shirt, walks up to me. “That’s a bootleg copy of the Desperate Bicycles,” he says. The Desperate Bicycles were an East London-based DIY band active in the late 1970s. They lived by their motto: “It’s cheap. It’s easy. Go and do it.” Fervently anti-corporate, The Desperate Bicycles recorded, produced, and distributed records on their own. They included an account of each step of this process in each album they sold, almost as a recipe for other musicians, hoping to bring sound into this world. Their first pressing of 500 cost 153 pounds to make—3 hours of studio time, sleeves, vinyl.
Our conversation is interrupted by Tim on a ladder trying to take a group picture. “Thank you all for making KALX what it is,” he says from his perch, “The best damn college radio station in the country, and probably the world.”
Words by Christopher LeBoa
