What This County Needs: Art With...

In the 1980s, the Orange County theme song in the highbrow arts went something like this:

Hush little baby, don’t you cry, daddy’s gonna buy you a performing arts center for $73 million.

The Brens and Segerstroms showed us how you get things done around here: With real estate money, and lots of it.

In traditional arts circles, they call folks like that patrons; in the more earthy precincts of rock and pop, we just call ‘em sugar daddies. And a sugar daddy (or mama) is just what the county pop scene needs in the 1990s.

Here’s the first assignment for our as-yet-unrecruited rock-loving sugar parent: Ante up $20 million or $30 million or so, buy out one of the stronger-signaled Orange County-based radio stations and turn it into something a music fan can treasure.

Being owned by a sugar daddy whose only aim is to make enough money to keep the station in good operating order, the station would not be a slave to the corporate profit imperatives that have turned all of today’s rock stations into mindless eunuchs. Those of you who really want to hear New Kids on the Block or Phil Collins would be welcome to turn elsewhere. KDAD (or KMOM) would appeal to the alert, the curious, the intense.

It would be run by music-knowing, music-loving disc jockeys who would throw out all bottom-line formats and formulas and play an insightful, broadening, genre-jumping, history-conscious mix that would draw on all the music of the rock era and its important precursors without meandering into navel-gazing esoterica. The station would never pander, but it would always invite. And there would be no doubt that it would be an Orange County station. Plenty of air time would be devoted to performers on the local scene and to tie-ins with local concerts being played by national acts.

Once the airwaves have been made safe for intelligent life, our daddy could provide a dose of sugar for the anemic local club scene--with ample money budgeted for lawyers to impress upon the county’s traditionally recalcitrant public officials that grass-roots musical enterprises have as many rights as any other business.

Where to find a sugar daddy? Do the Bren and Segerstrom kids like rock? How big is their allowance, anyway?

Would Bruce Springsteen or Sting be interested in buying out KEZY? Instead of jumping self-importantly into environmental issues that others are better qualified to address, would it be too much for our moneyed rock heroes to start investing in the betterment of their own domain?

I wish.