RADIO : Is This the Best Job in L.A.? : Chris Douridas just plays the music he likes on KCRW-FM’s ‘Morning Becomes Eclectic.’ How does he get away with it? What’s there to get away with?

It’s a typical morning at KCRW-FM.

Chris Douridas, the host of the public radio station’s weekday morning music program, is running back and forth between his spot behind the mike and the library, grabbing CDs off the shelf that he feels like playing: indie-label rockers Sebadoh, French rapper MC Solaar, Dutch pop group Bettie Serveert, Me’Shell NdegeOcello teaming with Herbie Hancock for a jazz and hip-hop blend from an upcoming release.

His assistant is answering the phones, telling listeners what they just heard and whether it is available in local record stores.

Giant Sand, a quirky and beguiling alternative rock band that almost never gets radio play, is warming up in a spacious recording studio for a live performance.

“You can see that all of this happens spontaneously,” Douridas, host of “Morning Becomes Eclectic” and music director at KCRW (89.9), says as he punches buttons on his CD players, DAT recorder and radio soundboard while cuing up a track on an old-fashioned vinyl turntable.

“There’s not much science to it. Whatever we feel like playing, we pretty much just throw it on the air.”

For music lovers, Douridas, 31, has the dream job. He wakes up every weekday and from 9 to noon shares his favorite songs with his Southern California audience. There’s no playlist. No one tells him what he can and can’t do. And he meets, interviews and watches performances by everyone from the Afghan Whigs to Little Jimmy Scott to Jackson Browne to Kristin Hersh to Ry Cooder to obscure ambient bands like Low.

It is a job that, especially in the world of corporate-dominated commercial pop and rock radio, has practically vanished.

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Most disc jockeys just don’t get to turn their listeners onto the latest thing anymore. Instead, they are required to play only what is prescribed by a computerized list--with songs in “heavy,” “medium” or “light” rotation--created by professional programmers via market research, the input of radio consultants, the bullying of major record labels and sales charts that reflect the familiar tastes of the bulk of the audience. Adventure, experimentation, novelty are no longer a part of the equation--or the deejay’s job description.

“Back when I was a youngster in 1978, I used to be able to play anything I wanted,” said Jed (The Fish) Gould, who has been a deejay at KROQ-FM (106.7) for much of the past 16 years. “And it was thrilling to be excited about your 10 favorite songs and be able to play them all in a row.”

Soon, however, the role of the jock was reduced to picking two songs an hour, then one song a shift, then nothing, Gould said, as professional consultants and music directors came to dominate an industry that fell into the hands of corporations--such as KROQ owner Infinity Broadcasting--that paid tens of millions of dollars for individual stations in the 1980s. That personality-only role for the deejay prevails today at KROQ and most other stations, although “Jed the Fish” gets to play his “catch of the day”--one new song of his choice--each weekday at 4:40 p.m.

“It’s generally true that such tight control on the music makes for something bland and boring,” he said, “but when you pay $50 million for a radio station, it’s a big business, and like in any business, you want to control whatever you can to make sure you make money.”

“I’ve spent my career fighting for it, for free-form radio, but basically my feeling is that they have ruined an art form,” said Jim Ladd, longtime L.A. deejay for KLOS and the defunct but once preeminent rock ‘n’ roll station KMET, who currently works the night shift at KLSX-FM (97.1).

There, he can’t play anything he wants. But within the restricted format of what his bosses define as “classic rock,” he does put together sets of songs that attempt to tell some kind of story about a particular theme, such as politics or sex. Few jocks are even allowed that kind of creativity with the music.

“Everyone on the dial is following the well-traveled path to mediocrity,” Ladd said. “You get just a list of songs made up by some person at a computer, belching this stuff out, who doesn’t care if Joni Mitchell is followed by Black Sabbath. They don’t care about how music goes together. It’s soulless. It’s mindless. It’s just ‘This song is A-list rotation and these are B-list,’ and they think that’s the way to herd the sheep.”

Such a policy--especially the fear of playing anything unfa miliar or new--is a reason that many people have turned away from radio as a source for music, contends Mike Morrison, program director for KSCA-FM (101.9), which recently adopted a new music format--kind of a mellow cross between KROQ’s teen-aged alternative music mentality and KLSX’s oldies.

But while the station does play new music from relatively unknown bands like Toad the Wet Sprocket and Wild Colonials, it is not exactly a haven for those seeking a wildly new musical adventure ( see review, Page 84 ).

The station’s playlist is “carefully planned,” Morrison said, and most of the new songs on KSCA come from the latest albums of popular performers such as the Rolling Stones, the Pretenders, Counting Crows and Bonnie Raitt. Furthermore, about half the songs--from artists such as Elton John, Steely Dan, Dire Straits and Don Henley--come from the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Douridas was offered the job of KSCA’s morning drive-time deejay, but he decided to stay put at KCRW--in part, he said, because he had concerns over restrictions about what he could play. He believes that a freewheeling show similar to “Morning Becomes Eclectic” probably would be allowed on L.A. commercial radio only as a specialty program on weekends or late at night.

KSCA’s Morrison, who for now doubles as the station’s morning deejay, said: “The reason we couldn’t let Chris (Douridas) or anyone else play whatever they want every day is that this radio station was not intended to be the commercial equivalent of ‘Morning Becomes Eclectic’ followed by somebody else and something entirely different.

“Yes, we have a format, in that we have a method to our rotations and some songs get played more frequently than others. But that’s because we don’t want any confusion, at least at the beginning. We want to be consistent, 24 hours a day, so that people will be able to tune in and know that they are listening to this radio station. We might play a song you can hear on KROQ or one you might hear on KLOS, but we don’t want to play three songs in a row that you could hear on KROQ or KLOS. We’re not so inflexible, though, that our deejays don’t have room to play a request.”

But such a strict formula makes it extremely difficult to get airplay Please see Page 84 for new music and new bands that might not be instantly popular.

“That’s really the problem with radio today,” said Joel Amsterdam, director of press and artist development for Elektra Records. “The trick for a great radio program director, what I’d like to see, is to find a bunch of deejays who share your aesthetic and taste and let them go for it. If everything is too tightly formatted, it takes the fun out of it. But even so, even if it might be a little too classic rock, even if it’s not as eclectic as KCRW, KSCA really has been a breath of fresh air. They certainly have showed signs of taking risks with live performances and playing many artists that other commercial radio stations won’t even touch.”

The real heroes of record industry executives trying to find a break for some of their more obscure talents are deejays such as Douridas, who have the ability to champion artists they like, to talk about them on the air and to play their best song--not necessarily the single--several times over the course of a few weeks.

“That’s why Chris is so invaluable,” Amsterdam said. “He brings his great taste and passion and love for music to the airwaves, and unfortunately that just happens so rarely these days. So when you find someone like Chris, you cherish him. He loves great music and he’s never afraid to take chances.”

And he plays it first, often exposing L.A. audiences to music and artists long before their albums are even available. Douridas has been playing Wild Colonials, for example, for more than a year and invited them in to perform live before they had recorded their debut album, which has only recently been in heavy rotation on KSCA.

Similarly, he helped to build anticipation for Eddi Reader’s new album by playing songs off her British import before it was released here. He also invited her on his show to play live last year while she was recording the album (and she’ll be returning to the KCRW airwaves Monday morning). Commercial radio generally plays songs off a new album only when it becomes available in record stores.

“The most exciting thing about KCRW is how far upstream we can be in the creative process,” Douridas said. “Very often we have artists coming in while they are recording something or before the record is out, or they bring us a DAT of something they’ve been working on, or I’m getting releases as imports before they come out in the States. I’m getting all kinds of indie releases and imports in the mail each day and I listen to them, and if a song stops and grabs me, if it connects, I play it. It doesn’t have to be the one single that you might hear over and over on commercial radio. I’ll play any song on the record that rings the bell for me.”

Douridas’ ear for good music won him a job as a consultant for Geffen Records in January, 1993. If he stumbles upon a band he loves that is not signed to a deal in the United States, he shares it with Geffen. That Dog, a local band, scored a major-label deal thanks to him, as did Leslie Winer, whom Douridas found on a British import. Though Douridas did give heavy early exposure to such recent Geffen stars as Beck and Wild Colonials, he said both were signed by the label before he began working for it.

He sees no conflict in scouting for one record company while hosting a radio program that serves to expose music from every label to the record-buying public.

“If anything, it almost hurts the band in terms of their exposure on my show,” Douridas said. “If I had anything to do with them signing at Geffen, I tend to run the other way. My show is about playing the best music from around the planet, whatever the source. That’s all I’m thinking about.”

Several employees of rival record labels said they have no doubts about Douridas’ integrity. Elektra’s Amsterdam said he wishes Douridas worked for his company.

Douridas has served as KCRW’s music director for the past three years after working as host of a similar music show at a public radio station in Dallas. When he came to KCRW, replacing Tom Schnabel as music director and host of “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” he wanted to bring a younger, hipper feel to the station’s music programming. Though Deirdre O’Donoghue, once the nighttime music host at KCRW, played a good deal of new and esoteric pop sounds, Douridas said, there was a huge gap between her tastes and Schnabel’s mix of jazz and world music, a huge gap between what was being played on commercial radio and what could be found on KCRW. Schnabel still spins his favorites on KCRW on the weekends.

So Douridas hired younger hosts: Jason Bentley (his show, “Metropolis,” a mix of acid jazz, cool pop and ambient dance music, airs weeknights from 8 to 10) and Liza Richardson (whose “Man in the Moon” mix of quirky pop and spoken word follows “Metropolis” nightly). Tricia Halloran, who deejays weekend nights on KCRW, presents what is arguably the best local show this side of college radio for fans of cutting-edge, alternative punk and rock.

Douridas’ own program is a random mix of the mellower, bluesier, acoustic side of the alternative pop scene--with a dash of rap, country and international and foreign-language sounds thrown in at his whim. On occasion he will even stray into the harder-edged electric world of PJ Harvey or Nirvana.

“But I’m very selective about that because, it’s funny, when one person hears an electric guitar on KCRW, they might call me up and ask why I’ve decided to start playing metal,” Douridas said. “So I guess that is the one parameter I have. When I get to that edge of music, once I stretch out their heads for three or four minutes, I’ll come back pretty fast with something quieter.

“As for the foreign-language stuff, I think the music will still have the same effect on people. Just because it’s in another language isn’t enough for me to pass on it. I think it’s important for us to hear music from other cultures because it stretches our understanding, opens up our minds a little bit. If you hear all this extremely dark news about the slaughter in Rwanda and then you hear a piece of music from Rwanda that is exquisitely beautiful, it gives you a place to have some compassion for that part of the world. But it’s not like ‘Oh there’s some news from Yemen today, let’s get out the Yemen library.’ It’s all just a gut feeling.”

The centerpiece of his show, however--besides no commercials (save the station promos)--is the live performances that close nearly every program. Everyone from big-name pop stars like Natalie Merchant and Evan Dando to old-time superstars like James Taylor to yet-to-even-make-a-record-type bands like Pomegranate have stopped by the radio station to play a half-hour set. Douridas helped produce a compilation album that was released earlier this year containing what he selected as the best of those recordings as a benefit for the station. Another album is planned for early next year.

All this attracts about 25,000 listeners at any given moment to his program each day, Douridas said. Good for a public radio station--good enough to keep it financially healthy. But would that audience be big enough if Douridas took the same act to a commercial station?

“That’s the $80-million question,” Douridas said. “Most professional consultants would say, ‘Are you kidding? Forget it.’ They just don’t believe there is a big enough potential audience for this more esoteric approach. The only way for open programming to work is for some station to try it and find that the audience embraces it.”

KSCA’s Morrison doesn’t believe that putting power back in the hands of deejays will lead to success, or even to better and more varied music for the listeners.

“I’ve had experience with free-form radio, and a lot of people advocate for deejays to have more freedom because they think it will result in more diversity, more variety and be far less boring,” he said. “But the truth is that free-form can often be more repetitive because one jock might not know what the other played right before and they might all like the same songs and you get the same thing over and over. You can avoid that with a format and by applying just a little more sophistication to what you’re doing.”

KROQ’s Gould, meanwhile, has approached his boss about doing a free-form show in the wee hours of Friday night--something that mixes “dance ambient sounds with random orb ambient music and a little spoken word and then some weird phone calls at 3 in the morning.”

“And he said to me, ‘Jed, will I recognize anything I’m going to hear?’ And I said, ‘Nope.’ And that made him very nervous. But hopefully, he’ll let me try it anyway.”