KCRW Bringing Together Some Familiar Voices

Consider it an eclectic convergence: All three of the past and present music directors at KCRW-FM (89.9) spin shows on the station starting next month.

Perhaps the most significant change comes with the Oct. 7 return of Chris Douridas, who hosted KCRW’s flagship “Morning Becomes Eclectic” from 1990 to 1998. His new show, “Ground Zero,” will form a two-hour Saturday afternoon programming block that will also be Webcast on Spinner.com, where Douridas is vice president of music programming.

Tom Schnabel, KCRW’s music director from 1979 to 1990 and current host of its weekend world music program, “Cafe L.A.,” will cut back his show to two hours on Sunday afternoons. As a result, “Weekends Become Eclectic,” hosted by Anne Litt, will expand by an hour on both Saturday and Sunday.

“Morning Becomes Eclectic” will continue to be the on-air home for music director Nic Harcourt, deejaying from 9 a.m. to noon on weekdays. But he will also debut “Sounds Eclectic,” a new two-hour music show that will be syndicated nationally everywhere but Los Angeles by Public Radio International. Here, fans can tap into “Sounds Eclectic” on the station’s Web site, KCRWmusic.com, and on SoundsEclectic.com, a new site that will become an Internet archive for the program.

Station general manager Ruth Seymour said the multiple changes were instigated by a serendipitous confluence of events: Schnabel’s new position as director of content for the online World Entertainment Network (WEN.com), necessitating a cutback in his hosting duties; Harcourt’s desire to increase the station’s sphere of influence beyond L.A. through syndication; and Douridas’ interest in bridging terrestrial and Internet radio through “Ground Zero.”

“Ground Zero” is a co-production of KCRW and Spinner.com, which was the first Internet radio station when it went online in 1996. According to Douridas, the show, which will air Saturdays from noon to 2 p.m., “is going to try to champion a lot of music that appeals to the mainstream but is interesting enough and of enough integrity that the KCRW audience . . . would still want to check it out.”

Featuring new music and a blend of interviews with both known and unknown artists, “Ground Zero” will also have an interactive element, enabling listeners to submit questions via the Internet for artists who will be guests on upcoming shows.

While “Ground Zero” will have some things in common with “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” Douridas said that “this isn’t going to be that show. I already did that.”

In fact, when Douridas left KCRW in early 1998 to work as an A&R; advisor for DreamWorks, he made the change, he says, because “I felt like I got to a place where the challenges were fewer and fewer.” And though he had no intention of returning to the station, he always knew the door was open: “They never asked for my keys.”

For Douridas, who left his DreamWorks position in May, coming back appealed because “it’s mecca to me for progressive radio. Doing a show like this outside of KCRW doesn’t feel right. That’s why the show is called ‘Ground Zero’ because . . . L.A. is ground zero [for the music industry] and it’s my goal for Spinner to be recognized as ground zero online. It makes sense for all of us to be talking programmingwise.”

He hopes the show will be “an environment that’s right for bands that are down the middle between digging around in the progressive and interesting sides of music and trying to reach people in a mainstream way.”

Hearing Music on Spinner.com

Reaching the mainstream listener will be a challenge for both the AOL-owned Spinner.com, which has 140 niche musical channels (the most popular being “Awesome ‘80s”), and KCRW, which has a somewhat elitist reputation.

For Spinner.com, which includes a live stream of the Santa Monica station’s music programming, KCRW is already an anomaly--one of the few live-deejay stations that Douridas handpicked. The rest of the site’s music channels are extremely specific genre wise, do not use live talent and operate like CD jukeboxes, where each channel is loaded with an average of 1,500 songs that are programmed for light to heavy rotation.

Meanwhile, within the broadcast radio landscape, KCRW executives have designed the programming changes in hopes they can expand the station’s audience while playing to its existing strengths.

For many of the station’s current 450,000 listeners, KCRW is a safe haven for the progressive music programming that has grown increasingly difficult to find on the radio dial. The Federal Communications Commission’s 1996 relaxation of station ownership rules, allowing consolidation within the industry, has resulted in highly formatted and increasingly generic programming dominating the FM dial. Both commercial stations and public radio, which tends to favor more esoteric forms of music like jazz and classical, have been affected. Within that environment, Seymour believes KCRW offers programming that is distinctive, and programming that can make the transition to a national arena.

“We have made this station important to the political and cultural life of the city. This is an opportunity to affect the national consciousness,” Seymour said. Indeed, in addition to syndicating Harcourt’s new “Sounds Eclectic,” earlier this week she outlined plans to syndicate a national version of Warren Olney’s “Which Way, L.A.?” called “To the Point,” also with PRI handling the distribution.

Looking for ‘Eclectic’ Listeners Nationwide

Seymour said she had wanted to make “Morning Becomes Eclectic” a national program for years, but it took Harcourt to pull it together.

“You get to that point after a few years where the audience is . . . growing and you think, ‘What can I do now to make it interesting for me?’ Well, let’s see if we can take this to a bigger stage,” said Harcourt, a former commercial radio deejay who came to the station from Woodstock, N.Y., to take over the reins at “Morning Becomes Eclectic” in April 1998. Since his arrival, station listenership has increased 10%. Fund-raising is up about 20%.

The two-hour “Sounds Eclectic” will consist of two interview segments from his previous week’s show and a selection of music Harcourt would normally play on “Morning Becomes Eclectic.”

While his format is popular in L.A., Harcourt conceded it will be a challenge to get other public radio stations to take it. PRI hopes to sell the program on the notion that other stations’ listeners are being influenced by KCRW without knowing it.

A “tastemaker” station, numerous bands have launched their careers on KCRW, specifically “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” and have had their songs picked up on commercial radio stations, in movie soundtracks or for commercials.

“I don’t think it’s going to be an easy thing,” Harcourt said. “It’s going to take a while, but I think if we stay the course, we can get people to take it.”

* Beginning Oct. 7, “Ground Zero” with Chris Douridas can be heard on KCRW-FM (89.9) Saturdays from noon to 2 p.m.; “Weekends Become Eclectic” with Anne Litt will air Saturdays and Sundays from 2-5 p.m.; Tom Schnabel’s “Cafe L.A.” will air Sundays from noon to 2 p.m.