Vita.mn's 5 most influential 2006-2011: 89.3 The Current

Minnesota Public Radio's hip little experiment has had a huge impact on the local music scene. And that's about all its staffers agree on.

By Chris Riemenschneider Star Tribune

August 17, 2012 — 4:04pm

Photo by Tom WallaceYou might think they play way too much wussy dance-rock or '80s/'90s dinosaurs. You might slag them for spinning too many artists you can hear on other stations (never mind that they played them first). You might cringe every time you hear Mark Wheat mispronounce "contribute," which means it's another damn pledge drive. You might want to tell Bill DeVille to save his encyclopedic knowledge of music for a college lecture. You might not get Mary Lucia at all. You might have a list of 20 ways the station could be better.

Whatever your hangup, though, you must admit: No one thing has made a bigger difference in the Twin Cities music scene over the past half-decade than the Current (89.3 FM).

Before the Current, touring buzz bands like the Arcade Fire or the White Stripes were relegated to small clubs when they first came to town. After the Current, bands like Mumford & Sons, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, Dawes and many more are quickly selling out First Avenue.

Before the Current, local acts such as Atmosphere and Mason Jennings were selling out First Ave even without much radio play. After the Current, those acts are hosting multiple nights there or even throwing festivals. They're also competing for daily rotation in the ears of the Current's estimated 340,000 weekly listeners alongside P.O.S., Dessa, Solid Gold, Jeremy Messersmith, Tapes 'n Tapes and Cloud Cult (all of whom have packed First Ave, too). Heck, even Gay Witch Abortion and Marijuana Deathsquads have gotten on the air there.

Despite that, the Current's ratings are through the roof. As MinnPost.com media blogger David Brauer pointed out over the summer, its listenership numbers have tripled since 2009, landing it at No. 9 among local stations (over 93X and in stiff competition with Clear Channel's Cities 97).

More important, membership numbers are climbing, too. Kids who steal music and older music fans with shrinking wallets somehow have bought the idea that there's a radio station in the Internet and iEverything age worth paying for.

We sat down with four of the Current's core staffers to discuss the station's inarguable ascent, and to air at least some of the aforementioned grievances. Three of them -- DJs Wheat, Lucia and David Campbell -- were local fixtures before Minnesota Public Radio launched the Current in January 2005. The fourth, program director Jim McGuinn, came from Philadelphia almost three years ago.

Q: When the Current started, it was trumpeted as free-form radio. Then there was a sharp shift to a narrower, consultant-based format. Is it accurate to say it is somewhere in between now?

[Lucia nods her head yes. Wheat shakes his head no.]

Lucia: I think that's right. There has always been structure in the way we program from day one. It was a little more rigid at one point, which was an experiment that we tried. With Jim [McGuinn] coming on board with so many ideas, it just organically grew into something different. When we first started, it really was just us playing our CDs from home. Really. I can remember that sad little music shelf with about 40 CDs on it, and half of them were mine.

Campbell: How much Johnny Cash did you play then?

Lucia: Seriously! I think that there has been an organic growth in the parameters of what we play, and how many genres we expose people to.

Campbell: [McGuinn] brings strategy in a different way than I've ever experienced before. At the same time, there's always freedom to freak out if there's reason to.

Q: What's the strategy for rotating that one Coldplay, Red Hot Chili Peppers or Foster the People song -- the kind of repeatedly played singles you never used to hear repeatedly played on the Current?

Wheat: There was another station on the air when we first came on [Drive 105]. Now, the market is not served by the "traditional alt-rock" station, so to help serve that audience, we saw that as being part of our mission. I think it's important for us as Minnesota Public Radio to try to define our audience as wide as we can, and not be restricted to playing a small core of bands just because nobody else is playing them.

McGuinn: We have roughly 12 people who run the Current in terms of the programming. There are the hosts, and then a couple off-air folks. Really, it's kind of like, "What do you think we should [play]?" We don't all agree, like brothers and sisters, but we all kind of have some rough consensus on what feels right. When we do something that doesn't feel right, we correct ourselves. We change our mind a lot. The beauty is our audience lets us go there.

Q: Walk me through the Monday morning meetings to make these decisions. What are those like?

McGuinn: With new music, we try to come up with the 70 or so best records that are happening right now and commit to playing them. Roughly seven or eight of those drop out a week, and more get put in. And we all kind of cumulatively decide, "Let's take a shot with this or that." You know, if Tom Waits has a new record and we like it, we're gonna play it. Then we slot those songs into specific rotations or categories. And then we kind of plot the new music around the clock, and then the hosts fill in the rest around that.

Wheat: So as a DJ, every day you have a skeleton of the rotation songs. And then you fill in the gaps around that, responding to whatever is going on. And you have the freedom to play requests. We still do that: pick up the phone and actually talk to people.

McGuinn: There are certain rules, too.

Wheat: Like: "Don't play Coldplay more than once a day."

McGuinn: Yep, that, and rules about artist separation, so that Barb Abney can't play David Bowie at 1:40 [p.m.], and then Mary comes in and plays David Bowie at 2:20.

Lucia: Usually it's 2:20. I like to go with that.

Campbell: That's when David likes us to play him.

Wheat: [laughing] That's when the consultant in Atlanta likes us to play him.

Q: Do you DJs ever hold your nose when you're playing something?

[Lucia nods her head yes. Wheat shakes his head no.]

Lucia: I feel like it would not be very real of me to say no. I definitely think we take the high road where, if it's something that you're not particularly in love with, you just move along.

Wheat: I don't hold my nose personally because, though I'm not a huge fan of Coldplay, there are a lot of people out there who are. And therefore, I'm actually doing a public service.

McGuinn: I sure hope this piece isn't all about Coldplay.

Q: There's a line of recent artists that started out as Current staples and then blew up, like Adele, Mumford & Sons, Kings of Leon, the Arcade Fire and now Foster the People. What is your philosophy when these acts start getting airplay everywhere else?

Campbell: Do we not like them just because they're no longer rare and underground?

McGuinn: If our audience becomes totally sick of something, we'll back off it. But our job is not to build bands up and hand them over to other media. With Foster the People, we started playing ["Pumped Up Kicks"] in January. So that song will probably wind up being our most played song of the year, and that means maybe 300 times we played it [in 2011]. A Top 40 station might play that song 300 times in three weeks.

Q: Can each of you pinpoint your favorite moment of the past half-decade with the Current?

Lucia: Mine happened in this room with Frank Black, who can be difficult. He was on an upswing that day. And it's almost like you don't want to talk to him about the Pixies. It's like asking Jackie Kennedy about the motorcade. So we're sitting in here having these insane conversations, and he would then play a song that somehow related to what we talked about. He started talking about a woman with fur on her arms who lives in a volcano, and all of a sudden he starts strumming the opening to [the Pixies song] "Velouria." I almost fell out of my chair.

Wheat: I've had a lot of moments like that, but if I had to nail down one moment it was the member drive about three years ago. It had taken us three or four years to explain what this is, and the numbers were off the hook. We felt like we were getting the response from the audience we always dreamed of.

McGuinn: You feel honored to be in the position we're in. For me, it was a private moment after Rock the Garden this summer. We ended up at Nye's, and [morning co-host] Jill Riley was singing karaoke with Jim James from My Morning Jacket. Then we went to a party at a friend of Craig Finn's. It was sort of like, "Wow, we're in the middle of this whole thing." That, and Prince showing up at our birthday party [in 2010].

Campbell: The one I was absolutely the most nervous about, but it turned out really wonderful, was the interview after Eyedea [Mikey Larsen] passed with the Face Candy guys and Kathy Averill, Eyedea's mom. It was a pretty charged and intimidating environment. We just started talking about who Mikey was and how he was an important person to them. There was some crying and some laughing, an incredible sort of grieving process that was captured. It was beautiful.