He's an anomaly in the world of broadcasting, a DJ who breaks all the programming rules, actually picking his own music. Moreover it's mostly from new and upcoming artists that nobody else airs. He plays almost anything, but he is famous for it, with a top rated morning slot.

A radio veteran of more than twelve years originally from Birmingham, England, Nic Harcourt came to Santa Monica, California's highly respected public station, KCRW, by way of a commercial station, WDST in Woodstock, New York. For three years now Harcourt has been at the helm of KCRW as Music Director, but he is better known as the host of Morning Becomes Eclectic, possibly the best single radio show in the entire country for new music. The groups he has helped bring to public attention include Badly Drawn Boy, Fela Kuti, Air, David Gray, Travis, The Dandy Warhols, and many more, mostly due to the fact that MBE broadcasts live performances by these new musicians several times a week. Of course there are others more familiar on MBE too, ranging from Beck to Willie Nelson. Maybe the best measure of his respect in the music world came last year when Radiohead released Kid A. One of only three promotional appearances they made for it was Nic's show.

Recently Harcourt expanded his offerings with Sounds Eclectic, a weekly syndicated show that showcases the best of the live sessions of MBE and more. Both shows are also available on the Internet, bringing Nic's work to listeners far beyond the transmitter's signal.

This past spring Nic produced a new compilation CD of live music that originated in the KCRW studios, also called Sounds Eclectic, as a companion to the new syndicated show. It's the sixth KCRW performance compilation, and it provided us the chance to talk to him about his show, the changing tides of broadcasting and what it means to be public and eclectic in the swamp of commercial radio.

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Cosmik: First off I have to ask you, is your job the greatest job in the world or what?

Harcourt: Not bad! (laughs)

Cosmik: What is the definition of eclectic to you? How do you go about choosing music for a show that has such a wide range of possibilities?

Harcourt: Umm, well, you know eclectic can obviously be defined however you feel like doing it. Whoever is doing the show would define it differently I guess. It just means that we can play a wide variety of musical styles. Clearly the show has a focus, it's not a free-for-all, but at the same time within that there's room to play around a little bit and try different things.

Cosmik: Do you consciously avoid things that are available on pop format radio?

Harcourt: You know, the only thing I consciously avoid is something that is really sort of noisy punk or metal.

Cosmik: So if Britney Spears came out with something really meaningful you'd play it?

Harcourt: Never say never! To me it's about inclusion rather than exclusion, but I have to be sensitive to our listeners and realize that they are probably not going to want to listen to something that's really hard on the ears. It probably wouldn't fit in what we do, but I don't want to avoid stuff just because it's popular.

Cosmik: You must be pelted with an incredible amount of promotional CD's of music. How much time do you spend preparing for a show; is it all planned out?

Harcourt: No, it's not necessarily all planned out. I spend time obviously well in advance on booking live guests, but as for putting the show together on a daily basis, I come in an hour before the show and I pull a whole bunch of music. I usually know the first song that I'll play before I go in the studio, and I have a whole bunch of CD's that I take in with me that I think I'm going to play, but it's not planned out. It comes together organically as the show goes along.

Cosmik: Do you have a lot of helpers that are going through all the new music, kind of pre-listening for you?

Harcourt: I listen to everything that comes in. Some people will hear about things that I don't hear about and bring them to my attention obviously, but basically all the music that comes to the radio station, my job as a music director ... is to audition and filter that music and put it into the library and make it available to others. That's not to say that the other DJ's can't bring their own stuff in because they frequently do, but I'm the guy who filters the stuff that is actually submitted to the station.

Cosmik: I wanted to talk to you about your new Sounds Eclectic CD, how's that going?

Harcourt: It's going good. It's always tough you know, to sell a compilation record, whatever type it is. The thing about the Sounds Eclectic CD is that it's a fundraiser for KCRW, as the other ones have been in the past--the Rare On Air series and the Morning Becomes Eclectic CD we did about a year and a half ago. We always do really well in Los Angeles obviously, and on the West Coast in general.

Cosmik: How many copies does that translate out to?

Harcourt: Usually they do somewhere between twenty and forty thousand nationally. Sounds Eclectic is also our weekly syndicated radio show that we are distributing through PRI.

Cosmik: How long has that been on now?

Harcourt: Only about five or six weeks here in LA, but it's been up and running for seven or eight months. The first market that picked it up was Montana, Yellowstone Public Radio. We've been adding stations very slowly but that's the nature of syndication. Since then we're on about fifteen stations now. The idea there is that the Sounds Eclectic CD will dovetail into the Sounds Eclectic show and it will do a number of things. First of all it will enable the stations that run the show to have a premium built into the show when they do their own pledge drive, the same as we do here.

Cosmik: I noticed that most all the tracks were live recordings taken last year, especially October, but that there was one that was much earlier, from August 1998.

Harcourt: The Neil Finn track [Throw Your Arms Around Me]. I had listened to that track when we had put together the last CD, back in 1998 or 99 and I don't really remember why I decided against it. I think it just didn't fit it with the overall sound of the other CD. That track was held over so to speak and I went back and listened to it and thought it would work in the sequence that we were putting together. The other thing we did was we try not to put the same artist on the CD who's been on the previous CD. If I am not mistaken, Rare On Air 4 which came out before the Morning Becomes Eclectic CD had a track on it by The Finn Brothers and so I thought that maybe we don't want to put it on this one. So we skipped a CD. Interestingly enough there was a song by Dido that I was considering for this CD and it didn't fit in the overall sound of the CD, so we might use that on the next one.

Cosmik: Do you find that there's a particular sound to the live performances simply because it's a morning show and everybody's just waking up?

Harcourt: It varies. We just had a band on this morning, Cinerama, that seemed quite wide-awake and happy to be here. It depends on who it is. It depends on if they've just driven a bus down from San Francisco and slept only two hours; there's just so many variables...It just so happens this last one was mainly an acoustic performance. It was just the way it came together. You pull all the songs together and you try and remember the sessions that would go together and pick the good songs from those sessions. You throw them all into a pot and start to put together an album and then you have to start trying to get permission to use the songs, and then you end up with what you end up with.

Cosmik: I know it's only two-track stereo but the sound is always so clean!

Harcourt: We have good engineers, which is a part of it, the other thing is that those songs are recorded directly from the studio. What goes over the air is compressed, so the actual recordings of the songs sound a lot better than what goes over the air.

Cosmik: I'm glad MBE's live performances are still available over the air, commercial radio is such a wasteland. It seems to me that the broadcast industry is in the middle of a sea change right at the moment and it may change the public stations a lot. There was a big article in the LA Times Calendar section early in June about Minnesota Public Radio buying KPCC here for example. Are you worried about some of the corporatization of public broadcasting; do you think that will affect what you do at KCRW?

Harcourt: No, I'm not worried about it. I think, umm, everything evolves. Everything changes. Public radio is no different from any other business insomuch and we have to evolve to be competitive. I don't see us running 8 or 12 minute blocks of advertising. There is a little bit of snobbiness out there that public radio shouldn't run any kind of underwriting, but the bottom line is that's the only way it's going to survive. We here at KCRW and I'm sure most public radio stations try to make it as little as possible. When I hear those comparisons, "Oh, it's just like commercial radio," it's like [the people who say that] are obviously not really listening that closely. Commercial radio will run up to twenty minutes an hour of commercials and we tend to run like four fifteen second underwriting credits. And a little bit of promotion, obviously; we have to talk about shows that are coming up. So it's unreasonable for people to expect public radio to stay the same.

Cosmik: As a former broadcaster myself I think there's a reason they call it "broad"casting. One of the things about broadcasting also is that there's a large cost in providing power to the transmitter. On top of that you are programming a single channel and there's a very limited number of slots per week plus there's a marked difference in their quality--3AM just isn't the same as 3PM, the potential audience is totally different. But the article ignored all that and was lamenting the passing of specialty shows with extremely small audiences. That's not broadcasting, that's really "narrow"casting. These days there's a new opportunity to do narrowcasting and that's on the Internet. Granted it's not the same as just turning on a radio but these guys still have an opportunity to get their show out there and maybe even outside of a single city for a change. Broadcasting on the other hand does have a much higher running cost and naturally has to go for a wider audience.

Harcourt: Yeah, you can't be too marginalized, otherwise you're not going to survive. I can only talk about what I do, I can't really be the spokesperson for the station or for public radio, but my opinion is that there's nothing wrong with being popular.

Cosmik: Where do you think Internet Broadcasting is going in all this? KCRW has been pretty much a pioneer in webcasting. How many listeners tune in worldwide each week?

Harcourt: I don't have the actual figures, but it's a lot. Quite frankly I get confused between hits and streams, I just know that we have a significant audience on the web.

Cosmik: Does it rival in size those that listen to you here in LA?

Harcourt: Don't think so, not at the same time, not simultaneously, but over a week probably it does. The thing is that our music programming is only a small part of what goes on the airwaves here in Southern California. Our Internet presence, we have an all music channel and an all news channel and then just the regular simulcast. There are a lot of people listening in their office right now to the music channel who are not interested in hearing the world news [that we air at this time] and they flip over to KCRW.com. Then they are hearing a program from last night being re-broadcast. I think the fact that [commercial] radio in general isn't really serving a lot of people's needs gives us an opportunity both here in LA and on the Internet to attract a wider audience.

Cosmik: It's obviously a first-class operation that you have there and it must require no small amount of donations and Corporation for Public Broadcasting funds.

Harcourt: We get very little money from government or other organizations; most of our money comes from pledge drives and underwriting.

Cosmik: There was a particular public affairs show you did in June, The Politics of Culture as guest host. It raised quite a lot of interesting questions about how the record companies use independent promoters to get around the payola laws and feed the commercial music stations music for their play lists. Did you feel it was necessary to organize that show in particular?

Harcourt: Debbie Adler actually produced that show. The Politics of Culture is a weekly show on a variety of subjects hosted by different people and a couple of times a year they rope me in, doing something that's music related. The one guest that we had on the program Eric Robert who has written a couple of pieces for Salon; he was writing stuff a couple of months ago about [promotion practices in the record industry]. Debbie was trying to put together a show around this in the public interest, you know, public radio. And then when Chuck Phillips did his piece last week or the week before that was fairly detailed on how independent promotion works, then obviously time was of the essence to put this show together. That's why we did it really, just because it's a topical issue. We're in the middle of Los Angeles and the entertainment industry; it's an important subject to cover.

Cosmik: I thought it was a powerful show, but listening to you over the last couple years I've never known you to make political statements or anything like that.

Harcourt: Did you think it was a political statement?

Cosmik: Sooner or later it's all politics. I read it as a questioning of authority. The first statement that you ran in the show was the one from the lawyer describing legal definitions of payola in the laws versus how the industry really operates these days. That sure made it seem like there's something going on that isn't right.

Harcourt: To be honest with you, I needed another ten minutes, maybe another thirty minutes; certainly we ran out of time. There were a couple of other points that I would have like to have covered. What was important to me as the host of the show and as somebody who is in the business, was to have the program be as balanced as possible. I hope we did that. The bigger question for me, and we just touched on it right at the end, is the way business is done in America, period. The music industry is just one example of how shady deals are done in the business world.

Cosmik: There are quite a few groups that seem to jump on to the stage full blown and I came only think this incestuous relationship of the music and radio industry is the reason why. The N-Syncs and The Backstreet Boys, who knew them before? Did they ever have a stage in their career where they were playing bars and stuff just getting their act together?

Harcourt: But that's not new, there's always been manufactured bands and singers and artists, whatever.

Cosmik: It seems like back room maneuvering by corporate power is a big problem and nobody's come up with a good solution for reigning it in. I don't see anything wrong with corporations fundamentally but at the same time, profit uber alles, if you will, it creates a lot of problems. Just on a more artist-by-artist level, how do you feel about TV commercials using various famous songs? I've heard The Who in several Nissan commercials and Moby's album Play last year, an album I really liked a lot, it seemed like every song popped up in a commercial!

Harcourt: (pauses) I guess I feel that in a world where everyone is trying to make a living, anything is fair game, you know? Now whether or not we turn around and say, "Well that's a sell-out," or "We don't appreciate the co-opting of sounds that we personally feel attached to," I also understand that.

Let me address the two examples that you gave. Moby for example, now he was very smart because his record really wasn't going anywhere. It came out of the gate with a bang and then just stalled out. So much is dependent on marketing plans and promotional strategies for a record, as it is with any product. Let's face it, at the end of the day a CD is a product. So for whatever reason it wasn't really getting the support that I think it should have gotten and I suspect that he probably felt the same. So what he and his management did was aggressively go out and license tracks from the CD for television shows, commercials and movies to get those impressions of the music out there in the market place. The effect of that was to spur sales of the record and in my opinion because they found an alternative way of marketing and promoting that music. Now you know at the end of the day you can say, "Yeah, but I'm so sick of it now! When I had it at home and it was mine, then it meant something to me, but now it's on this commercial and that movie, it doesn't mean as much to me." That's a personal thing obviously, but I totally respect his right to try and sell his record.

The thing with The Who is a completely different thing. They're obviously looking at ways of making some extra money, but who am I to deny them that really? It kinda bothers me on some level but ... (trails off)

Cosmik: There have been a number of really great songs, Lenny Kravitz and stuff like that that I don't feel good about playing anymore. I feel like they've been vandalized.

Harcourt: I understand. I think we can have those personal reactions, but as I say, at the end of the day somebody has the opportunity to secure the education of their kid or something... There was an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine about this a couple of months ago, talking about Apples In Stereo. An indy band who never really made any money who licensed a track for a commercial and basically the band gets to keep going for a year as a result of that. So everybody has their own reasons for doing this. Making money to keep going with the band, whether it's just putting extra money in the bank for an already rich rock star or whether it's somebody who needs a way to get those impressions of their record out there in the public. A significant part of it comes back to how difficult it is to get music played on the radio. And people trying to find other ways to get their music out there. I mean, The Who is probably not a good example of that but I think the Moby thing is and a lot of other bands too.

Cosmik: It comes back to the lockout that seems to be going on in commercial radio and how do you get around that. It's kind of funny Moby is using his music in ads and the term the industry promoters you had on the show kept using for getting music on radio play lists is "adds." They're getting paid for adds! The focus isn't on the music itself at all; the program directors in the music stations aren't really doing their job any more!

Harcourt: No, probably not. Most of it's being done on a corporate level anyway.

Cosmik: Has KCRW ever gotten any money for adding songs for broadcast like that?

Harcourt: No.

Cosmik: Well thank goodness and keep the eclectic music coming!

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Websites to check out:
www.kcrw.com
www.soundseclectic.com
The Politics Of Culture show mentioned above: kcrw.com/cgi-bin/ram_wrap.cgi?/pc/pc010606Radio_Stations_Recor

(C) 2001 - Rusty Pipes