KNDD 107.7 The End People

I went down to the KNDD Beach House to see Silversun Pickups, however, only Brian Aubert showed up there. However, he did perform Well Thought Out Twinkle and Lazy Eyes solo on acoustic guitar which I video-recorded. The performance was excellent. Brian Aubert was on during DJ No-Name‘s show.

DJ No Name seems to prefer a low profile. He’s seemed soft-spoken and takes things at a comfortable pace but also seems to prefer to hide most of his face with that baseball cap. He interacts well with guests on the air and seems to have a good, albeit at times dark, sense of humor.

DJ No Name

DJ No Name


I hung around afterwards to meet the Church of Lazlo personalities, Lazlo, Afentra, Slim Fast, and Candice Derriere. Afentra wasn’t there so I did not get to meet her. Lazlo strikes me as not unprofessional, but laid back. Like he’s been doing radio so long he just has it totally handled and that well may be the case given his history. He came in just before his show started and then just kind of grabs a microphone and starts talking.

Lazlo

Lazlo


Slim Fast comes in a bit early and talks to people and gets things setup the way he wants before the show. He comes across as spontaneous on the air but he really seems to plan ahead and just makes it sound that way.

Slim Fast

Slim Fast


Candice Derriere, their resident Drag Queen adds an element of high strangeness. Definitely the most visually interesting member of the church. Candice Derriere performs locally with a group called The Nutcrackers.

Candice Derriere

Candice Derriere

Click on any image to see a larger version. To see more photos of those that were present take a look at the KNDD page on my photo gallery. Unfortunately, there are no photographs of Afentra here because she was not present while I was there.

This group I think makes a great team. Lazlo seems to need to have a rapport with a present body. Slim Fast is a not uninteresting person. The two of them have a good rapport. Still, just the two of them might seem kind of mundane, nah, not really. Afentra adds a female perspective. Throw in Candice Derriere and you’ve got enough strange factor for all of them. It’s a weird show but I think it works.

I will end this by saying if you have an interest in radio or just an interest in music, either way, a trip down to the KNDD Beach House on Alki is worth while. All of the KNDD staff I’ve met have been extremely personable people. They seem to have struck an ideal balance between professionalism and having fun.

The one thing I wish the folks at KNDD would do, is fix the audio on their website. The sound quality of their audio on the web sounds muddy and swishy. A nice streaming Ogg Vorbis feed would fix that.

Art Bell Gone – Alternate Venue?

Experimental data that merely confirms theories are less than exciting. Completely random pseudoscience that has not even a shred of evidence is also useless. What is interesting is that which is right on the fringe. Data from well thought out and executed experiments that contradicts conventional scientific theories is where real advances in science come from.

The Art Bell show allowed everything from credentialed scientists to certifiable loonies on the air. By providing a relatively unfiltered medium, from time to time we did get to see truly interesting cutting edge stuff.

There are flaws not only with the execution of the scientific method but even with the method itself. Science wants phenomena to be reproducible on demand. Natural phenomena don’t always lend themselves to this. Pretty much anything that doesn’t is dismissed as pseudoscience.

Phenomena such as ball lightning, extraterrestrial visitations, psychic phenomena, all of these things are just dismissed out of hand by mainstream science. And that leaves many phenomena unexplained.

Art Bell provided a venue where these phenomena could be explored, I don’t see anyone standing inline to take his place. The other hosts do not have enough of a grip on known science to try to extend that into the presently unknown.

KNND 107.7 The End Alki Beach House

The End 107.7 KNND Beach House

KNND 107.7 The End is broadcasting from an Alki Beach house through September 22, 2007. It’s got a big deck where you can hang out and watch the show get done live as well as enjoy free drinks. They’re also giving away free CD’s and promotional material.

The End 107.1 Broadcast Table

They don’t have an enclosed studio at the beach house, just an open broadcast table. They use an ISDN line to get the program material from this remote studio to their main studio and actually broadcast the music portion of the program from the main studio doing only the announcing from this studio.

End Sessions Volume 4 Front

They are giving away free CD’s and other promotional materials. The CD shown above, End Sessions Volume 4, is one worth having. These are recordings they’ve made in their own studios and the engineering is nothing short of excellent. Kick drums sound like kick drums not the mushed wumps, the cymbals sound like cymbals, the guitar is crystal clear with all the overtones present, in short music sounds like music. There are few recordings I can’t find fault with but these are really good. If you can’t make it down to the Beach house to pick up a copy, you can buy it online.

I want to stress that I have absolutely no affiliation with The End 107.7 or their parent company. I simply happen to like the station, most of the music they play, and have a past that involves the radio industry, engineering, and also doing sound reinforcement. I love good music, I know what it sounds like live, and when someone actually does a decent job of recording good music I want people to know it.

They have a version of Jet’s “Are Ya Gonna Be My Girl” with an acoustic lead. It actually works rather well, and the overall recording is excellent. The performance is also very energized but then that’s Jet.

Tegan and Sara do an exceptional performance of Walking With A Ghost, again the recording is excellent. I wish the record companies would take a hint and start kicking out recordings like these.

They are located right next to slices pizza, about a block south from the Pepperdock.

Kraig Kitchen Resigns

Kraig Kitchin has announced his resignation as president of Premier Radio Networks. Kraig Kitchen was co-founder of Premier Radio and many of you have heard Art Bell talk about how much he helped Art through difficult times. This announcement was apparently made the same day Art Bell announced his retirement.

Art Bell’s program became more slanted towards the right, misquotes of Iran’s president were highly inflammatory and seemed geared towards trying to provoke a war. I wrote to him about this, about the quotes out of context, and how taken out of context they meant exactly the opposite of what they meant in context. To this I received no reply.

This article on Unknown Country, gives some insight with respect to the corporate culture at Clear Channel. It might give further insight as to the reason for Art Bell’s resignation. It is clear that the company line stating that Art Bell resigned because he wanted to spend more time with family is just so much bovine excrement.

Kraig Kitchin has stated that his future projects will be much more tightly focused. I can’t help but wonder if some future collaboration between Art Bell and Kraig Kitchin might be in the works? Perhaps one not so burdened with heavy handed control by Clear Channel? We can only speculate and hope.

Art Bell

Someone left a comment that said,

” Want even more supposition re Art Bell’s most recent retirement? Check out: http://hamfanz.blogspot.com/

I’m not going to endorse the content at that link, or the links that you may follow from there because I have no way of knowing what is true. I will say that the history given in that link differs significantly from what is given in, “The Art of Talk”, Art Bell’s autobiography.

Art Bell Retired Again

Art Bell retires from Coast-to-Coast AM again saying he wants to be able to spend more time with his new wife and daughter. Well, I guess doing a 4 hour show two days out of the week would take a lot of time away from family. I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with the merger between Clear Channel and Mergerco.

I hope you will forgive my cynicism but I can’t help but feel there are issues, other than those stated publicly, involved in both this retirement and previous retirements. That said I’d like to state a few of my beliefs and suspicions. These are nothing more than my beliefs and opinions. I’ll make that clear from the onset in hopes it will dissuade Art Bell and Clear Channel from suing me.

First, a lot of people were critical of Art Bell remarrying only three months and a few days after Ramona’s death. They have suggested that Art was “vulnerable”, or that Airyn is a “mail order bride”. I have even read one blog in which the poster suggested that he “disposed of Ramona and bought a new wife”.

Art Bell lives in Pahrump, Nevada. Prostitution is legal in Nevada counties with low populations and I believe that includes Nye county. Art Bell has large amounts of money. If all he wanted was a hot Asian girl to bang he wouldn’t have much difficulty obtaining same without the commitment that goes with marriage or the publicity.

Although it might seem disrespectful to many that he remarried so soon, it is a statistical fact that when men in a good marriage lose their spouse to death, they remarry substantially sooner on average than men who were in bad marriages.

Having listened to Art Bell over the years, having read his autobiography, and having seen many photos of him with Ramona, I do believe his love for her was very real and that their marriage was very good.

If he were going to mail order a bride, the Philippines wouldn’t be the best option because divorce isn’t even a legal option there. I don’t know what the effect of a legal annulment in the United States would be in light of the fact that the marriage took place in the Philippines. Suffice it to say that he could have gone with some lower risk options.

He generally speaks glowingly of various network officers but I wonder if things are as rosy there as the picture he paints. If you look at the rest of Clear Channels hosts, Art Bell seems very out of place.

Prior to the Clear Channel takeover, Art Bell didn’t use call screeners and did generally have interesting guests. Now calls are screened and the guests all seem to be selling something, usually pushing a new book. The commercial load seems up considerably. These don’t impress me as things that Art Bell would not accept without some resistance but perhaps I am wrong.

During the last retirement, which was somewhat lengthy, one of the substitute hosts that got a long run was Mike Siegel, who I personally couldn’t stand for a variety of reasons. Those of you who had heard Mike Siegel on KVI would know that prior to taking the position on Coast-to-Coast AM, he was a right wing political talk show host.

Ian Punnett, who will replace Art Bell on the weekends, seems to be largely apolitical, reasonably knowledgeable, and reasonably capable of handling callers in a civil and non-abrasive manner. However, for reasons I can’t nail down, he never has impressed me as being as interesting as Art Bell.

Many years ago I heard rumors that Art Bell was connected with the DIA. Whether there was any truth to these rumors or not, I don’t know. I have for many years had the sense that someone else was calling the shots.

I have found his position on various wars disturbing, justification for our continued presence in Iraq, or the continual push for war with Iran. To be specific about what I mean about Iran, he keeps pushing the line that the president of Iran wanted to “wipe Israel off the map”, but neglected to mention that that quote was actually part of a speech in which he is quoting Khomeini and setting himself apart from Khomeini’s policies, which means, taken in context he is saying exactly the opposite of what is being implied by the out of context quotes.

I have written to him on this topic and neither received any reply nor have I heard any on-air correction or attempt to place the quote in the proper context.

I find his penchant for revenge troubling. It’s hard for me to believe that after all of the years of marriage to Ramona and his long time friendship with Evelyn Paglini, he would not understand karma and the connectedness of all things and why revenge is not such a good thing for the person seeking it.

Art Bell received some items that were allegedly recovered from the Roswell UFO crash. I am of the belief that the crash really occurred and that these parts wouldn’t have been allowed to remain in civilian possession if they were genuine, and because of certain characteristics of the parts, I do believe they were genuine. All of this leads me to believe that Art Bell probably has some military intelligence ties.

So now that he’s off the air again, I wonder what is up? What’s getting ready to go down? The world has been strange lately.

There are some of my random thoughts. I don’t know if I am pleased or disappointed that he retired again, but I am not surprised.