Charley Goodman: History of the Excellent Center and Excellent Radio

Well originally the whole idea of this radio station started during an emergency the Highway 41 fire up in a Tascadero in San Luis Obispo County resulted in all of the major broadcast units that were up on Cuesta grade to be burned down or totally out of the picture and we saw a situation where one AM station news gathering service was kind of required to do everything that a civil defense system should have done in that kind of emergency situation but because there were no low power radio stations in the area there was no way to diffuse the responsibility and manpower and everything kind of filtered through a station called KVEC and they were even under manned and certainly not ready to take on the position that they had been thrust upon them and much of

their news gathering service was volunteer and because it was volunteer and not ready for the situation it made some mistakes that came to question after the fire as to the responsibility of I guess something along the lines of yelling fire in a movie theater and miscommunications ultimately turned out to a large portion of San Luis Obispo being evacuated unnecessarily so we watched a number of us at the center who had our eye on community radio for a number of different reasons we had our eye on the news gathering services and it was obvious to us that if we had to turn to Santa Barbara for our news about what was going in our county that some big gap was there and nobody wanted to acknowledge it so I started calling around to engineers and I had no idea if maybe there was

already something inside of FCC rules that would allow those kind of emergency stations to be set up in talking with one of the chief engineers in the area I got the story about how music event was going to happen up in the mountains and they had set up a small FM system much like what we have here to broadcast the music and to play music in the interim some kind of bluegrass strawberry bluegrass festival or something like that and what happened was a fire broke out and nobody was really ready for it and whole idea of evacuation and assignment of where firefighters should go amidst all of these people in that confusion was pretty much taken care of by utilizing transistor radios that firefighters had immediately they made the radio station the command center and it

facilitated more flowing dealing with that catastrophe and so that was just one instance that I heard and one good reason to pursue the idea of community radio in our area so I called the FCC and I couldn't get any kind of I kept on getting referrals to other phone numbers and eventually I ended up lost in the bowels of Washington DC and nobody would answer my question so we kind of let that ride along and had kind of scheduled a number of speakers to get on to in the local media to start to bring this up but I kept on getting put off and for one reason or other people couldn't make it and a lot of the people who were responsible parties in the government

really weren't making that step to introduce some new idea they're just going to wait for the next catastrophe I guess which is very common so time went on and another situation came up which was how were we going to do here at the excellent center our next black history celebration we had done two previous years and our main contributors was one entire family and what we were finding was that many people from that community didn't even live in this area that this area just did not have the walk -in traffic or that kind of population that might participate in such an event and we found ourselves with limited numbers of people and money and energy to pull this off for the third year and

other things were going on inside of you know world events that led Caboo and his family and I to talk about the need to go beyond color and maybe do a human rights show of sorts and so a lot of that was just kind of jelling around in our minds how are we going to treat this cultural event in our gallery and really speak to what was being screamed out from inside it hadn't really defined itself but eventually we realized that we didn't have time to break ourselves down into color that we couldn't have black history, red history, yellow history, white history and that didn't matter what it was really at risk at this point in time was how people treated each other humanity itself was at risk so there was of course the 41

fire but then there was another tradition that had been going on here at the Excellence Center which was black history month which we had done already two years in a row and was doing something to the rest of the community wasn't doing and that was giving proper acknowledgement to black history it was like pulling teeth trying to get the telegram tribune last year to focus on our exhibit in fact it was rather insulting actually so we were just I think going to make sure that the tradition continued but we wanted to take it up a level it wasn't allowable to us to just simply do another black history month that wasn't better than the one before and the one before and we'd already had such good exhibits and so much great participation that we really felt the pressure that we had to come up with something but we didn't want to fabricate something that wasn't honest

and the more we discussed black history and becoming more active and recognizing that truly one aspect of the most active aspect of black history was a man Contaco in Illinois who had been furthering the idea of micro power radio to the point of actually challenging the FCC to either shut him down or deal with the constitutionality of his case and to educate the people in that center and knowledge of self and in order to have knowledge of self the idea of books on tape and other aspects of history were projected on his radio station one reason Contaco had material in this area was that he was legally blind he had lost his eyesight legally in a skirmish with police earlier in his life and had

gone back to school and became educated and was taking his lease on life to educate his people in his housing project and in that outlying area of Springfield which was very racist he described it like an outreach of the Cluclux clan and there was a lot of turmoil in his particular area and man named David Chafferdini who is part of our radio exhibition and part of the center had a magazine out for a good part of the 80s that dealt with all the independent arts and his articles on micro power radio helped me to get focused on the plate on understanding just the place that community radio should take in our society a lot of people have forgotten

just what the true history of radio was and radio had more or less since 1978 become just a vehicle for advertising and diminishing formats as far as celebration of culture and music was concerned so the idea of enriching and refabricating a community through radio seemed to be focused through this situation in Illinois black liberation radio and at first I thought well I guess what we'll do is we had a video of his news coverage through the alternative press and our plan was to kind of download individual pictures out of those videos and do a photo exhibit to talk about him being active not just passive with black history and time went on and that didn't seem enough and Kaboo and I talked

among other people and decided that the situation in America was getting so bad that there really wasn't time to just deal with black history or red history or white or yellow or green history humanity itself seemed to be at risk so the show started to take a change a change in course and we really didn't know what exactly our show was going to be named or how we were going to deal with it I had offers from a number of people who have participated in the gallery who said that they would contribute to a show that was about human rights but I really didn't have a grip on what exactly nature wanted us to script as far as a show and that's kind of a preface to what exactly we do have here and I think I'll break here we'll kind of reset up the cameras

so I can tell the rest of the story cool so in a roundabout way we came up with humanity at risk and as you can see this is written in the email address vernacular and this later will I'll show you how it ties in well we've got is something called father of lies versus the mother of invention and everybody knows that necessity is the mother of invention and that's why we have created the community radio station excellent radio 88 .9 now you probably want what the hell is this father of lies well this is kind of a long story that is full of synchronicity but in cafe real quickly there was a play

done an opera that was written by Gary Eister it was performed at the Monday Club and it had also been performed in another instance I believe out at Cuesta and what it was was kind of a mini opera that was done by Kama the central area museums alliance of San Luis Obispo and I think the vocal arts ensemble was involved with it and it was a play that had as its key player the father of lies and this is a mini version of the father of lies will cut in some of the original father of lies that went to the ceiling but just prior to doing this little thing on the tape we had to take the other one back out to Cuesta for a brand new performance so right now you're looking at I believe these are Gary Eister's teeth here and the original piece had an eyeball squeezed into this I guess pagoda

-like temple and this was the father of lies it was the fictitious leader of a planet that derived its economy from constantly being at war with itself and that's kind of like what we're up against here that is indeed what we have an an economy that is based on keeping the participants on its planet at war with itself and so humanity itself was at risk and the whole idea of television changing humanity itself was so obvious that all you have to do is talk to a young kid today and if you're over 40 and have some kind of understanding of a conversation and what you should expect out of a young person well you've come to find that the attention span has gone the depth and compassion that is normally found in young people

was gone and right here was truly the reason for that people had replaced creativity with passivity and hope was being more or less replaced with the dope of the television the boob tube had taken over the mind in a sense and so it was out of necessity that we decided to take a chance with community radio we were keeping our eye on what was going on up in the Bay area with Stephen Dunifer and free radio Berkeley as far as pushing the issue through the courts and luckily enough the ninth district court refused to place an injunction against free radio Berkeley refusing to shut down the station because the argument the FCC posed was incomplete as far as technical and constitutional issues were concerned and the judge there

refused to shut down free radio Berkeley and told the FCC to go back and not to come back in to court with anybody until they were ready to address those issues which was basically in our case the understanding that there could be way more radio stations on the FM band than currently were being licensed technology had changed so greatly since 1978 that the argument by the FCC to keep stations off the air was just ridiculous and so like I say we were lucky that the injunction had been placed prior to our opening up the show we started this show March 1st I believe the ruling up in the Bay area was February 20th so what we did was looked into what had been offered in the technical world as far as kits for small

-watt radio and what we ran across was an incredible fact that Amark a wing of in a sense of the United Nations had been producing these small transmitters for countries around the world to refabricate communities in devastated communities either devastated by economics or natural disasters or political events democratic a democratic situations needing to be fostered quickly they just simply sent in radio transmitters and strangely enough many of those transmitters and those stations were run by women who really were carrying the world on their shoulders or on their hips it was up to women who stayed home and raised the children and you know brought the water to the plants and did the nurturing to nurture their community via the radio and you

know these are the kind of things that we never would have known if it had not been for our exploration beyond the normal media and once again I can thanks sound choice magazine for enlightening us all to the fact that Amark had been going on for some 20 years and that community radio was evident everywhere in the world except South Africa and America and now even South Africa has free community radio but United States is still working on creating a procedure so that stations like this can apply for a low -rot license so what we were finding though as we looked into Amark was that the only country in the world that wasn't utilizing community radio was America for a while it was America and South Africa that didn't have community radio but with the changing of the guards in South Africa now that leaves America with the only

has the only country that doesn't have legal low -rot radio possibilities going on that's changing throughout America as many Americans have not even waited for the laws to be changed back they've already gone into production and are functioning on a regular basis with no interference but the normal media just plain doesn't cover it they probably don't want people to know that people are taking life into their own hands so recognizing the position that community radio could take we just felt that much stronger that we were going to have to lead by example and so let me tell you kind of what we've come to find out about community radio and the place that it takes among the other technology and how it can we feel facilitate the

rebuilding of a community number one we went and researched into where we could find equipment at the lowest price because that was the key here to keep all of a cost so low that we didn't have to ask for any kind of funding and didn't have to do fundraisers and we needed to show that it was possible to put one of these stations together mainly with creative energy and throw away technology so that we could show any community that they could do it all they had to do is simply want to do it and that's exactly what happened we took equipment from stations that had shut down and had gone off to do more digital stuff and we took home equipment to personal computers and brought them in took our own personal facts

machines and brought them in and basically it was a lot of donations that brought us to the point that we're at right now cut okay and here is the okay okay okay this is basically the radio station over here just a regular mixing board this is better than what most people would script we borrowed this particular one but anybody could buy a mixer for you know maybe 150 bucks it would accommodate a turntable a tape deck a cassette and a microphone we're a little bit more elaborate than that but it was only because we had contacts in the electronic world so and we wanted to have more facilities here because we wanted to be a model for other radio

stations and it was necessary to be a little bit bigger than the normal model so basically what we try to do here is play music in the afternoons and just generate somewhat of a listenership into the wider idea of the culture of music world music and even American music and the format here is very wide wider than I ever really thought possible for radio stations still have a flow and that's partly because I've been collecting records I did NPR radio for many years for some nine years and I swear to God I've been collecting since even before I had a record player and I've kept all of that stuff I did reggae and African shows and avant -garde shows on our NPR station

KCPX for many years and kept tapes and at one point I had record service coming to me and I also hit the thrift shops and find large amounts of records and then the other half of the station was Soundchoice magazine which had for years been doing interviews and reviews of all of the independent music in America and this was kind of a clearinghouse down in Ohio for the alternate world of creativity that was going on and David lived down there and had accumulated all of this stuff and you know it seemed like every time we'd get on the phone with each other two hours would pass and we'd just be like talking about radio and so he eventually

I guess a law of diminishing returns sent him somewhere else beyond Ohio and to other kind of journalistic occupations and then at one point that sort of dried up and we were talking and situations were such that we had a place where he could move up here and so what we did was basically move his entire archive up here and so all of a sudden it seems like we're dealing with maybe a hundred thousand pieces of music and from it came this incredibly wide format and understanding and appreciation of music that I don't think many radio stations will ever have the benefit of it currently maybe with the use of the expanding idea of the the web and internet and downloading music and

fiber optics and satellites and stuff like that it may turn out that community radio links up with each other and then we may be talking about a zillion million pieces of music or information that might be available so David called his magazine Sound Choice and it was part of the ongoing audio evolution network and that continues now but it's a different form and with that concept of audio evolution network came the implanted idea that maybe we had to re -look at the culture and technology that was in the world that we lived in and maybe we had to rethink how it could be used maybe the idea of single parts not mixing together was the problem but how did you mix these

different dictates and it was kind of a mystery to us until we actually started the station and started to talk about how we could make changes with our radio station and one of the first things we focused on was the fact that in our area a school bond didn't get passed at the high school and we had a situation where there were way too many people in that school and it was getting to be a volatile situation the gang situation was being it was like throwing gasoline on a fire every day and it was starting to ripple through the community there are more cries for more police more security more protection the expulsion rate at the high school was the highest it had ever been in 20 years it was getting really ridiculous and nobody had a grip on what was going on and many people were concerned but they were they were simply taking the same route over

and over there trying to solve the same old problem with the same old tools and it was obvious to us that we were going to have to go beyond the same old tools or figure out how to use the tools in a combination where they were all working for the people so with the catastrophe of the high schools we decided that we were going to make it an opportunity to figure out how to solve one problem and if we can solve one problem that we could probably approach many other problems in our community and use the school as the template to solve the other problems and what I'm talking about is emergence between low power radio the utilization of the ability to take phone calls over the air the internet or the web as a fact gathering

system low power UHF television and local news gathering services like our arts and entertainment magazines or our own local newspaper the five cities Times Press Recorder and the Santa Maria Times as information gathers with the idea that if we discuss the problems that were at hand and really focused on the roots of the problems rather than just having another talk show that polarized people that we might actually get something done and if we knew that any time things got a little bit too volatile or out of control that the point was to get back to the facts then we would know where we were at all times and the quickest way to start that whole system we felt was to utilize a local newspaper and our UHF station which was currently running root

66 channel 66 UHF now it's kind of a strange little way that we figured this out as I said this whole show dictated itself later on I'll show you what I mean by that when you see the actual individual pieces but here was a case where I was looking up here we have a friend Marl Fancasar who does a show on 66 and he was telling a lot of people to catch his show and to do that they needed a loop antenna a small loop antenna to get UHF and the idea of cultivating UHF viewership at the same time was fitting into our plan but I never thought that by turning on the television and watching somebody do a show where they picked up the local newspaper actually it was somebody from K -Bare who was doing something called root 66 live and they picked up a

newspaper and they are pointing to an article that had Marl Fancasar in Ed Cassidy in it it was a feature story and he was holding it up but I didn't know that what was going on all I saw was somebody holding up a newspaper the sound was off I was doing radio mixing here I had no idea what was going on but bull on that hit me my god this is just sort of a mini version of Garrison Kieler going on here Lake Wobegon days and I realized that as I looked up at the newspaper that you know I'd be interested in anything this man pointed to I was watching television I was in kind of control by those alpha waves and I was ready to listen and I was ready to listen to anything he didn't have to talk about rock and roll before I got interested and so boom it kind of hit me and then we started to discuss how this would be a quick way to start to use the local news gathering services

as the center of our discussions they were the ones who went out to the school board meetings or they went to the planning commission or they went to the city council they reported on what happened and what transpired and this would be something that could be used on UHF TV but it could also be used in our discussions here during the afternoons on interactive talk radio so we thought well what we'll do is talk to the local newspaper tell them what we're doing talk to UHF channel 66 come to some kind of agreement where we could script a television show that would be somewhat of assignment cast or rebroadcast of people getting together and solving their problems that people in the community needed to see that something beyond people screaming at each other on television would could

actually produce something positive rather than just repolarizing stayed positions and so the idea came up that we should utilize the newspaper for our discussions here and somehow or another we should work out something with the local UHF station and possibly somebody who was connected to slow net or was versed in internet to gather facts and bring them into the center and have discussions about those facts use the internet to see how problems had been solved by other communities rather than just simply you know start from scratch get a bunch of good ideas together with a bunch of bad ideas and treat them equally and spend a year spinning our wheels instead with a little bit of creativity and prior knowledge in that area on internet maybe we could find out how other communities were

solving their problems and maybe they would even aid us in setting up programs that solved our problems also we wanted to create a situation where we were increasing voter registration and going beyond just simply scapegoating and being expecting somebody to take over and solve our problems with money that didn't exist or energy that didn't exist well we wanted to cultivate was participation on all levels in the school system and the first way to do that we thought was voter registration we've got here okay so we decided that we would start having talk radio in the afternoons here with the idea of actually solving problems in our community and as the title of the show says father of lies versus the mother of invention and necessity was the mother of invention we decided

that the station itself should be defined by the needs of this community and that we would focus on them and build ourselves accordingly so the afternoons were meant to be periods of time that we would interact with the community via the telephone and over the board where everyone had a voice an equal voice but we also went and got a facts machine donated so that could send us bits of information without having to tie up the phone and a long dissertation just to deliver bits of information we wanted to be able to bring in facts in a timely manner and facts has really helped because somebody can be at their office be an authority and send us information that we can mull over here and not actually have to leave his office and it has been really helpful in getting beyond

what a normal talk show is the same thing with the internet part of utilization of the internet was that we could go anywhere in the world ask a community how they solve their problems type something up get inside of their email or on their bulletin board but the fact that we could actually call them up on the phone at in Michigan or Kuala Lumpur didn't matter and then patch them through our board meant that we could actually have anybody in the world participating with Grover Beach or the five cities area in solving problems so I think we felt there are a lot of benefits to expand our recognition that we were in touch with the entire world that we weren't just here and Grover a beach town that was foggy today and there was no sunshine anywhere else in the world

okay here's a story how do I sound okay I'm ready to go whenever you say okay like I said before this show kind of scripted itself it was as if nature itself had something that it wanted to say through the gallery and we ultimately ended up with Mark Bryan's sculpture and Gary Eister's creation of the opera father of lies for our title but actually I didn't even ask Mark Bryan to participate in the show until some of the other art pieces that already arrived and part of the problem started with this larger piece that's up here which is a tribute to Kathleen Goddard Jones the naturalist who's had so much to do with saving the dunes out here the Napolamo dunes

and Guadalupe dunes here in the Pizmo Beach area and it was a big surprise to me when that came in Caboo who has done our artwork for black history two years in a row told me that he had pieces for this show and that it would be a human rights show but I had no idea what he was going to bring in and what he did was brought that and then these two pieces on the side which are tributes to the dunites the kind of counter -culture people who lived out in the dunes in the 30s in the early 30s Caboo was out there helping with a state run receding program in the dunes and he got to meet Kathleen Jones and got this deeper appreciation

of the dunites not just through the show that we had put on about the dunites which had uncovered all kinds of American history that hadn't been covered but also through his own explorations out there and I think a touch on the heart by the energy that's out in those dunes so he brought these pieces in which were attribute as I say to those people in the dunes and the dunites and those who protected Mother Nature so when that came in nothing else was in the gallery and I had no idea how we were going to construe this particular show into a human rights show John Garcia Robertson brought in two more pieces and then I was kind of caught in the middle with his treating of Martin Luther King

and also Paul Robeson as main parts of human rights abuse I was I was kind of caught in the middle of how am I going to make these two things work and then out of nowhere Jack Artusio brought in his pieces which are over on this wall which will show you and then Don Clopfer I invited after the other pieces came in I was hoping that maybe Don Clopfer would bring in a series of paintings that was working on field worker history but I had no idea that what he was going to bring in and as you can see as you bounce from wall to wall that what we have is basically man's and humanity to man the misuse by the greedy for selfish interests other men with no regards

to their humanity or their rights and as I said it was strange it was as if this show was scripted by nature herself because here in the centerpiece we have Kathleen Goddard Jones then the very last piece that came in was Diane Morris's piece which was son in the moon take a walk and it brought together aspects of our goddess show which recognized that the feminine and masculine the negative and positive are shown in all aspects of nature and that when you fall out of balance with nature recognizing the the need for respect between the feminine and the masculine the positive and the negative unless there is a respect and there is a balance you have what is on both walls man's and humanity to man and it's

just a timeline that goes on and on and you look at these instances and you think well look at all of the things they've left out how many Holocaust have they left out how much genocide has been left out but maybe by leaving it out we come to recognize that it's a principle that's being forwarded here not just individual cases and I think that furthers the idea that humanity at risk was the right choice for the name of this show because if we've got man killing man it won't be long till we're all gone and that in order to change that we have to focus again on the fact that there is a need for balance in our society and that means a balance with nature in order to live on this planet we're gonna

have to work something out with nature and like I said I never could have scripted out such a show it defined itself and the same thing with Mark Brian's piece coming in at the very last minute to become part of the title Father of Lies versus the Mother of invention and which is necessity it's strange because I did go up and originally video that play Father of Lies and I liked it mostly because it's spoken principle that I I was too far back and I didn't understand Latin and this dialogue that happened between this angel in heaven and this leader of this fictitious planet was lost on me but as I viewed it through the viewfinder what I recognized was that the Father of Lies seemingly was everywhere and if you drive around in a community at night and you see this blue light emanating

from every household you know how pervasive the Father of Lies has become and it's no wonder that humanity is at risk because they're all embracing a lie and there is no balance inside of commercial television anymore it's all exploitive it's all aimed at some sense of bottom line which is exploitation not not sharing not balancing with nature but overpowering it this is kind of the information area of the exhibit Father of Lies versus the Mother of invention it's comprised of Amnesty International and the ACLU and they're both concerned with human rights and the abuse of human rights man's and humanity to man

basically the ACLU works in principle they don't handle individual cases as much as they find cases that focus on the principles of the bill of rights the first 10 amendments to the Constitution and we've kind of expand as some of their newsletter so that people could get that point of view instilled because a lot of people don't realize what the ACLU is actually about and we're very proud that they wanted to become part of this large exhibit and well they're doing everybody's work and the same thing for Amnesty International you know as more and more people are we're housed into prisons and the prison conditions are starting to mirror conditions in the third world it's getting harder and harder to think of Amnesty

International as something that is only focusing on undeveloped third world nations we've become a third world nation in a sense in the way we treat our own people and that's why we've included letters from people inside of prisons here in America because there are a disproportionate amount of minorities in our prisons and there is also a growing understanding that the current quote drug wars has many victims that isn't really attached anything to do with drugs as much as it is attached to power and control and attacks on our creating enough insecurity in our country that the attacks on the Bill of Rights are becoming very

common so it's hard to tell any real difference between Amnesty International and ACOU from our way of thinking anymore that's pretty much it in this room there are some individual pieces in here that also speak to that idea that English should be the official language in America it's just another way to unfocus our attention on the needs to correct what is really wrong in the society and the common tendency to create scapegoats the biggest problem we have right now with actually accomplishing our goals as far as this community model micro power community radio station is concerned is getting the ear of the media first of all we need

to get across to them that we're not a threat that we would actually be enhancing the current media with what we're trying to do for instance radio people have turned away from radio as an entertainment and information gathering medium and they've kind of all gone to television so the idea of putting your money in advertising on radio is diminishing in acceptability and so one argument that we put forward here is that good radio encourages more people to listen to radio and the more good stations there are the more people who will be listening and the factor of dial out goes on no matter what medium you're in whether you're piecing through a magazine or clicking the dials through a television

or running across a radio people are still gonna dial around on the dial but if they're not listening to radio at all then they don't even they don't click out they mean there's no chance of hooking them to hear what kind of entertainment or education you might be presenting and so that's one problem that we're having right now is getting across the fact that we're not a threat to what's going on we're actually an enhancement to our community secondly getting the media to understand that they have to participate with us is somewhat against their normal nature so often the in in fact that's the history of radio and television and newspapers that they're constantly fighting among each other

and the only time there's any kind of agreement is when they work together to sell ads they kind of co -op together and this could be a continuation of such a system and part of what we were saying about local newspaper and getting it on to UHF television anytime we had a discussion if people wanted to participate all they'd have to do is go out and buy a local newspaper to sort of like you can't tell the players without a scorecard situation if they only had to go to a corner stand and pick up a newspaper to get updated on the current discussion about the school board and where monies were being spent and if they only came in in the middle of a conversation on the radio all they have to do is go to page three check out what other people have said start to balance what facts have

already been discussed and then they could present maybe a more balanced point of view and they could make a more balanced educated vote so we are trying to kind of unpolarize the situation and get our word out but it's it's very hard none of the local TV stations want to cover us they think all we're doing is looking for publicity and that's not our interest at all it we don't stand to gain anything here we're not deriving any kind of monetary benefit whatsoever so what we're really trying to do is get them to cover us as a news event that would be beneficial to the community