hollywood bowl

It’s another bright, sunny and promising Thursday morning in Los Angeles in early October, but things are not going well for the morning team on the public radio station KCSN, known as the SoCal Sound.

Morning show hosts Nic Harcourt and Jet Raskin are seven days into the station’s eight-day “shortfall” fundraiser, named for the season and the funds the station is attempting to make up after its nearly $250,000 grant from the Corp. for Public Broadcasting was canceled after the organization was defunded by Congress in July.

This morning, Harcourt and Raskin are experiencing their own shortfall. They’re behind on their goal for the first two hours of the show, yet they are plowing ahead, pleading with their listeners to contribute to the cause, offering premiums such as concert tickets, vinyl records and a specially designed long-sleeve hoodie T-shirt with the words “Protect Public Radio” written on a graphic of an acoustic guitar held in a clenched fist.

After the impassioned plea comes more music. David Bowie’s “Nite Flights,” a Walker Brothers song featured on the late legend’s 1993 album “Black Tie White Noise,” blares from the speakers. It’s not the album version, but rather the “Mood Swings Remix” released in 2010. It’s followed by “Ico,” a new song from upstart Canadian indie act Jo Passed’s forthcoming album, that’s been designated as the show’s “Fresh Squeezed Track of the Day.” You’re not likely to hear the two songs back-to-back anywhere, especially on the radio, but that’s the appeal of the SoCal Sound. The station has a playlist, but it allows its DJs to add their own picks to the mix, making it a listening experience on the radio dial.

The on-air mic in the station at 88.5 FM SoCal Sound.

(Matt Blake)

A few hours later, Harcourt and Raskin are breathing easier as the pledges start to roll in and they’re nearly back on track. For Harcourt, the highs and lows of a fundraising campaign are nothing new. He estimates he’s done more than 60 of them if you combine his years at KCSN and KCRW, the city’s best-known public radio station which first introduced the British-born DJ to Los Angeles listeners in 1998.

“The old-school way of doing it was two fund drives a year, a spring and a fall, but in recent years, public radio stations have found that that’s not enough, so you’ll find mini drives and pop-up drives or day here or day there,” Harcourt said in a recent phone interview. (The station also receives support from a number of local sponsors and underwriters including My Valley Pass, the Pantages, the Hollywood Bowl and others.) Aside from the morning drive show, Harcourt is also heard weeknights from 6 to 7 p.m.

He got his start in radio at WDST, a small commercial station in Woodstock, N.Y., after a friend suggested he bring his knowledge and collection of records by artists from Australia, where he spent his mid-20s, to the station for a specialty show. Harcourt got the gig and eventually became the morning host and program director.

At KCRW, he became synonymous with breaking new artists as the station’s music director and host of “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” and those artists haven’t forgotten. At their gig this summer at the Hollywood Bowl, French band Air thanked Harcourt from the stage, years after he gave them their big break in America.

Raskin, his co-host since March 2020, is a relative newbie. An art history major at the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, she switched her focus to broadcasting after an instructor said her dreams of becoming the head curator at the Getty Museum were unrealistic. She recalled listening to KCSN in her car, changed her major to broadcasting and transferred to California State University, Northridge, where the SoCal Sound has its studios. Initially, she was working in promotions until she was offered an overnight shift. “I was like, ‘Yes. You don’t have to ask me twice. Of course I want a shift,’” she recalled. That led to weekends and ultimately the morning show. When general manager Patrick Osburn suggested that Harcourt add a co-host, he requested Raksin. She also flies solo from 6 to 7 a.m. weekdays on “Jet Into Work.”

The station’s other regular staff is a mix of radio veterans, with most refugees from commercial radio who are thrilled to leave that world for a public radio station where they have more freedom. Music director and midday host Julie Slater’s resume includes a lengthy stint at WXRK (K-Rock) New York, where she followed Howard Stern. Program director Marc Kaczor, who got the nickname Mookie from late rock ’n’ roll madman Mojo Nixon when they both worked at XTRA (91X) San Diego, is on from 2 to 4 p.m.

Perhaps the station’s most well-known personality, Matt Pinfield is a former MTV VJ and one-time host of the popular alternative music show “120 Minutes.” He’s on from 4 to 6 p.m. and is happy to be back on the air. In January, he suffered a life-threatening stroke and caught MRSA pneumonia while recovering in the hospital.

SoCal Sound program director Marc Kaczor, left, and DJ/MTV legend Matt Pinfield.

(Photo from SoCal Sound)

“I’ve gotten a lot of my abilities back,” said Pinfield, who returned to the air in June. “Certainly, I’m a lot further along than they ever expected me to be. They told both my daughters that I was never going to walk or talk again and probably need 24-hour care.”

The station also has several specialty shows, including Byron the Curator’s “Bilingual Sounds,” heard weekdays from 9 to 11 p.m., “L.A. Buzz Bands” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Times,” heard Sunday and Wednesday nights, respectively, hosted by former L.A. Times columnist Kevin Bronson and longtime pop music critic Robert Hilburn. While the station has 12 paid employees, the weekend staff is largely made up of volunteers.

Broadcasting from the campus of CSUN, the station struck a deal in 2017 with KSBR at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, which shares the 88.5 frequency. The partnership allows it to be heard in Orange County as well as the San Fernando Valley. Still, there are parts of Los Angeles where it’s difficult to pick up the station on the radio, but it’s also available to stream on the web and various radio apps. It also has a partnership with fellow public radio station KPCC, the news/talk station known as LAist, where SoCal Sound DJs refer their listeners to for news.

Staffers at the SoCal Sound take great pains to point out that the station does not broadcast news but became collateral damage in the Trump administration’s apparent war on liberal-leaning NPR stations. “We don’t play news, but we got kind of caught up in all of that,” Raskin noted.

The SoCal Sound’s continuing struggle to survive comes at a time when all radio stations are struggling to retain their audiences amid competition for music streaming services, podcasts and social media apps like TikTok. “It’s a big media market and we’re trying to find our place within it with big behemoths and heritage brands,” said Kaczor. “We always lean into the localism and the grassroots of it all and now we’re leaning into that even more.”

Aside from offering listeners a place to hear a curated mix of new, local and older artists, Osburn, who became general manager of the station in 2019 after working in sales for several years at commercial stations in San Diego, points out the SoCal Sound plays a crucial role to a specific segment of the music industry.

L.A. band La Lom performs at SoCal Sound’s live performance studio.

(Photo from SoCal Sound)

“The labels and the music industry love this format, and they love this radio station because we’re Triple A and we’re in Los Angeles,” he explained. “The industry needs us to survive and be there to break new artists and to break new music by existing artists,” he added. “They really don’t want to see us go away.”

Paul Janeway, frontman of St. Paul & the Broken Bones, can testify to that. The veteran neo-soul band recently released their sixth studio album, a self-titled effort on their own independent label, Oasis Pizza. The lead single from the album, “Sushi and Coca-Cola” recently topped the station’s weekly playlist, which is a big boost for a band that enjoyed a next-big-thing buzz a decade ago when they played Coachella and appeared on most of the network late-night TV shows.

“For us, it’s been a long journey, but we’ve always kind of lived in that world of KCSN and the public radio sphere,” Janeway said. “We’re not Top 40 artists. It’s a platform and a place for us to live. We have no other place to go.”

As for the SoCal Sound, the station fell a bit short of its goal to cover the amount of the grant money that was rescinded, Kaczor said. “Although we didn’t hit our goal, we consider the last drive to be a success. We actually had fun doing it,” he added. “We’ll be doing our best to raise even more money moving forward. We may have to get creative with it.”