Ferris O’Brien talks about the return of 105.3 FM “The Spy”
“The Spy” is currently locked in a basement, but Ferris O’Brien promises to release it in three days.
Five years ago, 105.3 FM “The Spy” left the airwaves, replaced by a Spanish language station, and a great experiment in ultra-alternative rock radio was consigned to history. Now O’Brien, the morning disc jockey on The Spy, has bought the station from Citadel Broadcasting and the long dormant Spy returns to the airwaves Monday.
“I’ve been working on this at least since March — actually physically working on this deal,” said O’Brien. “But in all actuality, this has been something I’ve been thinking about doing, wanting to be doing, for the last 10 years.”
O’Brien, whose career in radio began with KDGE-FM in Dallas, eventually moved to Stillwater, where he was a key player on KSPI-FM, the stylistic precursor to KSYY. KSPI-FM changed formats in 2000, and O’Brien joined 105.3 FM when that station adopted a deep alternative format in December 2002, playing a diverse selection of underground British and domestic rock.
After KSYY changed formats in June 2004, O’Brien continued to work with Citadel, hosting a “Spy Radio” program on KATT-FM. But O’Brien said his dream has always been to run his own station, and he reached an agreement earlier this year to purchase the station from Citadel with his own money and investment from family members.
Since embarking on the process of buying the station, O’Brien has been collecting and programming the necessary equipment and reaching out to past colleagues such as former Chainsaw Kittens singer Tyson Meade, one of the regular deejays on the station. Meade, who now lives and teaches in Shanghai, China, is expected to return to The Spy with a regular show recorded half a world away.
In the meantime, O’Brien is filling his equipment with digital song files, ranging from classics by The Smiths and Talking Heads to local bands such as Pretty Black Chains.
“I’ve had the automation system for about two months, and I am still working on it today,” he said. “I lock myself in my basement, and my wife refers to it as “mad scientist syndrome.”
While he acknowledged that there are big risks involved in this undertaking, O’Brien said he thinks he can operate a profitable business while bringing a radio legend back to life.
“You know, I’m not in this specifically to get filthy, stinking rich, where I fill up a bedroom with 100-dollar bills and roll around naked. If that happens, that’s great, too. But if I break even and make a good living and can pay the bills and keep it on the air, I know I can do that.”
Video of the Day: Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck, “Heaven Can Wait”
A Silverlake shuffle from Gainsbourg’s upcoming disc with Beck, IRM, due in January, the video features hamburger skateboards, a wigged lizard, nacho bomb, green fuzzy meanies, fruity pebbles in the bathtub — come to think of it, all this sounds like a thrown-out lyric from the Mellow Gold days.
Video of the Day: Grizzly Bear, “Ready, Able”
A Claymation sasquatch gets sucked into a plexiglass chandelier. Just another day at the office.
Insane Danes and Wayne
Secrets Of The State - The William Blakes from Speed Of Sound on Vimeo.
Danish pop band The William Blakes have released their new disc titled Wayne Coyne. And we truly love them for that, but this video for “Secrets of the State” appears to be suffering from a loss in translation. Still, how can you not love a band that does this with their debut disc?
Video of the Day: Pomplamoose, “Single Ladies”
Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte do their own songs, but a superb introduction to their ethos, the equation for which seems to be Pianosaurus + Self’s Gizmodgery + twee pop + light irony, is Pomplamoose’s excellent array of covers. Shuffle around the duo’s YouTube channel for great takes on Earth Wind & Fire’s “September” and Jacko’s “Beat It.” Thanks to Static videographer Tanner Herriott for the tip.
Video of the Day: Rain Machine, “Give Blood”
This is Kyp Malone of TV On the Radio, in the event that his stupendous face garden wasn’t a giveaway. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the luxury hotel setting — this gets whacked out fairly quickly.
Movie Review: “2012″
Rating: 19
As it turns out, the world ends stupidly. It ends with sight gags such as a couple arguing in a grocery store, the husband saying, “I feel like something is coming between us,” and the ground opening up. It ends with the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy crashing into the White House. It ends with a failed novelist outrunning giant cracks in the Earth, driving a Bentley on a glacier and saving the last vestiges of humanity from a harsh meeting with the business end of the Himalayas. And it all happens three years from now, in “2012.”
In director Roland Emmerich’s end-of-world view, disaster can only be meaningful if easily identifiable architecture and geography falls down and goes boom. All of this is seen through the eyes of bedraggled common man Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), an unsuccessful writer who lost his wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and children to Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Gordon Silberman (Tom McCarthy). Now, Jackson is reduced to driving a limousine and listening to an Art Bell-style crackpot who believes the end of the world is nigh.
Meanwhile, geophysicist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) knows that Earth’s core is heating up. Helmsley is the hero who warned the president’s chief of staff, Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt), that extreme measures were needed to save humanity. An ambitious, vaguely biblical escape plan is under way, but most civilians just think they are experiencing standard “earthquake weather” in Los Angeles and need to “move back to Wisconsin.”
But because Jackson is a sneaky fellow with loose standards when it comes to hiking in protected areas, he knows something. He is also an astoundingly good limo driver who can beat a rapidly developing ground fissure as it rips up boulevards in West L.A., and Gordon, who has only piloted a plane once before, flies the family’s escape craft as if he were the Blue Angels’ star aviator.
The end of the world is not a personal horror in “2012.” What happens onscreen has no more emotional resonance than the implosion of an old Las Vegas hotel. When Gordon manages to co-pilot a Russian cargo plane out of a cratering Vegas, he has a little chuckle when his landing gear grazes the fake Eiffel Tower. When conspiracy radio host Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) gets knocked off a mountain by a thermal blast, the result is pure vaudeville. The end of days is so apocalyptically hilarious that more than 6 billion people die laughing.
Nothing less than total annihilation can be expected from Emmerich, whose aliens demolished national monuments in “Independence Day,” whose big lizard took Manhattan in “Godzilla” and whose deep freeze gave Earth the big chill in “The Day After Tomorrow.” In a sense, “2012” is the climactic act by modern popcorn cinema’s greatest force for havoc. Everything is laid to waste, including physical science, dramatic tension and a certain amount of Cusack’s reputation as an actor with taste and scruples. But Cusack is not alone. Ejiofor, Peet, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover (as the unluckiest U.S. president in history) and Platt all deserve better than spouting exposition and engaging in emotionally lackluster subplots in Emmerich’s pageant of destruction.
As T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men,” “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” In John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” a thoughtful, terrifying and deeply emotional look at a harsh and unforgiving post-apocalyptic world, humanity is at low ebb, whimpering but still raggedly alive. Compared to such a lyrical treatment of end times, “2012” is just a long series of big, dumb bangs.
Music Review: Them Crooked Vultures, “S/T”
Rating: 85
Despite British punk’s initial impulse to kill Led Zeppelin and its ilk, so many American teenagers, especially those who grew up knowing Zeppelin mostly after its active reign ended, took both sides as articles of faith. Whether it was Dave Grohl bashing out rhythms in Washington, D.C., punk bands before moving to Seattle and joining Nirvana, or Josh Homme perfecting “stoner rock” in the California desert, John Bonham’s boom-bash and Jimmy Page’s elegant riffology were never far from either lad’s playing. Now conspiring with the third element of Zeppelin’s instrumental triumvirate, bassist John Paul Jones, they are Them Crooked Vultures.
It makes perfect sense that this self-titled disc often sounds like Foo Fighters or, more pointedly, Queens of the Stone Age’s “Songs for the Deaf,” which featured both Grohl and Homme (especially Them Vultures’ first single, “New Fang”), but Zeppelin sneaks in early and often. Witness the 2:45 mark in the opening “No One Loves Me & Neither Do I” coming after an inside-out dirty boogie, the song crashes into the Misty Mountains — this is Jones playing like he did on “Black Dog,” bass-as-driver, and it’s monstrous.
But Them Crooked Vultures are extrapolating from Zeppelin’s ethos 30 years after “In Through the Out Door,” not copying and splicing best bits. While “Elephants” is a seven-minute assembly of Homme’s guitar heroics, it sprawls on its own merits, and Homme’s falsetto on “Scumbag Blues” evokes Cream, not Zep, even when Jones breaks out a Clavinet line that faintly echoes “Trampled Under Foot.” With the exception of Cream and Zeppelin, most supergroups work better on spreadsheets than on record, but Them Crooked Vultures does not sound as dismissible as three rich players pooling their musical wealth. This is worth leaving day jobs.
Music Review: Flight of the Conchords, “I Told You I Was Freaky”
Rating: 75
Beyond Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie’s brilliantly self-satirical lyrics, Flight of the Conchords works its magic thanks to an unimpeachable mimicry skill. “Bowie” and the Pet Shop Boys parody “Inner City Pressure” from the duo’s 2008 debut used musical precision to expertly telegraph the jokes. For “I Told You I Was Freaky,” the duo delves deep into soul textures and goofball come-ons, and frankly, it’s ample proof that R&B radio would be tons more tolerable if Clement and McKenzie hired out as lyricists.
Witness the brilliantly dopey “Sugalumps,” a dorky male equivalent to the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps.” “You probably think that my pants have the mumps,” Clement sings in a series of strained double entendres, which work beautifully as both pop and comedy. Similarly, “We’re Both in Love With a Sexy Lady” is a spot-on parody of R. Kelly and Usher’s “Same Girl,” except the girl (played by Kristen Wiig on the duo’s HBO series) has a lazy eye and a lost terrier.
While “Freaky” is front-loaded with R&B, some of the most canny digs are aimed at classic pop. It’s only an accident of history that Billy Joel didn’t write “Rambling Through the Avenues of Time” during his flowery “Piano Man” period, and Ray Davies would have been proud to write the jaunty litany of ex-girlfriends, “Carol Brown.” The continued success of HBO’s “Flight of the Conchords” notwithstanding, “I Told You I Was Freaky” proves Clement and McKenzie’s music does not need visual aids to be down, dirty and stupid-funny.
Video of the Day: Brendan Benson, “A Whole Lot Better”
Our erstwhile Raconteur is back where he’s best — solo and power-popping our faces off.
