Getting Current

If you were a Minneapolis bohemian ten years ago, you might have found yourself packed into a downtown nightclub for what was then one of the city’s most popular bands, the Beatifics. Back then, the band was promoting its first album, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, a collection of gloomy love’s-lost lyrics and power-pop melodies. The now-legendary radio station Rev 105 was giving it a regular spin right up until the day Rev died, in 1996. As a result, track one—“Almost Something There,” a swell bubblegum anthem—had become a local hit with crusty hipsters and high school cheerleaders alike.

Since the demise of Rev 105, and thus of most programming of local music during waking hours, the Beatifics suffered a fall from radio grace. Their 2002 album, The Way We Never Were, fell on deaf ears at Drive 105 and Cities 97, the surviving corporate FM stations that feign devotion to local music. (The Beatifics remained darlings of the AM dial at the low-powered, student-run Radio K, God bless them.)

Their luck changed in late January when Minnesota Public Radio launched its new station, the Current. Beatifics frontman Chris Dorn and his friends report that the new station, staffed by some of the same Rev 105 personalities who championed his band’s first album, plays a song from How I Learned to Stop Worrying almost daily. (They don’t yet have Dorn’s second album in rotation. “I’ve been meaning to drop it by,” he said.)

Suddenly, Dorn’s music is being blasted again across the prairie on high-powered FM radio. This represents an opportunity to him and many other earnest musicians who wouldn’t otherwise be heard. In its early days, the Current aggressively worked to build a representative library of local music, one that reached beyond the Replacements and Soul Asylum (bands that somehow suffice to define the Minnesota sound farther down the dial). MPR staffers brought in their personal music collections, much of which was residual from Rev 105 days. They also called bands. They called promoters. They called distributors. They went shopping. Mary Lucia email-strafed all the musicians in her address book—all in a blanket effort to invite more local CDs. ’Twas certainly a fertile moment for musicians with stars in their eyes.

“The Current could make celebrities out of some local rockers,” said radio maven Jerry Steller, who owns a St. Paul-based promotion company that helps unsigned and indie bands get airplay. (Now that must be a long row to hoe.) Steller said there are a handful of stations like the Current in cities like Seattle, Santa Monica, and Philadelphia. Depending on their wattage and marketing might, these stations are freed from corporate playlists and can cultivate healthy music communities in their midst—replete with income-earning, recognized-by-fans-on-the-street musicians. In Steller’s estimation, the ninety-eight-thousand-watt Current has that potential, especially under the able watch of Minnesota Public Radio. “It’ll affect CD sales of local artists,” he predicted. “And a lot more people will go to shows.”

The Current is exhuming many other Rev 105 superstars, too, including Matt Wilson, Lifter Puller, and Dan Israel, who got misty about it when he appeared on Local Music with Chris Roberts, a recently added weekend show. At the same time, the station is fortifying post-Rev acts like Valet, the Olympic Hopefuls, and Atmosphere—a group so popular with concertgoers it surpassed the Replacements’ 1985 five-show-feat when it packed the Seventh Street Entry for seven days straight in January (but still hadn’t been played on a local commercial radio station). For flavor, the station also tosses in the occasional unlikely track from local jazz vocalist Prudence Johnson or folksinger Ann Reed. (This may be a consequence of forcing the square-pegged Morning Show with Dale Connelly and Jim Ed Poole into the station’s otherwise hip aesthetic. But it seems to work in the Current’s oddly felicitous iPod-on-shuffle way.)

Although Dorn is happy to be in the company of bands getting airplay, he’s sheepish about revealing his pipe dreams. When pressed, he conceded, “Yeah, it’s nice to have someone saying ‘We like your stuff. We wish you made more of it!’ And when a radio station plays your music five times a day and is constantly telling its listeners you have a show and then parks its van out in front of that show, you tend to bring in more people,” he said, pondering his Rev 105-induced stardom. “I wonder if MPR will get a van.”—Christy DeSmith