Observing Regeneration: The Llano Idea
Weird? What is it? Crew members of The Llano Idea would tell you it’s arriving to your final radio shift of the semester and being told it didn’t exist. I mean, it had. Unfortunately, it did not magically disappear. Rather, it was administratively shut down with no more than a fifteen minute warning on the last day of the fall semester. It was an all-out plotted guerilla attack, sly and definite in its effect. It would later turn out that the decision was one we’ve grown familiar with in these recessive times. Of course, it was budget issues that blew the wind that fell the 40-year-old house of cards. Texas Tech University’s alternative music radio station KTXT 88.1 found itself a casualty of budgetary issues burdening the student media department. Meetings were attended by those who picked up what was left to be kept, so many hearts and diamonds scattered but not torn. It was with this deck of picked up pieces that The Llano Idea saw its foundations formed. Granted it did not mend all wounds, proposed a month after the guerilla attack was an opportunity to continue the reputation students, DJs in training, had worked so hard to reinvigorate with every passing semester. An unnamed Texas Tech alumni in Austin gave to one time members of KTXT all necessary components to create an online radio station independent of Texas Tech and run purely on self-motivation and absolute threadbare love for the best in unique music. Indeed, all allusions to “the Day the Music Died,” in this Buddy Holly shrouded environment went out the window.
Since the closing of KTXT, all equipment removed to ubiquitous locations days after the close, the one-time members have made their home from dives to living room carpet. Your reporter attended a couple of their weekly meetings. I was fortunate enough to see the first in a new, well, old office, which housed no less than 20 members sardine-packed for a routine hour meeting that occurs every week. They have been given one month to figure a plan for financing of the operation. The significance of this is the burden itself. Every effort made here will affect the opportunities of future students who wish to participate in the radio industry. Its success will speak to Texas DIY music efforts as a whole as well. Students Alan Brown, Pat Thompson, and Ben Williams, only to name a few, will be staying in Lubbock after graduation to insure consistency in the online station’s new programs, most of which are still being ironed out and learned anew. The meeting covered topics such as having a blog updated with news from an onsite representative, “Burgers” Rana, at this year’s SXSW music conference in Austin. Merchandise is also underway for local promotion—strange talk of handmade plush logos, a prairie dog you see entranced in earphones at the top right of the radio site. Members are to begin advertising for community organizations considered beneficial and somewhat necessary to avoid an aesthetic of underground snobbery.
The website itself appears as a grandiose blog, where members post new additions to programming, a Clive Barkeresque act that is like watching the corporeal entity of KTXT begin to have a nervous system, then organs, then skin. The form is further decorated with members’ weekly music-related discoveries and interests. Indeed, even now they display a flyer for local rock and experimental acts that boasts a heart seemingly from right out of Wynn Kapit and Lawrence Elson’s Anatomy Coloring Book peeking out from behind hipsters’ very own 1980’s Ray Bans. The station hopes to initiate a welcome appendage in this digital evolution, starting to record live local shows that can be streamed from their website. Already you can review programs that aired on KTXT and hear the voices of members that without hesitation saved a gem of a station. While students were thwarted in their efforts to stable the falling pillars of KTXT, being a non-profit organization, here they will be able to elicit support from DIY music sympathizers or simply Lubbock locals with a true sense of cultural pride. Still, they know monetary support is nothing compared to listeners, to Texas peripheral support, and to their quality efforts—those efforts already evident.
Those familiar with this online journal will not be estranged from these students’ and members’ truly inspired efforts. It’s a story you want to hear, that a valuable art vessel is not doomed to extinction by rote political action, that in fact what it proposed in the way of dedicated music-lovers further dedicated to sharing their passions was not a feigned emotion. But let’s be honest, this corpse brought back to life is still somewhat hidden in the attic awaiting new listeners to build its strength, and entrance to that room does not play on your car radio, is not terrestrial. They are aware that it is not a too-distant future that will bring their online efforts directly to your car radio, but until that future, the survival of The Llano Idea will have to have dedicated or simply curious listeners feed themselves to its efforts. So, weird maybe a mythological or grotesque rebirth out of a miracle dressed in Grim Reaper adornment, but weirder still will be this reborn entity slain yet once again, this time by ignorance.
