On Monday mornings there’s the Freak Power Ticket. Wednesday evenings they’re Speaking of Sex. The Friday Riff takes us into the end of the week, and over the weekend they have us groovin’ to rock, reggae, jazz and Indian music. And it’s all in our backyard, on KCSB.

After 45 years on the air, the local community radio station at 91.9 FM has earned its bragging rights. It was there when the bank burned in Isla Vista. It was there during the Diablo Canyon protests, the anti-apartheid rallies, the Isla Vista evictions and when Bill Clinton and Paul Orfalea came to town.

“I don’t believe radio is dying, though that’s what I hear,” said the station’s staff advisor, Elizabeth Robinson. The emergence of satellite broadcasts, the Internet juggernaut and the hundreds of channels on TV might pull away some people’s attention these days, but they’d still be hard put to replace a community-focused media with its eyes and ears on the local scene.

KCSB has the distinction of being the first radio station to come out of any of the University of California campuses, though no particular political or personally creative reason drove its creation.

“It was started by a group of students who were interested primarily in the technology,” said Robinson. “They were geeks who wanted to know how to do radio.”

Back in 1964, the radio station consisted of a small transmitter beaming 10 watts of AM power from the building that is now the women’s center. Called Radio Navajo, the station’s transmissions just barely made it off campus into Isla Vista.

Over time, the station acquired an FM signal, got licensed, took on more power and distance, and moved to the tower several hundred feet away from its original space. There’s an AM station still, but now it’s used as a training ground for would-be broadcasters and deejays.

As KSCB’s repertoire expanded over the years, it began to define for the UC system what a University of California radio station should be.

“We started with classical music, and started having news programs by the late 1960s,” said show host Ted Coe. Rock music eventually made it into the lineup, but only after some time due to its subversive nature.

These days KCSB broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with an eclectic mishmash of jazz, Latin, gospel, reggae, rock, talk, and whatever the deejays decide on. Some of the hosts are students whose schedules frequently dictate if and when they have shows, and others are community members with years of broadcast under their belts.

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, however. During the Isla Vista riots of 1970, the National Guard shut the station down for fear that the reportage was actually inciting the action.

“I would stand by them today,” said Robinson, of the news broadcasted by the station at the time.

And then there was the time KCSB dropped its syndicated feed from Pacifica Foundation during an uproar over the influence of management on Pacifica’s news.

“Their news director got sacked for protesting the interference that was going on with their news production and what felt like betrayal of community media,” said Robinson. KCSB has since picked up shows affiliated with Pacifica, but independent from the foundation.

“The main thing is that we have chosen things that are newsworthy and that are not corporately owned — produced by a variety of different people,” Robinson said.

It’s an ethic echoed by the deejays of KCSB, many of whom go out of their way to seek out the underrepresented, whether in the arts, news, or society.

“It’s about not having programming and playlists determined by marketers. There’s a human sensibility,” said Coe, whose show, Freak Power Ticket, makes it a point to convey the underground rumblings in the arts community.

In the face of new media and the glut of information online, KCSB plans to stay on as a community radio station by doing what it did first: tinkering with the technology and moving with the times.

“We have to augment what we do,” said Robinson. “We need to be developing and expanding a web presence, to take a multimedia approach.” The station plans to put a multimedia center together to give interested students access to new media.

“We need to have a different kind of relationship with our listeners instead of them being receptacles we pour stuff into.”

Photo by Sonia Fernandez

Caption: Jazz aficionado Stanley Naftely has hosted his show “Jazz Straight Ahead” for 15 years.