By Sara Scribner FCC, BLT, DOA By Sara Scribner Last Friday, two Federal Communications Commission agents euthanized one of the best radio stations in Los Angeles. They confiscated $500 worth of equipment, including the station's transmitter, thereby effectively ending the broadcast of such unpredictable radio shows as The Tiananmen Square Dance (described on the station's now-defunct Website as "a bunch of noise"), Odd Pets Get Funky ("dead people from L.A. and all over"), and Nick-o-teen's Wild-Ass World ("music, stories, crank calls"). Not exactly KLOS. Nor KROQ. Nor even KCRW--not by a long shot. In an era when bloated corporations (and their attendant fixations on all things fiscal) own nearly every station in Los Angeles, when intelligence and good music are scarce and the Barenaked Ladies inescapable, the FCC went and pulled the plug on one of the strangest and most compelling radio experiments in the city. Why? Because that radio experiment was KBLT-FM (104.7), and it was a pirate station. The FCC showdown was a moment that KBLT founder Paige Jarrett had been fearing/avoiding for three years, ever since she started operating the station out of one small, cavelike room in her Silver Lake fourplex apartment. From the moment she first pushed play and christened the L.A. station with its first song--the blues-squawk of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's "Bellbottoms"-- she'd been anticipating a confrontation, and had even contemplated an eventual legal tussle, not unlike the one that allowed the Bay Area pirate station Free Radio Berkeley to operate quasi-legally from 1995 until earlier this year. Her expectations were heightened a few months ago, when one of the DJs at the USC pirate radio station, KSCR, warned Jarrett that the USC station had been visited by FCC agents. "They called me and said, `They thought we were you; they're looking for you,' " Jarrett says. That prompted Jarrett to black-out the station for two and a half months. KBLT eventually resumed broadcast, but its return was short-lived. Last Friday, the station's signal was mysteriously switched off. The transmitter itself was not at Jarrett's apartment; it sat on the roof of a skyscraper, so Jarrett raced to the Sunset Boulevard transmission site on her motorcycle, determined to switch it back on before too much dead airtime had elapsed. The same thing had happened two days earlier, and Jarrett was more annoyed than scared. ("I just wanted to know who was doing it," she says.) She hiked the stairs of the skyscraper--atop which other local radio and televisions stations have their antennas--after seeing two people on the roof near KBLT's antenna and transmitter. Her original thought was that someone who didn't approve of her station was simply playing a prank. Turns out she was half-right. "I was in the stairwell on the 19th or 20th floor," Jarrett says. "And I heard these voices. All I could think was, `They're heeere.' I turned around, and there was this guy standing in the stairwell. He said, "Are you going up to the roof?' " She nodded. "He said, `I'd like to talk to you about that.' That's when he flashed his badge, a stupid little FCC card." The two men gave Jarrett the option of handing over her equipment or being slapped with a $11,000 fine. She handed over the transmitter. Then they started asking questions. "Who was I? Who owned the equipment? Who built the equipment? Where was the studio?" she remembers. "I was like, `I don't know.' Playing dumb, like I don't know who I am. Finally, I just said, `I don't have to be answering any of these questions, do I?' And they were cool because they said, `No, you don't.' " Not that it mattered much. For Jarrett, who knew that the FCC had been closing in on her for a year, the loss of her equipment was the final straw. She's decided/conceded that she'll have to shut down the station indefinitely, if only because they government now knows who she is. (The FCC usually only pursues pirate radio stations after receiving a complaint; Jarrett wasn't told who first reported KBLT, and FCC agents involved in the shut-down did not return calls for comment.) The altercation was one small moment in a larger, protracted battle between the government and small, illegal microbroadcasters, or "pirate radio" stations, which operate without the phenomenally expensive licenses that the FCC requires for legal broadcasting. Since the '70s--culminating with the absurd price explosion that accompanied ownership-law changes in the early '90s--the radio waves have become so prohibitively pricey that pirate radio operators have morphed into de facto free-speech activists, with most vocal and political being Free Radio Berkeley, pirate-radio guru Stephen Dunifer's rebel broadcast in Northern California. Begun in 1993, the station was temporarily shut down in 1995; Dunifer actually won a court injunction, which allowed him to keep operating until a U.S. district judge in Oakland could consider his claims that the FCC violates free speech by restricting micro-broadcasters. Earlier this year, she ruled against Dunifer. Alan Korn , Dunifer's lawyer, says that the deregulation of the media, paired with the record-industry boom and the discovery that rock radio often equals big money, has sapped the life out of commercial music radio everywhere, including L.A. "KLOS and KMET were so different in the '70s," he says. "But then you had massive consolidation. There are no longer ownership caps regulating how many media outlets anyone can own in one area, so one guy will be the music director for five stations in a community." And, says Korn, when 10-watt microradio stations were eliminated by the FCC in 1980, "you had these stations that had to go up the tower [for much more money] or off the air; you had to bring in more money and mainstream the programming to do that. You couldn't offend any of the listeners." Thus, the Disneyfication of radio, with mainstream-bland the rule of thumb. College and public stations are an outlet, but they remain the almost exclusive domain of students and subdued, connected DJs, respectively; furthermore, cuts of government funding for public radio have found many public-radio outlets courting generous corporations for operating money, thereby subjecting themselves to the same ratings concerns as commercial stations. As a result, many pirate radio stations consider themselves the last bastion of true populism and accessibility on the airwaves. For Jarrett, the decision to go pirate was less world-historical; KBLT was founded to fight for what Jarrett considers everyone's inalienable right to decent music programming. Especially in a city where commercial radio hasn't been challenging, dangerous, or interesting since the '70s, the halcyon days of the punky upstart KROQ--now owned by a huge broadcasting conglomerate and mostly predictable in its programming tastes. "I wanted to start a legitimate station," Jarrett says while sitting in the Silver Lake home from which she ran the station. An unlikely criminal if ever there was one, she wears a dyed-black bob, powder blue T-shirt, faded corduroy pants, and dirty, fuzzy pink bedroom slippers. She talks while she makes candles in her kitchen; friend/KBLT DJ/singer-songwriter Lida Husik stops by with coffee and to lend a hand. Jarrett was first smitten by radio programming in Berkeley, where she helped run the college station. She then idealistically set out to start her own commercial radio outlet. "I always thought that San Francisco was a really cool town that had the worst radio I'd ever heard," she says. She approached the proper lawyers and regular avenues but was cut short immediately by the realities of modern broadcasting. "They said that it would cost $20 million," she remembers. "That was in San Francisco. In Los Angeles, stations begin at $100 million. I'm not a trust-fund baby...I never set out to be a pirate radio operator; I set out to have a radio station. It just so happens that, for a person like me, the only way to do it is to be a pirate-radio operator." While still in San Francisco, she decided to go pirate, originally thinking that the only way to run such a station would be to broadcast from a ship (the way many British pirates operate, hence the moniker) or from her moving motorcycle. That was when she met Dunifer, who had been broadcasting his leftist Free Radio Berkeley from a fixed location for some time. "He suggested that I operate from my house, which is what I did." She called her station KPBJ (get it?); when she moved to L.A. in 1995, she brought her equipment and started KBLT (ditto). The 40-watt station soon became a local radio hero for daring to sandwich electronic lounge between hillbilly music between '70s punk between the kitchen sink; its outlaw/rebel status as an illegal enterprise probably didn't hurt its case, either. Over the past three years, the mini-station has won the support of Mike Watt (a regular DJ), ex-Circle Jerk Keith Morris (who filled in for Watt when he was on tour); the Dust Brothers and Mazzy Star (who have headlined benefits for the station); and Buffalo Daughter, the Flaming Lips, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Helium, Ben Lee, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Brad Laner, all of whom have stopped by the station to guest DJ or perform on-air. (Scheduled future appearances by Will Oldham, Talvin Singh, and Royal Trux have, needless to say, been canceled.) You could get the station only in a small area--a roughly two-mile vicinity--but it was almost always worth the effort. Because of the station, Jarrett says that she's lived her life "like an animal in a zoo," with an average of 50 people a week tramping in and out of her living room, hauling CDs, bongs, friends, and beer. DJs would witness her dates. She got used to talking KBLT business in her bathrobe. Her DJs know every minute detail of her so-called private life, and most of them are fiercely protective of her and the station. But for Jarrett, the thrill and fun of running KBLT wanes whenever she thinks of FCC vans triangulating her signal, of having to pay fines and huge lawyer fees. And now, there's this newfound X-Files feeling that she just can't shake. "I feel like I'm being monitored," says Jarrett, "It's a very creepy feeling, especially since I was feeling so goddamned smug for getting away with it for so long. Now it's like, `No. I'm not getting away with it.' "