Pirate Cat scratches Republican Leg, China Laughs

San Francisco CA

Description

In its first years, Pirate Cat operated on the knife’s edge between legality and illegality — broadcasting as a low-power FM station on the 87.9 frequency in both San Francisco and the East Bay. In an interview with Mother Jones in January 2010, Roberts described the process: The FCC would send a letter demanding that Pirate Cat’s transmitter be shut down. Roberts would respond with an application to be registered as a radio station operating in a time of war, along with a check for around $10. The FCC would cash the check. Then, a few months later, the whole thing would begin again. At first, Pirate Cat was mostly a stream of punk and postpunk music. Gradually it acquired a devoted and eclectic lineup of DJs, and became that great rarity in San Francisco — a real community radio station, even if that community came from all over the Bay Area. The station added a coffee shop in the room next to the DJ booth; the profits paid the rent on the studio, and the cafe earned Pirate Cat a moment of television stardom when Anthony Bourdain came by to sample its maple bacon latte. Where other small radio stations struggled to stay alive, Pirate Cat had a restless, appealing energy that often exceeded its grasp. There were the intermittent experiments with Pirate Cat TV, which broadcast on channel 13. It was intended to be a community television station, but seemed to show mostly first-run films that were still in movie theaters, raunchy cable dating shows and — most often — a shot of a frozen computer desktop. Then, in November of 2009, a few months after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors publicly commended the station for its role in covering local politics, the FCC finally moved in on Pirate Cat. Other pirate radio stations had been operating more or less in the open, under the same loophole as Roberts. The FCC sued one such station, won, and used that court victory to effectively close the loophole for good. The FCC fined Roberts $10,000. He turned off the transmitters, and the station became Internet-only. According to an article published in the SF Weekly in May of last year, it was Roberts’ pro bono attourney, Michael Couzens, who tipped him off to the existence of KPDO, a legal low-power radio station in Pescadero whose license was about to expire. Roberts stepped in, helped get the license renewed, and persuaded the schoolteacher who was the original license holder to bring him on to the station’s board and put him in charge, by promising to run a radio station for the community, one where schoolkids and other residents could learn to be DJs. According to the article, a tarot reading also played a key role in Roberts’ selection. “He was the knight of pentacles,” the schoolteacher was quoted as saying. “The dark horse, bringing forth energy. Bringing things into fruition. There he was.” It’s unclear how much Roberts stayed involved in the running of Pirate Cat once he moved to Pescadero. When the SF Weekly article was published, KPDO routinely rebroadcast the shows of certain Pirate Cat DJs. No one from Pirate Cat appears to be on the current schedule. The SF Weekly article also mentioned that Roberts was having a hard time raising funds and selling ads in Pescadero, a fairly clannish, small-town community where he was an outsider. He considered transferring Pirate Cat to its DJs, but they couldn’t raise the money in order to do so. Instead, he joked, he had two stations. “I’m a small version of the evil Murdoch.”