FOR THE LAST two years, Wednesday nights at the Blank Club have been the best place in the South Bay to hear up-and-coming local and touring bands for free. Some of the bands that are now the most respected and popular in the scene played their first major gig at the weekly showcase, from Hurricane Roses to San Francesca (back when they were Le Verita) to Family Room.
But when Brooklyn’s Wet Witch plays Nov. 9 with San Jose’s Buried at Birth and Santa Cruz’s Moon Eater, the show will be a mission statement from a new crusader for the cause of alternative music in the South Bay, Bill O’Brien of SaveAlternative.com.
Founded as an online radio station on the East Coast four years ago, S*ALT has been promoting and collaborating on shows here and there around the South Bay for months, but in joining up with the Blank Club and Grand Fanali Productions on the Wednesday shows, they may have found their ideal partnership.
At first, the South Bay may seem like a strange place for S*ALT to wind up, coming out of the East Coast and making its mark in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. But O’Brien was drawn here immediately when he heard how San Jose’s alternative station, Channel 92.3 FM (KSJO), had became a pawn in Clear Channel’s ongoing chess match with the FCC over ownership limits, eventually being sold this year and switching to a Chinese-language format. The same thing happened when he moved back to his hometown from New York after getting fed up watching major labels fail to connect with the alternative-music audience.
“I left the major-label world, and I came back to New Jersey, and our heritage alternative radio station, which was the equivalent of your KSJO, flipped formats, to Top 40,” says O’Brien. “We had all these great artists, and there was all this great new music happening, and there was no support for it whatsoever. So we decided to start an online radio station ourselves, and start programming it ourselves. We literally threw it together and built this online radio station that over the next three years kind of dominated the region.”
The Chinese company that bought KSJO allowed SaveAlternative to program on its FM signal for a while, which allowed the organization to make a huge impact in a short time, but also confused some listeners who didn’t know if Channel 92.3 might be coming back.
“The thing that was different [than on the East Coast] was that we were actually going to be able to be on the FM tower for three weeks to show people what we would be doing online,” he says. “That helped us gain a strong listener base. On the East Coast, we had to do it through doing live shows and events and having our label and everything.”
What wasn’t different was their reason for doing it in the first place: “Alternative radio is disappearing all over the United States. It’s falling apart. Everything’s flipping to Top 40, to country, to whatever’s selling. Then alternative stations that are still alive are doing a lot of the same redundant [programming], playing Nickelback alongside Blink 182 and then Mumford and Sons a hundred times. It’s almost treated like Top 40.”
With the Wednesday shows, S*ALT isn’t trying to fix what’s not broken. But O’Brien sees a lot of opportunities for cross-promotion, including a Sunday night show from 10 to 11pm on the website Noise Control, that will focus not just on Bay Area bands but more specifically on the bands that will be playing the Blank Club that Wednesday.
“It’s not like we’re jumping in there and changing anything,” he explains. “We want to do what we can to promote that it’s something really special and great. The fact that you can go on a Wednesday night and see a bunch of new music for free is something that not many venues can do. There’s not a lot of places in the United States that do it.”
Ryan Fassler of the local extreme metal band Buried at Birth, who’ll be opening for Wet Witch at the Nov. 9 show, says the invitation came out of the blue. “Bill sent me a message on Facebook,” says Fassler. “I went and listened to Wet Witch, and I was psyched.”
Fassler, whose band will release their first full-length in December on Give Praise Records, particularly liked the variety in the lineup. While all of the bands are heavy in their own way, the quickly rising Wet Witch is like a cross between hardcore punk and the percussive attack of Sleigh Bells (who they often open for). Moon Eaters, who’ll play first, are more rock in the vein of Stooges or Rocket From the Tombs. He tends to be wary of bills that lump Buried at Birth in with other bands that sound too similar, because “people’s ears get fatigued rather quickly,” he says. “Which is why I think this show at the Blank is really cool.”
WET WITCH with BURIED AT BIRTH
Wed., Nov. 9; 9pm; free
