December was a good month for the New Parish. With a capacity of 450, the downtown Oakland club normally fills its calendar with a steady stream of local and national acts, with an emphasis on hip-hop, soul, funk, reggae, and dancey blues-rock.
But the end of 2014 saw a handful of bigger-than-usual names taking the stage. The Grammy Award-winning British pop-soul singer Estelle performed Dec. 9, and The Funky Meters, New Orleans' "founding fathers of funk," brought the house down Dec. 18.
It was also around this time that club employees started getting funny calls from artists' management people, who discovered that a handful of guest-list spots for these shows — those few coveted spaces normally reserved for the band's crew, and, in some cases, media and contest-winners — had been scalped.
As far as anyone could figure, someone appeared to be putting tickets for sale on Craigslist, and, after customers had transferred payment, they were told that their names would be on the list, or they'd have tickets waiting at will-call.
Jason Perkins, co-owner of the Parish Entertainment Group (which owns music venues the New Parish, Leo's Music Club, and Brick and Mortar Music Hall), was perplexed.
"We had people calling us from a band's promotional company, saying 'Is this allowed? Is this a policy you have?'" he says. "And of course, no, we don't sell our guest-list spots. But this made us look like we were being shady. It looked bad for everyone."
Perkins' staff looked through the media requests it had received, and became suspicious of Mutiny Radio, the much-aggrieved, internet-only radio station run out of a storefront at 21st and Florida in the Mission. (Followers of local media drama will recall the station's predecessor, Pirate Cat Radio, which started as founder Daniel "Monkey Man" Roberts' pet project and ran as an idiosyncratic, unlicensed low-power FM station for more than a decade — until 2009, when the FCC threatened a fine of $10,000 if it didn't get off the airwaves. The station moved online, and the next year saw an acrimonious split between Roberts and other employees; a group relaunched the station as Mutiny Radio in June of 2011. But more on that later.)
A Mutiny Radio DJ named Aisha Spearman — aka DJ Aisha, of "Sounds from the Street with DJ Aisha," every Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. — appeared to the New Parish folks to be the culprit, as she was normally the person requesting tickets for giveaways.
Perkins emailed the DJ to say he knew what was going on.
"Aisha, this is possibly one of the lowest scams I have seen in a long time," wrote Perkins in an email on Dec. 23. "Asking us for free ticket give[aways] and then selling them on Craig's list [sic]? WOW — that is just terrible...I'm including other club owners on this email so they know not to fall for this scam either. Extremely disappointed."
On Jan. 4, nearly two weeks later, he got a response: "Hey Jason, we need to make money just like anyone else. Get over it."
Perkins was appalled. He wrote back to suggest that what the station was doing was illegal, and received the following response:
"Haven't you seen that episode of Leave it to beaver [sic], where the beaver collects water to sell before the water for his neighborhood is shut off? What we are doing isn't illegal, just opportunistic and purely capitalist." Below that, a reference to California Penal Code 346, which governs ticket-scalping, and says only that "It is illegal to sell tickets that were bought for the purpose of resale for more than face value on the grounds of the event venue without the written permission of the event sponsor."
Perkins wasn't sure if selling promo tickets was technically illegal, but it didn't matter. He forwarded the exchange to a handful of other club owners and promoters around the Bay Area, including Allen Scott from Another Planet Entertainment, Dawn Holliday of Slim's and Great American Music Hall, and Dan Strachota of the Rickshaw Stop. One club owner forwarded SF Weekly the email chain, including the bizarre responses.
And that seemed like the end of it: A cut-and-dry case of a scammer getting caught in the act, and promoters spreading the word not to work with her anymore.
Except that the alleged scammer was from Mutiny Radio, where things are very rarely cut-and-dry. And so it was: Those emails weren't, allegedly, sent by anyone who works at the station. Not only does Spearman deny selling tickets, the DJs at Mutiny say these email chains did not include them at any point.
This is when things got interesting.
In the landscape of you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours trades and interactions that make up a music scene's hidden economy, ticket giveaways are among the most straightforward. Club owners get free promotion, radio stations have an incentive to offer their listeners for tuning in, and fans get free tickets: Everyone wins.
To sell tickets intended for promotional purposes, of course, cuts everyone out of that equation except the seller. There's no question it's slimy.
But is it unethical, if they were tickets the venue wasn't going to make a profit from anyway? Dawn Holliday — who, as the owner of Slim's, a former protégé of Bill Graham's, and the founder of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, knows the S.F. music scene as well as anybody — says there's no question about that, either.
"This is out-and-out thievery," says Holliday. "To me, you're stealing not only from the club, you're stealing from the band. The band is supposed to get a percentage of every ticket that walks in the door, not to mention a percentage to the house, every sound guy, stage tech. ... [The person selling tickets] is basically spending people's potential paychecks. There is nothing ethically proper about what this person is doing."
Holliday feels lucky that Slim's is a small enough venue to keep a close eye on scalping. The club's employees go through Craigslist periodically, and regularly contact people who buy illegally to offer a refund and a face-value ticket at the door. If Holliday sees scalper exchanges happening in the line for Slim's shows, she tears people's tickets up then and there.
"This is how bands have income, and when it comes to small businesses in San Francisco, it's the only way any of us stay open too," she says. "I'm just appalled. I think if there were an 11th commandment, it should be, 'Thou shalt not sell comps.' I mean, I would actually probably take the one about adultery off and add that instead."
I first reached out to Mutiny Radio on Jan. 6, to ask for a comment on the accusations of scalping. I used the personal address I had for the station manager, Pam Benjamin, as well as "tech@mutinyradio.org" — the address behind the snotty responses to the New Parish folks, the person venue owners had pegged as Spearman.
The response I got appeared to be from Benjamin:
We have been doing this for a while now and I really don't see the problem. I had this idea a longtime ago when I was at Pirate Cat Radio. Monkey wouldn't let us do it and I always thought that was a waste. Just like anyone, we need to make money however we can.
To be completely transparent, we have raised about $2,000 doing this. Its [sic] not a lot of money by SF terms but it helps. I love the promoters that work with us and don't think Bill Graham would care if he was still alive.
Cheers to you too,
- P
This was new. Such nonchalance from the highest person on the totem pole implied that scalping was far from a misstep by one DJ; it was systemic, an accepted practice for fundraising.
We went back and forth over the next two days. (Holliday, upon hearing Graham's name invoked in this context: "I worked for Bill Graham for 14 years and believe me, he would care. He barely believed in promotional tickets to begin with.")
I asked about tax filings for the $2,000, whether it was an officially station-condoned policy, and more. Benjamin was steadfast in her defense: "...these tickets aren't bought, they are [given] to us to promote the bands and their shows. We do all that stuff but if something is laying around we sell them. There is no face value for guest list tickets even. You know these promoter people need to understand their own rules and how they gave us these tickets. This is the age [of] Airbnb economics. It's time to embrace that."
Privately, I questioned the intelligence of any media professional who wanted to maintain a relationship with venue owners in a small city like San Francisco so blatantly disregarding the aforementioned understanding about the nature of promotions, but I didn't question the validity of the email.
Until the real Pam Benjamin called.
This Benjamin, who had only seen my initial email, was calling to say she had no idea what was going on — and that selling promotional tickets was absolutely not a station-sanctioned policy. I forwarded her the correspondence I'd been having with the person I thought was her over the last couple of days, and she called back immediately, obviously upset. Apparently I'd been communicating with the person behind "tech@mutinyradio.org," who apparently changed the name field of the email to appear as Benjamin's personal email.
"This practice has never been condoned nor has any money been seen in the station coffers," says Benjamin, adding with a sad laugh that she would love to stumble upon $2,000. "We are under the Media Alliance 501c3 tax codes so that we can receive donations and have fundraisers. The person you've been communicating with is trying to slur our good name."
So who's behind the "tech" address? Benjamin says no one at the station has had access to the mutinyradio.org domain name since February, which is when she says someone "stole" it from them by renewing it under false pretenses. She later saw the domain name for sale online for $500 and decided to buy it — but by the time the collective decided to go for it, the person had raised the price to $2,000. They decided to pass. The station now operates from the domain names pcrcollective.org and mutinyradio.fm, while its old home, mutinyradio.org, bears lots of Pirate Cat Radio insignia.
Benjamin suspects that the person behind the "hijacking" is Roberts; according to many at the station, he's been known to do this kind of thing before. There's certainly evidence that someone out there is using the Mutiny Radio name, and in at least one instance, there are ties to Roberts: The Twitter handle @MutinyNewsSF, which longtime Mutiny DJ "Will the Stranger" says was hacked or stolen from the station, tweeted out a promotional announcement about Sidestage, Roberts' new company, as recently as Sept. 24. The Facebook page at facebook.com/mutinyradiosf is branded with the same "Pirate Cat presents Mutiny Radio" imagery and writing, and posts mostly classic punk videos and news — Roberts' wheelhouse — and nothing actually related to the station. Will forwarded a list of a half-dozen other "stolen" social media or audio-streaming accounts, many of which appear at first glance to belong to Mutiny Radio, as evidence. Benjamin is careful to state, however, that she does not want to out-and-out accuse Roberts, as the station is in the middle of a legal case against him — a suit that's been stalled since he left the country in 2011.
A search for the owner of the mutiny.org domain name turns up only a Phoenix, Ariz., business called Domains By Proxy, which helps users maintain their privacy; the company's only required to fork over information via subpoena. The IP address of the "tech@mutinyradio.org" emails points toward Google headquarters, meaning only that the emails are hosted by Gmail. The Craigslist ads believed to be from Mutiny are long gone, with apparently nothing cached.
I contacted the person claiming to be Benjamin at the mutinyradio.org address and confronted him/her/it about the impersonation. The person would only identify as "an angry former Mutiny DJ that has sold tickets and really doesn't think Mutiny is worth writing stories about. Vapid, ineffectual, irrelevant and not newsworthy." I asked about the $2,000. "$2,000 is only what I saw from October 2013 to Summer of 2014. The number is bigger than that I'm sure."
As for Roberts? Reached via email in Berlin, where he now lives, Roberts tells a different story about the domain name: He did own mutiny.org for a time, he says, as a "test market" name before he bought KPDO in Pescadero. He says it was hacked a few years back, until early 2014, when he says a person from Mutiny Radio reached out to offer the domain name back to him. He says he accepted, and subsequently sold it for $5,000; he doesn't know who owns it now.
But if you want to get him really riled up, ask whether he's ever scalped tickets.
In a lengthy email and blog post, Roberts wrote of the DIY punk ethos that drove his founding of Pirate Cat Radio as a teenager, and the reverence with which he's always treated relationships with promoters.
His time working for Bill Graham Presents was the spark for these relationships, wrote Roberts. After founding Pirate Cat, "I would hand-pick BGP concerts with bands that I liked and secure tickets to give away on Pirate Cat Radio. This opened Pirate Cat Radio to a whole new world of promotional giveaways. Now PCR could giveaway tickets to venues like the Warfield, the Fillmore or even the Shoreline amphitheatre...until the very end, when I sold Pirate Cat Cafe and closed Pirate Cat Radio, we still worked with and had great relationships with most bay area [sic] venues and bookers and promoters," wrote Roberts. "The flow of ticket giveaways never stopped and the idea of jeopardizing these relationships was unfathomable."
In summary: "The background of how Pirate Cat Radio was founded and grew should explain my stance on cheating promotional partners. If anyone at PCR ever did something like this they would have been caught and removed without bias. Basically told to walk the plank."
The story of Mutiny Radio doesn't date back too far, but what it lacks in years, it more than makes up for in drama. Founded as Pirate Cat Radio in 1996, it was the brainchild of a then-15-year-old Daniel Roberts, who wanted to promote local punk shows. He found a way to do it out of his parents' living room in Los Gatos, with a store-bought 40-watt radio transmitter and a low-power FM station out on the far western edge of the dial: 87.9 FM.
That's the frequency where listeners could find Pirate Cat up until 2010, at which point it had enjoyed a sizable cult following for nearly 15 years. The FCC issued a few warnings, but Roberts — who by then had legally changed his name to "Monkey," and was running the station out of the highly visible storefront at 21st and Florida Streets in the Mission — claimed operations were legal, citing a federal provision that allows low-power radio stations to operate during wartime. (The War on Terror, Roberts reasoned, had been in progress since 2002; therefore Pirate Cat was on the up and up.) In the fall of 2009, the FCC voiced its dissenting opinion to the tune of a $10,000 fine, and Pirate Cat Radio moved online.
Just over a year later, in February 2011 — to cop Sherilyn Connelly's phrasing from her 2013 SF Weekly story about pirate radio — the station "exploded in a fiery ball of drama." Depending on who you ask, said fireball involved Roberts a) selling a majority share of the station to an outside investor who answered a Craigslist ad; b) selling it to a nonprofit that ran Pescadero's KPDO 89.3 FM (which Roberts also ran briefly); or c) taking the station's cash box and leaving the country.
Regardless: From that train wreck of an ownership dispute sprang the PCR Collective, a group of DJs that soon rebranded itself as Mutiny Radio, streaming comedy, music, and mixed-media shows seven days a week. Benjamin, a comedian, has served as station manager and program director since the changeover, operating with a goal of making decisions more democratically than when the station was under Roberts' leadership.
There are now 49 on-air shows at Mutiny, with each DJ either paying $40 per month for the honor or otherwise paying dues in "sweat equity" — volunteer work. Several people mentioned Benjamin's tirelessness and dedication; the group recently voted to give her a monthly $500 stipend for her long hours, making her the only paid staff member. (Benjamin: "It has sort of been my whole life since June of 2013.")
The station's overhead is currently $2,700 a month, says Benjamin, including rent and bills; the collective is making ends meet from a combinations of dues, live shows (the station is rented out to bands each Saturday from 8 to 10 p.m.), and a small amount of underwriting from a medical marijuana company. Mutiny hasn't been in the red since it started the rentals, says Benjamin.
Former volunteers will tell you, however, that the station has never quite seemed able to shake off the ghost of its former captain. In 2013, an entire directors' group left amidst disagreement about the station's direction. And on more than one occasion, the Mutiny audio stream and social media accounts have been shut down or taken over through what many members believe to be hacking by a vindictive and tech-savvy Roberts. (Benjamin bemoans her own lack of technical know-how, by contrast.)
Still, the station enjoys plenty of goodwill in a changing San Francisco, especially considering its location in the rapidly gentrifying Mission District. For the last three years, Mutiny has partnered with Mission Boys and Girls Club for a program in which Benjamin trains students to make their own podcasts. The cafe's walls are home to installations with names like "Eviction Times" and "Incarcerated Art," featuring work by local visual artists who receive 100 percent of the proceeds. Iconic San Francisco rabble rouser Diamond Dave Whitaker hosts a talk show that's hard to imagine anywhere else. The studio has hosted musical guests like George Clinton and Toots and the Maytals, provided stage time for nearly every underground comic in town, and offered independent coverage of the Occupy movement at a time when, arguably, many other media sources in the Bay Area couldn't, or wouldn't.
And, hey: It's a volunteer-run arts collective. Ask members of any business that fits this profile, and they'll tell you that disagreement and disorganization are signs that a collective is, well, a collective — most often one with very noble, populist, if not terribly well-defined, goals. There are certainly businesses worthy of much more scrutiny — cough, tech companies receiving massive tax breaks in the name of community development — currently shaping San Francisco in much more permanent ways.
So how is it that a little DIY radio station with such good intentions keeps finding itself under siege — whether it's by an outsider or someone among its ranks?
Who's trying to sabotage whom?
It's 7:30 on a Saturday night, and at the corner of 21st and Florida, there's a warm light emanating from the doors at Mutiny Radio. Inside the small, funky space, Christmas lights are strewn near the ceiling, and benches are lined up for a show that will start in half an hour, while the band's instruments and brown-bagged tallboys lie in wait against a front window. A donation jar is propped against a piano. In one corner, a man works on an acrylic painting. His brightly colored portraits of Mutiny Radio DJs already line one wall; his work in progress, incidentally, is of SF Weekly's film critic, former Pirate Cat Radio (and current Radio Valencia) DJ Sherilyn Connelly.
Behind the glass, Spearman is finishing up her show. The local band Strange Hotel is in the studio tonight, promoting its upcoming gig at the Make Out Room. On the sidewalk outside, groups of twentysomethings congregate, smoking cigarettes; inside, friends of the band move furniture to make room for a stage.
When I first contacted Spearman, she called back the next day, on a break from her day job at a tech-related media blog. She's been at Mutiny for about five years, and says she's been doing giveaways for at least a year or two. Asked if she'd ever sold tickets meant for giveaways, she said simply, "No, I haven't."
"Over the years I've developed a relationship with a few different places; Another Planet Entertainment used to work with us a lot," she says. "So it's definitely a bummer that they don't want to work with us now." She does acknowledge that in many cases having "giveaways" from her show simply means posting on Facebook that she has tickets up for grabs, and that they often go to friends.
But she's had the same email address for a long time now, she says — her personal one. And she has no qualms about saying she believes the emails from the mutinyradio.org address sound like Roberts.
"I was at the station in 2011 when the shit hit the fan and we changed from Pirate Cat to Mutiny Radio. There was a point where he was contacting people through our various email addresses; he's always found ways to do that kind of thing," she says tonight, clearly ready to go home before the show starts, and seemingly not overly concerned about the allegations against her. "I just hope this doesn't cast the station in a negative light."
Two days after I go to see Spearman, a smoking gun of sorts — if Craigslist transactions can ever be considered so exciting — lands in my inbox. A man who wishes to remain anonymous has forwarded correspondence between himself and a person who by all appearances is Spearman, showing that he bought tickets off Craigslist from her, through interactions that include her personal email address, for at least four shows throughout the fall of 2014. It includes PayPal records linked to her name.
The man says he attends roughly 120 shows a year, and patronizes scalpers on the street in addition to cruising Craigslist for tickets. Spearman's posts first came to his attention when he saw tickets listed for $20 below the door price; he would reach out, pay via PayPal, and in some cases have tickets waiting for him at will-call in under an hour. In one of their interactions, she tells him, "They may ask what list, so just mention Live Nation under Mutiny Radio if you have to."
By all appearances, Spearman's been caught red-handed, right?
One would think. Confronted with this information, Spearman maintains she had no part in these transactions. She surmises that Roberts hacked into both her personal email and PayPal accounts through his hacking of mutinyradio.org, which is "scary."
"I'm flashing back to when I first started there, and I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen," she says. "But being a part of the station made me learn that I had to have my wits about me, have my guard up, because people are gonna do whatever the hell they want ... I guess selling the station wasn't enough for him and he still has some beef with us after all these years."
She sighs, thinking about the days when Roberts ruled the roost. "It was actually terrifying. The monarch of the station was always there," she says. "Now, with the DJs taking more control over things, it's much more free-form and it has a much more positive energy. If Pam weren't running things, I don't think I would be there. I probably wouldn't be doing radio at all."
If the station were still playing by Roberts' rules — that scalpers should be "removed without bias" — Spearman wouldn't, in fact, be doing radio there for much longer. Absent any evidence to the contrary (asked if she'd seen any odd transactions on her PayPal account, Spearman said she'd noticed some "funny" ones, but was unable to produce proof of anything that looked like hacking), signs point toward her having sold promotional tickets on at least a few occasions.
In the meantime, Roberts — entrepreneurial, tech-savvy, often straight-up obnoxious Roberts, who cut ties with his former staff members so forcefully that he takes issue with reporters even describing Mutiny Radio as something that grew out of Pirate Cat — is an easy bogeyman for the station's woes, way over there in Berlin.
Radio, and the function it plays in shaping culture, has arguably changed more over the past 20 years than just about any other medium (except, of course, for the internet). Ask anyone born before 1990, and they'll tell you of a soft spot they nurture for a particular DJ — there's a reason the voices of Chuy Gomez, Big Rick Stuart, and Aaron Axelson sound like lullabies to Bay Area natives — or high school evenings during which they marked time by when Loveline came on. These were collective, formative ways to experience music. And college radio? For Berkeley kids, there was pretty much nothing cooler than going to see a band because you heard about it on KALX.
Spotify and Pandora and other music-streaming sites have since turned radio on its head. The internet has democratized the way we consume art by making us curators of our own soundtracks, but it's also fragmented us in our thirst for individualization, our insistence on music as a personal accessory. So where, in 2015, does community radio fit into this puzzle? It's a tough question.
BFF.fm, Radio Valencia, FCC Free Radio, and San Francisco Liberation Radio are all alive and well within San Francisco city limits. Each offers a slightly different ethos, but the spirit is similar: If the newfangled forms of listening have separated us from one another, community radio done well has the power to bridge the distance. The next time someone tells you all the great, civic-minded weirdos have left San Francisco, point them toward Burrito Justice hour on BFF.fm, or whatever esoteric blues are currently playing on FCC Free Radio. They're still here. They've just gone underground — which is, in some cases, where they've always been. We just stopped thinking to look there when we do go looking for news, entertainment, and connection. There are 1.3 million apps, after all, in that race.
"I think something everyone can agree with, even if they hate everything else about Monkey, is he had a great idea from the beginning," says Spearman diplomatically. "To have people come together and give the community a voice, to let people know that you don't have to just listen to Fox News and think that's truth. You get to listen to your community instead."
As for the scalping? Spearman says she doesn't condone the idea of selling tickets, but she can understand how a person could think it was a good way to keep a station afloat. After all, no one goes into radio for the money.
"I can see both sides of it," she says. "And certain kinds of people are more desperate than others."
Which leaves us, unfortunately, not too far from the starting square of this wacky board game. After all the evidence has been shaken out, Spearman maintains her innocence. Roberts maintains those at the station are, in fact, trying to sully his good name, instead of the other way around. And the person behind the tech@mutinyradio.org address is happy to share opinions of the station, but certainly isn't going to provide any details as to his or her identity. One thing's for sure: Whoever's haunting Mutiny Radio hasn't been exorcised, and it doesn't seem like they'll be leaving of their own accord anytime soon.
On Monday, Jan. 19, Benjamin tells me that Mutiny Radio has been taken off the air; the archive of podcasts is nowhere to be found. (They were back on the air by Friday.) At the moment, though, the staff is in a panic; Benjamin believes the station has been hacked.
"Pearl Harbor for Mutiny Radio," she writes. "Twin Towers down."
"Love, the 'real' Pam Benjamin."
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