Low Fidelity: Someone Is Selling Tickets They Shouldn't Be Selling. But No One Seems to Be Who They Seem 

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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.