Broadcasting Live From ... the Basement

By Giselle Velazquez, Pop and Politics. Posted August 20, 2005.

Geography was destiny for Karoline Hatch.

"My parents live on top of the hill in [San Francisco's] the Castro, and they have an amazing view," explains Hatch. "One time I was over at their house and I thought, this would be a great place for a radio station..."

Years of lawsuits, protests, busted doors, and one FCC raid later, San Francisco Liberation Radio is still coming out live from the Hatch family basement.

In an era where radio behemoths like Clear Channel and Infinity rule the airwaves, pirate station Liberation Radio has struggled since 1993 to broadcast news, music, community information, and more to its local listeners. The station was founded by a small group of people deeply unsatisfied with mainstream coverage of issues such as the Gulf War and the treatment of the homeless in San Francisco.

Twice denied the exceedingly difficult-to-obtain license the Federal Communications Commission deems necessary for low-power community radio stations to legally operate, Liberation Radio defiantly stayed on the airwaves and continued to broadcast. Like other microradio stations which operate illegally, the station has frequently incurred the wrath of the FCC, which tightly controls the public airwaves.

Karoline Hatch wasn't there during the inception of the station, when Liberation Radio was a short-range broadcast from the back of co-founder Richard Edmonson's van. But as a Liberation Radio DJ, she was instrumental in bringing the station to her parents' home -- and consequently a much wider audience.

It might not have happened if Hatch was a morning person.

"I went to college at UC Santa Cruz and I was... a bit of a night owl," Hatch remembers during a nighttime interview at her Mission district apartment. "One of the things that I really enjoyed was to listen to the college station and the pirate radio station in Santa Cruz late at night. Sometimes when there were live DJs I'd call them up late at night and say 'I'm out here, I'm listening,' just to remind people that there was an audience even late at night."

Hatch's midnight calls to the stations led to occasional volunteering sessions, where she learned the basics of Radio 101. When Hatch came home from college, she brought her interest in radio back to her parents house. She suddenly saw the panoramic view from their Castro home in a brand new way.

"FM transmission is basically line-of-sight. So wherever the antennae is, if you stand up there and look, then you could pretty much get to anywhere you could see," Hatch explains. The sweeping vista became more than just a pretty sight -- it looked like potential listeners. She told her parents, Charlotte and Jim Hatch, to think about hosting a radio station at their home. "And they were like ... 'Yeah, right. Ha. Crazy girl.'"

After a few turbulent years, however, her counter cultural parents had changed their minds about their daughter's wild idea.

"I graduated from college, George Bush got elected, September 11 happened, and then the war on Afghanistan was started," Hatch recalls. "They came back to me and said, 'We've been considering your radio station idea.' I fell over backwards."

She and her mother immediately started researching the logistics of broadcasting from a private residence. Along the way, they discovered a person on the other side of the city already doing something similar -- Liberation Radio, which by that time was run out of the home of Richard Edmonson. Hatch e-mailed him about possibly producing a show, and was invited down to the station.

"It was approaching the date that I'm supposed to go down to see the station," Hatch says. "And I realized that possibly what he means is that I'm supposed to start my show the next day. So I called him up and I say, 'Should I bring records, should I prepare my show?' And he said 'Yeah, you're going on between 5 and 6!'"

Rough starts aside, Hatch began doing her own show on the station, and the Hatch women quickly became regulars. Eventually, Edmonson decided he was "ready to have [his] living room back" and turned the station -- equipment, transmitter, name and all -- over to Hatch and her mother. The reach of the station immediately jumped with the repositioning of the transmitter at the Hatch house, with the broadcasts reaching parts of the East Bay.

Giselle Velazquez is a recent graduate of the journalism department at San Francisco State University. She lives in the shadow of Sign Hill in South San Francisco, the Industrial City.

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