WEXT: Making Public Radio Hip

In the world of mainstream radio, Troy’s WEXT finds its niche in the world of indie and local artists

Story by Andrew Beam

Flipping the dial to 97.7 FM while driving through the Capital region and Saratoga area, a listener might be caught by surprise at what is coming through the speakers of their car.

Songs like Interpol’s “Heinrich Maneuver”, Metric’s “Gimme Sympathy”, and Monsters of Folk’s “Say Please” all play within the hour, proving this isn’t just any run-of-the-mill radio station. It’s WEXT.

WEXT, also referred to as The Exit, is a station that features mainly independent and local artists in its daily rotation. At any time during the day, the station’s playlist is filled with unique artists such as Mason Jennings, Fleet Foxes, A.A. Bondy, Grizzly Bear, or Saratoga’s very own Phantogram, while competing in the market with stations such as Albany’s Channel 103.1 FM, whose playlist contains bands such as Linkin Park, Nickelback, Godsmack, Mudvayne, and Breaking Benjamin, or performers considered to be today’s Modern Rock music. So when Chris Wienk and Dave Michaels started WEXT on July 7, 2007, they did it with the purpose of providing the area with something they felt was missing.

“Basically we wanted to provide the area with something that wasn’t here,” Wienk says. “We were looking at different radio stations that were around and stations that didn’t really give listeners a place for independent music. So we thought there should be one.” This doesn’t mean that there isn’t any sign of mainstream music to be played on the station because there is still a fair amount of big named bands that fit the mold of their format.

“When their primary station is playing something they don’t want to hear, we might become a button. I’m hoping we can become a button on more radios around town.”

Wienk, at what he says is the “ancient” age of 46, knows that people will crave for bands like Coldplay, being a world famous band and all, but he knows that listeners may want to look beyond them. “It’s a conscious decision to think there are people out there who want to hear more than just Coldplay,” Wienk explains. “That band might have been the band that got them hooked on to want to hear something new and different. Then they come to a station like WEXT, and they discover a whole new world of music they didn’t know existed.”

Independent artists are always fighting to be heard, while local 518 bands are scrapping at the bottom. Before WEXT got off the ground Wienk had in mind that he wanted to include the local artists in the rotation by playing at least one of them once every hour.

“At first people looked at me and were like, ‘Do you really think there’s enough music to do that?’ And I said, ‘I’m positive of it.’” Wienk was somewhat new to the area, having been born there but soon moving away before attending high school, so his knowledge of the bands in the local scene was somewhat limited. Soon he went hunting for bands, searching through databases like Garageband.com where he had found a few prospects to add the playlist. “I found some interesting names, but just lots of bands doing original music and it was pretty good,” he says, as his voice excitingly grows to a higher pitch. With their launch date was fast approaching, Wienk decided to enlist some of the capital regions more knowledgeable artists in the area.

“I sent three or four emails around to people like Matt Loiacono from the Kamikaze Hearts, and Greg Haymes, who was at the time writing for the “Times Union”, as well as from the band Blotto, one of the kings from the local 518 during the 1980’s. One of the first bands to have their video “I Wanna Be A Lifeguard” on MTV,” Wienk says. “I sent emails to these guys and said, ‘Who are the bands we really need to pay attention to?”

Having sent the emails from a fake email account in order to fend off junk email, Wienk had to sift through emails to find responses from both Haymes and Loiacono. “They pointed out Sarah Pedinotti” he says. “And Greg pointed out Kamikaze Hearts and a handful of other bands.”

Sarah Pedinotti fronts the band Railbird, an indie-folk band out of Saratoga Springs. She fully understands the importance of having a band like WEXT in the community and how much they stand out. “While surfing the dial, it’s unfortunately rare to come across this type of radio station,” she says. “Especially in commercial radio because DJ’s are often told what to play and the playlists are dictated by computers. But Chris Wienk and the WEXT staff are real, live, passionate people who are choosing to share music that they love.”

The passion of music that comes from the WEXT staff is absolutely priceless, and that is mainly because the majority of the staff is volunteers.

“There’s five people who volunteer on a regular basis,” Wienk says. “Only two of them are WMHT employees who are not getting additional dollars to do it. They already have a full time job, but they love music and they wanted to help out.” They are not able to pay their DJ’s due to the fact that there is no money to pay them. WEXT is a listener supported radio station, meaning, the way the station makes money are by donations from the listeners. They are putting on a concert where they will have local 518 bands perform on October 23, 2009 in order to raise money for the station. For a ticket to get in, all they are asking for is a donation.

“The bands are donating their performances, we’re asking for contributions from listeners basically to support the music, and as a gift, we’re giving them this concert.” The last time the station had done this, Chris recalls several satisfied customers walking out of the venue. “The people coming out of the concert, their first words out of their mouths were, ‘Oh my God, when are you doing another one, this was fun”

Those who do want to attend can pay $60 for two tickets or $30 for one, and all the money will go directly to the radio station. “We ask people to give money each year to renew their contributions to keep the radio station going,” Wienk says, “Some people give us $500 or $1,000 a year. A couple people have given us almost $10,000 a year. We ask people to give what they can give.”

“The remarkable thing about Chris Wienk is his genuine enthusiasm for fresh music,” she says. “He has an industrious spirit, always looking to find great new stuff to bring to our ears.”

WEXT has done its best to integrate themselves into the local community by getting involved with shows that are happening around the area. When psych-indie band Grizzly Bear was set to play Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, WEXT knew they wanted in, so they got involved with Robin Adams, advisor to the school’s radio station, WSPN, in order to help out with advertising, as well as getting the station’s name out there.

“A friend of mine knows Chris Wienk, and I kind of heard through the grape vine that he wanted to get involved with the show,” Adams says. “We were just in the beginning stages of planning it and hadn’t completely thought about how we were going to advertise to the public. So I just gave Chris a call out of the blue, and he was just so excited to be involved with it in some way – and we just started hatching plans.” Adams decided to buy some underwriting time with the station, and soon Wienk took the reigns as he went to their Twitter and Facebook page advertising for the show. This ended up having quite an impact on the selling of tickets.

“We use a ticket company called Brown Paper Tickets, which enables us to track when tickets were sold,” Adams describes, “And you can tell whenever he Twittered or put something on Facebook, you could see the ticket sales would shoot up by 15 to 20 sold that day.”

In addition to advertising on the web, Wienk tried wetting the beaks of his listeners with a little taste of what Grizzly Bear sounded like by playing the songs a little more frequently than others. “We had two of their songs we were probably playing 10-15 times a week,” he explains, “Just to get people familiar with a band they might not know about.”

Wienk uses this method to get a band on the minds of listeners. “Mostly the repetition over the course of the week is going to be on current songs,” Wienk says as he describes the process, “We have a current playlist of a hundred songs maybe, and some of them are more popular than others, and some of them we want to be more popular than others. So we sort of pay attention to what sort of reactions we get from listeners and maybe what’s happening around the country at other stations.”

Songs will be played around 10 to 15 times a week if they are considered popular. Wienk feels that if people hear a new song that they enjoy, chances are it is going to be a song they are going to want to hear again in order to let it settle in. “If it’s a new song and you want to become familiar with it, one of the best ways to do it is to hear it again,” he says. “If you think about it, 15 times a week is not that many times. It seems like it as a flat number, but its not if you think of how you might listen to a radio station because you can only spend an hour with it a couple of times a week. Maybe at 15 times a week, you’ve not going to hear that song.”

For Wienk, deciding on what will be played on the station has a lot of thought that is put into it. He personally feels that his ears play a major role in the selection. “My hope is that I have a good ear for stuff that people do want to hear because people are starting to use WEXT as an arbiter of taste to some degree,” Wienk says. “So if I say, ‘We ought to play this new School of Seven Bells record,’ I’ve got to have a pretty good reason for it. Like, why am I thinking this is a good song for us or a good band for us to play. I have to think about it in terms of sonic qualities and capabilities.”

“It’s a conscious decision to think there are people out there who want to hear more than just Coldplay,” Wienk explains. “That band might have been the band that got them hooked on to want to hear something new and different. Then they come to a station like WEXT, and they discover a whole new world of music they didn’t know existed.”

There is a lot of excitement that generates through Wienk when he gets to talking about music. Speaking to him over the phone, the level of his voice picks up when he gets into the nitty-gritty of music today. Pedinotti expresses her gratitude towards their love of music and their constant want to fulfill their listener’s musical needs.

“The remarkable thing about Chris Wienk is his genuine enthusiasm for fresh music,” she says. “He has an industrious spirit, always looking to find great new stuff to bring to our ears.”

Even at the age of 46, Wienk seems to have his hand on what is hot in today’s music. Walking into his office at the WMHT headquarters, the PBS syndicate in the Capital Region where the radio station is located, you can see stickers of bands like The National or local 518 bands Ten Year Vamp, plastered all over his door. Stacks and crates of CD’s blanket the floor and desk with notable names like Arctic Monkeys and Joshua Radin. This is clearly the office of a music lover.

His hope for the radio station is a very simple one: more listeners. “I definitely want us to have more people knowing about us and more people sampling us because not everyone is going to jump right in and listen all day long, everyday like some of the people who email,” he says. “When their primary station is playing something they don’t want to hear, we might become a button. I’m hoping we can become a button on more radios around town.”

Does this sound like a radio station that would interest you?