#creative interview

Odds are Chris Douridas has made you a mix tape.

If you owned an iPod in the 2000s, you can bet you know his work. Despite a prolific and storied career at the forefront of the digital music scene, the one-time music director of L.A. radio station KCRW, DJ, and music supervisor doesn’t consider “tastemaker” to be a job. It’s a noteworthy anecdote, considering the moniker is often bestowed upon the venerable 25-year music industry professional in any number of creative circles.

Cutting his teeth on public radio in Texas, Douridas landed on the L.A. music scene as a radio host in the early ’90s. He’s often credited with discovering artists well before they became marquee names (like Beck and Gillian Welch, to name two.) Steve Jobs tapped him to curate original programming for iTunes in the initial stages of Apple’s music business coup. If you bought a first-edition iPod, he made your playlist. Douridas holds three Grammy nominations for music supervision, has interviewed everyone from Paul McCartney to PJ Harvey, and hosts a weekly bicoastal music showcase (School Night!) that Paper magazine deemed "America’s Best Party."

Of course, one would never know any of this simply by lunching with the guy. Douridas isn’t going to tell you. Despite an illustrious past as one of the industry's most respected musical touchstones, he is highly unlikely to mention accolades or accomplishments in casual conversation. In fact, he only wants to talk about what’s next. The “what” might just be your new favorite band.

I sat down with my colleague and friend of many years to talk love in the time of internet hate, things to never ask musicians, and exactly what it takes to make a respectable living out of passion projects. Among the most amiable and encyclopedic multihyphenates in the business at large, Douridas has built a career on integrity and, for lack of a better term,, good taste. He’s also got a good Lou Reed story for you.

JILLIAN KNOX FINLEY: It’s hard to cherry-pick what to talk about first. You have so many impressive career points.

CHRIS DOURIDAS: Really?

JKF: Yeah, really! I’ll just start at the start. You majored in theater in college, and your first gig in radio was DJ'ing the college station, right?

CD: Yeah.

JKF: Did you always want to work in radio?

CD: No. It was the furthest thing from my mind. Actually, my stepbrother lived with us when I was a kid, and I would hear him through the bedroom wall in the next room imitating local DJs. It annoyed the shit out of me. I thought, there’s nothing more obnoxious than being a radio DJ!

JKF: You have one of the least obnoxious radio DJ voices. It’s all soothing tones.

CD: Well, thank you. He was imitating commercial radio DJs. You know—Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! Moto car speedway!

JKF: Commercial radio is a pretty far cry from what you do at KCRW.

CD: Oh, yeah. It’s night and day. The difference is commercial radio is driven by advertising. We’re driven by public support. Generally speaking, in order to get pubic support, you program what you think is quality. Ideally, you’re driven by a sense of integrity and, you know, truth. It was not until I got to college that I really became aware of public radio. I started slowly falling in love with the NPR outlook in my college years.

By then, I had volunteered at the college station and started noticing how much amazing music was coming into the mail there. I realized, Wow there’s a world of great music that nobody hears about. My friends in school would talk about how music sucked. If I heard them say, “There’s no good music anymore.” I’d be like, “No! No! No! Check this out.” I kind of developed a passion for sharing the cool things that I was coming across.

JKF: How did you come to KCRW?            

CD: I was planning to be an actor, continuing to work in theater in Texas while I was in school. When I left school, I set my sights on Dallas. I thought it would be kind of great if I could continue working in radio instead of waiting tables between jobs. An opening happened at KERA, the public radio station in Dallas. I ended up getting the job.

At the time, the listenership at that Dallas station faltered so much because they were operating like most other public radio stations: playing strictly classical by day and jazz at night. Another colleague at the station and I convinced the management to transform the format to match what we had been doing in college. The show I had in college was called The Morning Exchange, and we were mixing everything from blues and bluegrass to reggae and pop.

JKF: So basically it was Morning Becomes Eclectic.

CD: Essentially, yeah. I cut my teeth mixing eclectic music. So, we convinced the management to transform the format. My colleague was working the day shift, adding things like Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, and acoustic folk to the classical mix. I was on at night doing the jazz show, adding Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Ray Charles, Elvis Costello, and kind of jazz-flavored Joe Jackson into the mix. We ended up meeting in the middle. The format really flourished. Texas Monthly did a cover story about our growth. In that article, they compared us to KCRW in L.A. That was the first time I heard about KCRW. I realized I could move to Los Angeles, pursue my acting career, and maybe work there.

JKF: All these years I have known you, and I found out from an internet search you were in Waterworld. Somehow that never came up organically in conversation.

CD: Yes. Remnants of my acting pursuit from that time. So… yeah, shortly after that article appeared in Texas Monthly, I moved to L.A. without a job and pounced on KCRW. They wouldn't really have anything to do with me because they didn’t have any open slots on the air. I found a job at KUSC, the classical station here in town for the first six months living in Los Angeles. Then Tom Schnabel announced he was leaving KCRW, and I swooped in. It was really good timing. Then, of course, I got consumed by wanting to make Morning Becomes Eclectic as successful as possible, so my acting life took a backseat.

JKF: It took a detour.

CD: It took a detour, yeah. I had just turned 28, and I had the best job in the world in radio.

JKF: As someone who grew up in the ‘90s, I remember Sessions@AOL (which you started) as a pretty big deal. It predated phones at concerts. YouTube wasn’t yet a thing. My parents wouldn’t allow me to go to shows, and almost all the venues were 18 and over in Austin.

CD: Yeah, so that was your venue! We were on the welcome page of AOL. It was a natural outgrowth of my work at KCRW. I got invited to run creative programing concepts for AOL music, and it was a natural thing for me to take the same daily interview and performance format I was doing at KCRW into the digital universe.

JKF: You were the first person to curate playlists for Apple at the behest of Steve Jobs when iTunes launched. Essentially you were at the ground floor of the digital music boom.

CD: Yeah, I left AOL after four years or so. It was a very corporate environment. I don’t think I can really pinpoint when I became aware of what Apple was doing. I heard that they were working on this music service that would fuel iPod sales. When I left AOL, I got a call from Apple asking if I would come up and meet with Steve Jobs about the launch of iTunes. I basically did what I was doing for AOL, but with a cooler boss.

As the music-programming consultant for iTunes, I built iTunes Originals, a performance program interviewing icons in their home studio environment. The idea was to record them where they were most comfortable. We did Willie Nelson in Austin, Bjork in Iceland, Paul Simon in Connecticut, Depeche Mode in a studio in New Jersey… We went all over the world. iTunes Essentials was a sort of playlist to-go idea. You could go on iTunes and find the song you want, but what if you wanted a custom playlist? The goal was to become the biggest digital music source in the world.

JKF: Well, you succeeded. The web changed the way people discovered music. The access changed, but the need for curators stayed the same. Being someone who was known and vetted for tastemaking, did you find yourself more in demand than ever?

CD: I didn’t really think about it. I do think that with the easy access to so much music around the world, people need filters. They’re going to go to the trusted filters that they rely on to find what they love, places like Pitchfork, KCRW, or Spotify.

JKF: Your taste is diverse, to say the least. My favorite thing about your show is you have the ability to jump seamlessly between new music, deep cuts, and older established tracks. I find myself getting stuck in patterns of only listening to say The Stones back catalogue for three weeks straight. Then I’ll get fixated on something else or swing into a neophiliac binge of only feeling stimulated by music that’s new. How do you stay hungry for finding new bands? Do you ever just dive into the classics and say in with the old?

CD: Oh, yeah. Every day! It’s not because I’m sick of the new. Everything that I do is really the same job. I wake up every morning, and I’m excited to find that next great thing that turns me on musically, whether it’s something from an old ’50s country album or something that’s brand-new that’s coming from a band recording their first demos. I think having that sort of rediscovery of an old ’60s classic or some offbeat Stones track illuminates what’s new. Very often you can hear reference points in new music that are throwbacks to old tracks. This juxtaposition of the best of the old and the best of the new gives dimension to both.

JKF: It does. I think at times people can get stuck on the past musically. For whatever reason, they stop acquiring new tastes and fall back on nostalgia.

CD: I would say there’s so much great new music being made now. To close yourself off to that is short-sighted.

JKF: I was listening to an interview you did with Lou Reed on Morning Becomes Eclectic in 1994. Reed was saying how hard it is for artists to make money in the industry, that essentially they are “at the bottom of the food chain” financially—as he put it. It might be surprising for the general public to know how difficult it actually is for artists to make money. That was in 1994! There’s so much overhead, so many people get paid first before the artists.

CD: It’s true. I don’t remember the specifics of that conversation. Lou came through a few times. I remember once he came by with a book of lyrics he had published. He was saying how he always wanted to write the great American novel. At the time, I found myself thinking that he really had. His songs are populated by these amazing characters, like Holly in “Walk on the Wild Side.” If you look at his body of work, he really did in some ways create the great American rock ’n’ roll novel.

JKF: Street Hassle alone is a novel. His lyrics have always been steeped in social commentary.

CD: I think the interview you mentioned was the same time I had walked him back across campus to his car. He was all leathered out. You know, he had his leather jacket on. We were walking across campus, and we passed a couple of students. I heard one say to the other, “Check this guy out. This guy thinks he’s Lou Reed.” I asked Lou if he heard that, and he said “Yeah.” We just laughed.

JKF: Ok, I love that story. My wardrobe goal is maybe to have a stranger say, “That girl thinks she’s Lou Reed.” Are there artists that truly stand out to you as genuine innovators? I don’t entirely think it’s fair of to call artists the “next” iteration of something. There can’t be a next Dylan or a next Elvis. Artists are a product of their time as much as anything else. I’m interested from your perspective, though. Are there musicians that come along who are entirely non-derivative?

CD: Wow. That’s a good question. Some are.

JKF: You just got very pensive.

CD: I’m thinking it through! Even the ones I can think of are kind of conglomerates of things past. If you take Tom Waits, for example. He’s a bit Howlin’ Wolf. He’s a bit Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, but yet he doesn't sound like anybody else.

JKF: I think Tom Waits is a solid response.

CD: While his influences might be apparent, he’s forged a whole new thing of his own out of it. I think that’s true about our favorite artists. If you think about Leonard Cohen taking the exposure to the Old Testament of his youth and infusing that with his day-to-day meditations on love and relationships, his work takes on this sort of sanctified look at relationships. Nobody’s doing that the way he does it.

JKF: Do you ever get nervous when you’re interviewing major icons, being that you’re also a fan?

CD: Of course! The real cure for being nervous is to be fully prepared. I was sitting with Leonard Cohen last week, and I was nervous. I’ve had him on the air many times, but it was an atmosphere where I had journalists from around the world watching me. I would be nervous meeting Bob Dylan. I’ve never met Dylan.

JKF: I loved The Day of Dylan thing at you curated on Eclectic24 for his 75th birthday. That was an embarrassment of riches!

CD: Oh, wow!

JKF: I listened to it the entire day.

CD: I think I had one person tell me they heard it.

“You know immediately when you put something on the air if it’s working. The radio show is the laboratory.”

JKF: I heard it the whole day into the night—24 hours of Bob Dylan. It was fantastic.

CD: Thank you! I was so proud of that. That makes me so happy. I assembled that whole thing myself, all the interviews, songs, covers. I mixed it. I picked all the tracks. I’m so glad you heard that. What was interesting for me was I was never really the “Dylan Guy.”

Usually when somebody comes into the station, or if I’m going to do an interview, I comb through their entire catalogue. I read everything I can that’s available. I really dive in. If there’s a book, I’ll read it. I do a lot of preparation. In doing so, I get to know their entire life. I never had that opportunity with Dylan, because I’d never met him.

I always thought one day I’d meet him and go through all to learn his entire catalog. The Day of Dylan thing was my opportunity to go read everything, listen to every possible interview, find all the good covers, all the songs about Dylan, all the songs that he loved. You heard what I culled from that exploration. It was a documentation of the things I found that got me excited about his work.

JKF: I remember when you were putting together three full days of Coachella-only playlists this year for KCRW.

CD: Yeah, that almost killed me. I was buried. That took me 85 hours to produce. It was intense.

JKF: When you’re making a playlist do you have a whole ethos?

CD: You mean orchestrating the sets and stuff?

JKF: Yeah, there’s a whole story arch to a mixtape!

CD: Of course! It’s completely built on segues.

JKF: Do you find taste-wise you’re always ahead of the curve?

Cheeks is a Perth-based illustrator and artist with a really distinct, lowbrow style. Her work is incredible. If her ability to project badassery through art wasn’t enough, her detailed line work is something that will inspire any young artist. I’ve been following her comicy, grafitti-style work for a while and finally got the time to sit down and chat with her. 

Tell us about the Cheeks persona.

Well, my [real] name is Ika. I work under the pseudonym “Cheeks,” which is just a stupid nickname my friends in high school gave me and it just sort of stuck. I though it would be more interesting and fun to work under a pseudonym.

What’s your creative process like and what inspires you?

I’m really inspired by things or movements that have a lot of energy. When I first started really getting into art and drawing, I was really influenced by lowbrow subcultures - like skate art, punk posters, comics, graffiti artists, contemporary illustration. Things that are a little bit different, not just your traditional art in a gallery. The best things I really liked about those things were their energy. Things that were really gnarly and it makes you start to get excited and sort of caught up in it all.

Melbourne based graphic designer Kayla Flett, is re-colouring urban landscapes with her vibrant, psychedelic designs. Originally from Darwin in the Northern Territory, she moved to Melbourne this year to complete her uni studies. She has a passion for creating and appreciating all forms of art and design. Inspired by the tropics and bold colour palettes, Kayla spends her time pasting up her psychedelic  imagery on the walls of Melbourne’s cityscape.

Kayla Flett is a cool artists. I met her when doing her older brother's photography for our new issue FEAR. She was doing funky paste ups and I got a few snaps of her work going up.

While she isn't in our new issue Degenerate is happy to support young creatives and their work! So I got her to answer a few questions for our launch! 

Were you scared moving from Darwin to Melbourne for your studies and now that year is gone how do you feel about the year that's passed?

I wasn't too scared about the idea prior to moving but once I did move the city was actually very daunting. Coming from a small city with barely a skyline to a massive one where the buildings almost trap you in the streets is a bit full on! It's nice to know I have two homes now! This year has been exciting and full of learning curbs! Im looking forward to what the future might hold!

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Introduce yourself.

My name is Leah and I work, rest and play. I studied on two separate occasions and on the second realised you can only study so much before you cotton on to the fact that I was just going to loose that piece of paper too, so what was I trying to achieve exactly? 

Currently working a 9 to 5 job that always throws challenges at me, I take on random freelance jobs, and all that alone makes me feel good about getting away from uni. I don't have a tone of time for art, but that's also because I play a shit tone of video/card games. Hah.

Describe yourself in 3 words.

Bullshit artist?

What do you do? Create?

For me I "create" visuals of all the stuff going on in my head. I sprawl it out on paper or, I sit down for a bit longer and I will flesh it out on fabric with cotton markers. I really enjoy creating unique wearable art. It feels like a good point of difference. I also create content for work, I am directing, producing, shooting and editing footage. That is something I think - despite being paid for it - is apart of my creative self.

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

What ever I'm watching or playing at the time. Music. Books, books is probably the big one. My favourite thing is to close my eyes and randomly pull a book of my shelf and use that as a starter.

What brought you to Degenerate? 

Connections and the yellow cover of issue one. Hah.

Lets get into some fun questions… What is your greatest fear?

Letting down those I care about the most and my cats passing away before their time.

You’re a freelance illustrator, how do you find that?

Inconstant. Freelance is a much broader term then I think many are lead to believe while studying. I don't just freelance design and illustration, my biggest freelance work is office based - production, marketing, IT - Just because it isn't creative, doesn't mean I don't freelance in it. 

What do you fear in the freelance community?

I didn't know it was considered a community. Freelancers, from what I can tell, don't really go out of their way to socialise specifically with one another. Honestly I couldn't think of anything worse. They are your competition after all. 

Any horror story with a client?

TLDR: DON'T DO WEDDING INVITES. EVER. 

Any tips for an aspiring freelancer?

Challenge yourself. Don't do the same ol' same ol. You will bore yourself to tears and if you are freelancing in a field that could almost be considered your hobbie, do it on the minimum. Don't try to make money off what truly makes you happy. If you are a creative person that loves to go home and just draw and paint etc, don't spend your 9 to 5 doing that all day for others. It's draining and it makes you lazy in your own creative endeavours. 

Also (and this is the big one) learn to trust yourself and your skills. I don't just mean your current creative skill set, I mean evolve your ability to take on anything, to learn anything in any situation. 

The other week I did a solid week of 3D modelling for a huge branding company. They asked me "can you use cinema 4D?" I replied "sure" - I had never even opened the program when I said this and I hadn't built anything in 3D for 5 years. 

So that night, I went home and crammed the damn program with every tutorial I could find. I taught myself as much as I could. Over that week I pulled off the biggest lie by delivering on the brief. I do this all the time and it is the greatest way to learn. You just need to believe you can do it. It's not for everyone, but its a damn fun way to get through life. 

Wow! What an impressive risk to take! Where do you hope to see yourself in five years? How about ten? 

So rich that I never have to "work" again, (hah) and achieving my goal to have a my first solo illustration exhibition in NY by the time I am 35. Until then, heading up the full production and event management, publish a kids picture book and possibly living in japan or traveling around the world. 

You’re the best, thanks for doing this with us! 

Thanks for asking. :)

Queen of Something

Folk & Fest is Australian blog run by the lovely Alexandra, it features design + lifestyle dedicating itself to the small details and all things pretty in life. I was so privileged as to have kicked off the new interview series, ‘Creatives’ where I talk about why I got into design, what my day to day looks like, through to my creative process, and even the Powerpuff Girls! Take a read right here!

Also be sure to wonder around because the blog itself is just graced with the most beautiful of designerly things.

Alexandra is such a sweetheart, I’ve loved getting to know her. Thank you again for having me!

This is the first in a series of posts we hope to do throughout the year called Creative Interviews. We plan to feature wedding vendors who’s work we love but we’re also inspired by work being done by creatives in other industries. Our goal is to highlight their work here on our blog through interviews and stories. A few weeks ago, Clark Creative had the opportunity to sit, chat, catch up with and interrogate the talented and wise events coordinator, Amy Mikec, of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts. Not only a mother of two, wedding planning goddess, and helicopter enthusiast, Amy assisted in the planning and coordination of our very own Mike and Jessica. The Wilson Center is a corner stone for the arts in our area providing multidisciplinary art offerings to the public. They serve as a bridge for the arts by connecting communities, linking arts organizations, and fostering a collaborative spirit that helps keep the arts alive and growing in Southeast Wisconsin. While conducting the interview we also took in a wonderful exhibit titled “Finite Elements” by artist Rory Burke. Keep reading to gain insight into the quirks and oddities that surround the multifaceted job and lifestyle of Milwaukee’s Amy Mikec and the offerings of the beautiful Sharon Lynne Wilson Center!