Young veejays shape new music channel

ME Television rises from ashes of controversial Austin Music Network

By Michael Corcoran
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, February 05, 2006

The young waiter at Kerbey Lane South was stained and flustered, having a bad night. The joint had been slammed for hours, the demanding diners spinning J.J. Castillo around his wait section like a pinball in a ringer tee. He'd just had a ketchup accident and was hauling an arm full of dirty dishes when a man, snapping his fingers, asked Castillo, "You're a veejay, right? I saw you on channel 15. What's it called now?" Castillo nodded and said, "ME Television," then hastily headed back to the kitchen.

"You want to be recognized," says Castillo, "but not when you're carrying dirty dishes."

The good news about Music & Entertainment Television, which launched Oct. 1 on the former Austin Music Network channel, is that the on-air talent is being noticed. The hottest new group on the channel is not the bands Tuna Helpers or What Made Milwaukee Famous, but the gang of fresh and funky veejays, who emerged from an audition of 250 hopefuls in September.

But as the fledgling network of high hopes crawls towards its goal of providing the prototype for similar regional channels across the country, the kids on the red leather couch are doing it more for love than the $250 a week in veejay pay.

"You just can't put a price tag on this opportunity," says Bobby Bones, who co-hosts "Airwaves," as well as the "New Media Review" talk show. "How many times in your life do you have the chance to launch a new network?"

Like Bones, who earns a bigger paycheck as the host of the morning drive-time radio show on KISS-FM, most of the other on-air talent at ME holds down other jobs. Anne Hudson, 28, does traffic reports on area Clear Channel stations, including KASE, KVET and 1300 the Zone. Emmy Robbin, 23, tends bar at the Midnight Rodeo kicker disco and does some acting (she's the chick with the big gat on the roof in "Sin City.") Dru Fay, 23, has a car detailing business.

Kevin Connor, the station vice president of programming, is better known as host of the popular morning show on KGSR. "The thing I've learned most from these long work days," he says, "is how much time I used to waste."

Connor was recruited by Connie Wodlinger, CEO of Austin Music Partners, which was awarded the contract to run channel 15 from the City Council in September 2004. As the former head of the Austin Music Commission, Connor was well aware of the stormy history of the Austin Music Network, which was blasted by taxpayers and city officials for its inconsistent quality and haphazard programming, while costing the city more than $4 million to fund since going on the air in 1995.

Wodlinger had heard of AMN's troubles and that Time Warner channel 15 was in danger of going dark. With Connor as her consultant, she crafted a proposal to take over the 24-hour music channel and continue to promote local music without any financial help from the city.

"Sitting there talking to Connie about how it would work, hearing her ideas, I just trusted her," says the well-connected Connor, who ushered former Houstonian Wodlinger into the Austin music inner circle. "She had done this before and can do it again."

A veteran of radio and TV, Wodlinger sued MTV in 1989 when its exclusive deals with record labels kept the most popular videos off Wodlinger's Houston-based Hit Video USA channel. Wodlinger eventually settled with MTV's parent company, Viacom, which bought out Hit Video USA. Later, she developed The Music Zone international music channel.

Intrigued with the idea to create programming that could be shared with sister channels all over the country was Paul Saucido, 35, who had hosted Los Angeles' popular Latino variety show "LATV Live." Saucido was well-versed in the burgeoning rock en español movement of Mexico-based bands showing Americans how to rock out like the old days.

"I've been coming to Austin for 10 years for South by Southwest," the Oscar De La Hoya lookalike says. "I knew it was a special place where music was like a way of life." He saw that the Latin alternative genre was underserved in Austin, so he put together ME's "Sonido Boombox," which plays videos by popular Mexican groups such as Cafe Tacuba, as well as locals Maneja Beto, Del Castillo and Charanga Cakewalk. Calling himself "the old man of the group," Saucido works full-time at the ME offices and soundstage at the Post 501 production studios, as do "TimeLine" host Jacqueline Renee, the station's executive producer (and Wodlinger's daughter), and Jennifer Peck, the channel's arts and food reporter as well as marketing head.

"It's so exciting to be in on the ground floor," says Saucido. "It's hard work to program a station for 24 hours a day. We're all working our butts off, but we're having the time of our lives."

Saucido points to a Jan. 21 ME showcase at Flamingo Cantina as proof that ME is making a difference in the music scene. "We had four local bands — Maneja Beto, EDO, MVP and the Illegal Aliens and Bletzung — and they all sounded different. The only thing in common was they were Latino. But they all stayed around for each other's sets and hung out together backstage. It was instant camaraderie and it felt like the beginning of something big."

While Flamingo Cantina owner (and Austin Music Commission member) Angela Gillen was happy to host the video shoot, she's not in favor of all aspects of ME TV. "I am disappointed that they have no plans for Internet streaming; nor can another entity take that over due to contractual restrictions," Gillen opines.

Wodlinger says agreements with record labels prevents ME TV from streaming, though she doesn't count out eventually making local live performances available on the Web.

Another concern of Gillen's is that newer local bands that don't have the video budgets to compete with Kanye West and Franz Ferdinand will be shut out, "whereas in days of old, AMN was a great avenue for these acts." Although the channel complies with a "75 percent Texas content" quota, per its contract with the city, that figure includes acts that tour in the area, which is why there are more national acts than ever before on channel 15.

Unlike its predecessor, ME is paid a fee by the Time Warner cable system that carries the channel, much as ESPN and MTV are, and Wodlinger says those fees come with heightened production standards. Still, the current ME programming is far from perfect. There's too much repetition, and ME is often the home of videos from defunct local acts that were once on major labels but were eventually dropped when they didn't sell enough records to pay for the video. What's the point in showing an old Reivers video, except that it's cool to recall that the scene once had its own Molly Ringwald in hat-wearing Kim Longacre? There are also minor glitches, such as on a recent Tuesday when the club list crawl at the bottom of the screen was for Monday's shows.

Former AMN head Louis Meyers scoffs at the taped veejay segments; his regime (2003-2005) used live hosts. "We took requests," Meyers says. "We listened to comments and complaints. Our goal was to promote local music. ME's goal is to create a big commercial model."

There's no mistaking, however, that the professional quality of what's on the screen is better than what was previously on channel 15. "My husband and I watch ME TV all the time," says Elaine Garza, the head of marketing for Spin and Vibe magazines, who recently moved to Austin from New York. "There's nothing like it anywhere else. You can't see, for instance, a Kathleen Edwards video in New York City."

With iTunes now selling downloads of videos for $1.99 each, the three-minute music clip, which peaked in the '80s with MTV, is having a return.

"The timing (to launch ME TV) couldn't be better," says Connor, who sees ME on the cutting edge of a national video boom. But the channel doesn't come cheap, with Wodlinger putting the startup costs "in the millions." Time Warner helped by investing an undisclosed amount of money for 15 percent equity of ME TV. An investment group led by Dell chief technical officer Kevin Kettler will eventually own 50 percent of ME TV, Wodlinger says.

"They're big music fans who want to help local musicians," she says, "but they're also businessmen who see this as a good investment." Wodlinger plans to hire a sales staff later this month to sell commercial time, a venture that failed in 1998 when veteran TV producer Rick Melchior persuaded the City Council to go with his proposal to make AMN self-sufficient, and even profitable, by selling commercials. In Melchior's first year, AMN's expenses were $788,000 and the station brought in only $75,000 in advertising.

Memories of Melchior, whose programs "Fly," "rock.alt" and "What's the Cover?" were predecessors to the current "Smash," "Red River Rocks" and "Tex-Mix," no doubt created much of the cynicism that greeted Wodlinger's takeover. Like Melchior, who co-founded the Video Music Channel in Atlanta in 1982, Wodlinger is an Austin outsider with big ideas. But where Melchior's ultimate goal was to produce shows that could be syndicated nationally, Wodlinger wants not only to sell the station's programming internationally, but to establish the concept of regional music TV channels, for which ME could provide much of the content.

To that end, the charter veejays of ME TV are the best salespeople. "For a rookie group, they've all made the grade," says Wodlinger, who's assembled on-air talent for her two previous music channels. "Usually one or two don't pan out, but there's not a weak one in this bunch." And they're getting better, producer Shane Stanfield says. "In the early going, a break might take 18 to 20 takes (to get it right)," he says, "but now we're down to one or two."

Do they see themselves as the Martha Quinns and Mark Goodmans and Nina Blackwoods of Austin?

"Who?" asks Castillo. "You have to understand that MTV was born before most of us were. We don't think about ourselves (that way) because we have no idea what it was like."