Marcus Doucette sits at a sidewalk table outside Nomad World Pub drinking a can of Mother’s Lil’ Helper Pale Ale.
He’s talking about hip-hop and reggae and rhythmic mashups from Nepal, music he plays as a midday radio DJ.
“I am continually wowed by all the music out there,” he says, exchanging nods with passers-by along Brady Street. “There’s always more to listen to. I’ll never get to the end of it.”
With a full beard and untamed shoulder-length hair, Doucette is easily recognized in public. He’s mid-sentence when a starry-eyed teenager approaches with her father. She smiles and fixes her eyes to Doucette’s while her father does the talking.
“She’s got an acoustic guitar,” says the father. “She’s writing songs and ready to get into the studio.”
Doucette takes the father’s cue. “Take your time,” he says to the Jewel look-alike, his voice lyrical and encouraging. “You’re still young. You can do what you want.”
With the diction of an English teacher and the vibe of a Rastafarian, Doucette, 36, is a local celebrity. Which puzzles a guy who spends his working days in a windowless 88Nine Radio Milwaukee studio.
“It’s funny that people take that much notice of me,” he says. “I talk on-air, but mostly it’s the music. I just stay out of the way.”
Before radio, Doucette built a following in the after-hours DJ scene performing at clubs around town. He continues to host a weekly show at Nomad on Sunday nights, but 88Nine is his mainstay, his “amniotic fluid,” he says.
Unpredictable and often edgy, Radio Milwaukee is hands-down the hippest station in town. Its staff is young and informed. Its format is tailored to urban listeners who follow Milwaukee’s music and arts scenes and civic projects. And it has managed to carve out a unique niche, forming various partnerships and creating communities with listeners through standard social media outlets. Its reach and overarching eclecticism is, in many ways, the draw.
On “Sound Travels,” which airs weekdays 10 a.m.-2 p.m. and Saturday mornings, Doucette takes listeners around the globe. He’ll slide from Australian indie pop singer Ben Lee, to English rock-and-soul band Florence + the Machine, to Mexican acoustic guitarists Rodrigo y Gabriela, to Milwaukee’s own Semi-Twang. “I don’t belong to a genre,” Doucette says. “I usually leave people’s tastes alone. It’s like controlling the conversation.”
The open-minded Doucette personifies the station’s tag line to the core – “Diverse music for a diverse city.” At birth, he was given the name Guru Amrit Singh by his bohemian parents – “ashram hippies,” as he calls them – who had converted to Sikhism. When he was around 2, his parents moved from Milwaukee to a Kansas City commune, where they taught yoga and followed a strict vegetarian diet. “Living in an ashram was a profound experience in my life,” he says. “Everybody was up at 4 a.m. to do yoga. Everybody learned to play music.”
But when Doucette was 7, his parents left the commune and split up. They dropped his Sikh name and began calling him Marc. He got his hair cut for the first time and had his first taste of meat. Yet the yogic lifestyle remained an enduring part of his life. He
continues to practice today.
As a boy, Doucette alternated between his mother’s home in Kansas City and his father’s home in Milwaukee. He lived with his dad in Sherman Park and then in Wauwatosa, playing Little League baseball and following the Brewers and the Bucks. “Growing up in Milwaukee was like classic rock to me,” he says.
But Doucette was hardly a typical kid. His mother is African-American, his father white. Being biracial – a “neither-nor” as Doucette puts it – was tough, particularly at Wauwatosa East High School, which was predominantly white when he enrolled as a sophomore in 1990. “I broke into a sweat walking into school,” he says. Feeling self-conscious, he became an introvert, reading books in the back of the room during class.
As a child, music at home ranged from Stevie Wonder to Slick Rick, but he didn’t pay much attention. It wasn’t until college at Marquette University, a time to explore, that he began to take notice. He grew dreadlocks, smoked pot and discovered a ton of new music – electronic, trip-hop, G. Love & Special Sauce, Counting Crows, Beck. “It hit me like a bomb,” he says. “I started to dream a little bit.”
Doucette registered for French and theology classes, and switched his major to English. He took a liking to William Faulkner, to American Indian writer Sherman Alexie and, of all things, to Viking sagas. “They’re like soap operas with broadswords,” he says. Inspired by his musical awakening and moved by the power of words, he tried his hand at writing personal essays and poetry, chasing his muse. “I had no career plans whatsoever,” he says. “It was my beginning of trying to live life as fearless
as possible.”
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After graduating, he began DJ-ing at a Downtown record store while working at the Milwaukee Public Library. Each job gave him welcome access to huge selections of recorded music, and eventually, he landed a DJ gig for a party of 200 people at Lakefront Brewery. “It was totally a starter set, but I was into it,” he says.
As he scratched out a living as a waiter, bartender, house painter and landscaper, the DJ gigs kept coming. “My extra thing gave me extra money to do more of my extra thing.”
And then he caught a break. In 2005, he was offered an on-air spot on WMSE 91.7 FM, a community station similar in format to 88Nine. He found his groove playing world music.
Two years passed, then Radio Milwaukee called and asked him to become a full-time DJ. He didn’t hesitate to make the jump.
“Marcus represents the essence of Radio Milwaukee in so many ways,” says Mary Louise Mussoline, its executive director. “He has a big heart, he cares about our audience, and he gives his best every day to present a diverse and adventurous musical experience.”
Started in 2007, 88Nine grew out of a locally produced jazz station run by Milwaukee Public Schools. Known then and now by the call letters WYMS-FM, the station changed hands after a contentious MPS decision in 2002 to pull the plug on the financially strapped in-house jazz format. WYMS moved to a syndicated approach as the school district searched for a new operator.
Today, 88Nine’s nine on-air DJs continue to broadcast from a studio in the basement of the district’s central offices on West Vliet Street, directly below the MPS human resources and payroll offices. Down the subterranean hallway is a cafeteria for MPS employees, the district’s Head Start office, and the officious-sounding Division of Purchasing and Warehouse Services. It’s an odd location for an urban radio station that cuts its teeth on indie rock and hip-hop. But the rent is cheap.
Supported by private contributions, foundation grants and corporate sponsorships, 88Nine was launched just before the onset of the recession. Yet the nonprofit station has grown steadily, says Mussoline, increasing its contributing membership from 1,600 in 2009 to 2,900 in 2011. According to Arbitron Inc., which measures audiences of local radio markets, the station had 78,500 weekly listeners in July 2011 compared to 51,600 in July 2010, she says.
In May 2010, the station picked up the syndicated “World Cafe” when WUWM-FM (Milwaukee’s public radio station) dropped the show, deciding its audience skewed younger than the Cafe’s
demographics.
88Nine, on the other hand, targets this younger audience, promoting the station through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as Foursquare, Foodspotting and Broadcastr, a location-based storytelling service.
“When we launched, there weren’t many stations to look to for a social media strategy,” Mussoline says. “But we knew this was going to be an important program area for us, given the demographic we hoped to attract.
“We see the Web and social media as a further extension of our broadcast signal,” she adds. “You could say it’s the ‘wave of the present’ for community radio.”
Through listener testimonials and on-air staff reports of concerts and other local events, 88Nine zealously – sometimes overzealously – promotes Milwaukee.
“People say, ‘I really like that you’re so positive about Milwaukee. I like learning new things about the community that I didn’t
know,’ ” says Mussoline. “We’re not Pollyanna, but we do try to let people know about the good news in the city.”
The station’s positivity fits Doucette’s. On-air, he steers clear of dogma. He follows playlists set communally by the staff, but he’s free to improvise and chooses music that “lifts the spirit and refreshes the soul.
“People don’t want to be put in a corner; they don’t want to be defined or put in a musical ’hood,” he says. “Milwaukee is a fractured community. Milwaukee is separate, in a way, but it really hungers for togetherness.”
Having little in common with the news-heavy format of
National Public Radio or the sharp-edged one-sided opinions of talk radio, Radio Milwaukee is social media delivered by an old-fashioned technology – radio waves.
“Every town needs something that connects to them,” Doucette says. “We put people in touch. We’re the switchboard operators.”
On a Wednesday show of “Sound Travels,” a nine-piece Minneapolis band called Irie Sol squeezes into 88Nine’s tiny studio for a live performance. Doucette untangles electrical cords and sets volume levels while intermittently reciting station promos into his on-air microphone.
The band, reggae funk with big Spanish overtones, tunes for a sound check of a song called “Senorita Linda.”
“I didn’t know you guys slung the Espanol,” Doucette says,
groovin’ to the chunky rhythm.
Junior Williams, a Jamaican vocalist wearing a knit cap over dreadlocks, adjusts his mic, then leans into Doucette. “You are so cool, mon,” Williams says, offering Doucette a fist bump and a grin. “I thought you were gonna be more like a nerdy guy.”
Plugged in and ready, as the clock on the wall ticks toward noon, Doucette introduces the band: “Many thanks for you guys being here. Many blessings, many blessings.” And they jump into a brassy salsa tune that’s sure to shake the bureaucrats upstairs.
