What is your name and DJ name?
Jesse Lion: My name is Jesse, and my DJ name is Jesse Lion.
L’Raine: And my name is Cathy – Cathy Weber Colvin – and my DJ name is L’Raine.
What is the name of your show and when is it on?
L: Mondays –
J: 2pm, Cerrillian Afternoon –
L: 2 to 4pm.
Please describe your show. What is its format?
J: It’s an hour of me playing a mix, and then it’s an hour of L’Raine playing different stuff:
L: This is what they’re going to print, spice it up!
J: Well, I play all kinds of stuff from all kinds of eras from Bach to Roll Over Beethoven, and L’Raine plays more of a sweet, introverted, kind of looking out the window and thinking about my problems type music.
L: [laughs] Ok, I play a mix of classic, and modern, and millennial, and gen x alternative rock.
J: Well, I’ll be playing everything from Paul Revere and the Raiders to Pussy Riot to Mitski to Frank Zappa to the original soul music cut of Mr. Moonlight, which was covered by the Beatles, Roy Johnson. So I got a way big mix.
L: Well, I’m playing…
[both laugh]
What drew you to participate in KMRD?
L: I live with this guy, and it just doesn’t seem fair to keep him all to myself!
We’ve been interested since Dan first started, and Dan would come by and say he had a radio show, and got us very excited. We were off raising our kids, but we tuned in and were interested.
J: I wanted to do something I hadn’t done before, something new, something I had to learn. It was a little leap into the void.
L: I was always a film and video maker and teacher, and it’s so much fun to just do radio.
J: As you age, you gotta learn new things or else – it’s either progress or regress.
L: I grew up with really great radio, and everybody listened to the radio all the time, and I love to get back to it. You can listen to it when you’re doing stuff – we turn it on all the time, we love it.
What is the appeal of doing a radio show? How does it fit into the rest of your life?
J: Down there in Cerrillos you don’t see a lot of other people; I feel like I’m seeing a lot of people when I’m on the radio.
L: We love to be part of the community, find out what’s going on. Madrid’s gotten so vibrant and continued to grow, from the anarchy of the ‘70s and continued to move forward along those lines, and it’s just really unique.
I love the live nature of it –
J: Yeah, it’s fun, to connect –
L: And it’s a performance, that part. Every radio show, all day long, you can listen to different performers. It’s a happening, right?
What difference has being a DJ made in your life?
J: It’s helped me reconnect with music I used to really dig, but forgot. My daughter’s a musician, so she’s turned me on to new artists and I like to mix them. What’s good is good, a hit from 1720 plays today like great.
L: I love the no-commercial format, and I’ve just gotten so tired of radio – the stations, they all have an agenda, and it feels like there’s not really an agenda here other than just connecting. I love that. It’s unique, it’s a rare thing, I think, in the whole country. We’ve gotten calls from people –
J: From classrooms –
L: We’ve got kids in a classroom, we got a call from Maine –
J: Somebody in Indiana –
L: Not people we know! So that’s pretty cool. It’s just great to have a megaphone for the sister/twin cities, Cerrillos and Madrid. I know that a lot of people in Cerrillos listen to it, and so it’s nice to have a little bit of the Cerrillos vibe going on. I know there’s a lot of Cerrillian DJs, and we like to be part of that. It’s great to be part of the community.
What are your hopes for your show?
J: Syndicate it, go worldwide, make a ton of money, and buy up everything in Madrid and just give it away.
L: It would be fun to do more stories, and we love doing the current events. We’re writers, so it does kind of keep the creative juices going. We look forward to it every week.
J: It’s like, taking part of Monday off to do it is really fun.
L: It’s part of our creative menu.
And then, we hope people are listening!
J: We don’t know. Are you out there? Am I in my closet having a show by myself?
What are your hopes for the station?
J: Keep on keeping on. Maybe get some more power. There’s this other 96.9 on the other side of the mountain that’s like this fascist gun bible thumping bizarre, so they’ll be coming in and out…
L: We would like to crest the hill and take over the other station!
J: “The seven headed dragon of revelations has come” … and then, “Meanwhile on introverts” – so we want more power, for the station to go farther.
L: What I would like to see is, I think there’s a lot of fun shows and there’s some really unique voices – I would love to continue to grow the audience and knowledge of it, so that we can do more stuff. Get more equipment. At the same time, I love the local nature of it. Lake Wobegon wasn’t a real place, but Madrid is.