The Sonic Surfer
DJ and music supervisor Liza Richardson stays ahead by going with the flow
This city of stars is a place of many unheralded DJ heroes, from techno artisan John Tejada to veteran house head Terrance Toy to nearly the entire KCRW (89.9 FM) roster, which, for reasons unknown, gets much less attention in this town than such sometime spinners as actor Danny Masterson and rocker Tommy Lee. One of the more overlooked KCRW dance jocks is Liza Richardson, who hosts a choice DJ mix-show called The Drop, Saturdays from 9 p.m. to midnight.
The program usually starts with eclectic, rock- reggae- and world-flavored down-tempo, but by hour two it's marching forward in full force, swirling, interlocking, and revolving unstoppably like a flywheel at 6,000 rpm. Richardson's tech-house grooves are as cutting as they get - more in line with what one might hear on the radio late at night in Berlin. Yet the bubbly oceanic pulses, bell-bottom kinetics, and countercultural futurism of her four-on-the-floor sets somehow seem right at home in our four-lane biosphere.
"I go on these long techno excursions, which I love," says the Brentwood resident and avid surfer, who paddles out almost daily. "You try to feel your DJ sets, like you try to feel any kind of wave in your life. You're inspired by the next song you're playing. I just go with the flow. I don't plan out my sets."
Among her five surfboards is a rare Tony Alva (Craig Hollingsworth-shaped) model. She worked with the former Dogtown skater on the Lords of Dogtown movie - Richardson as music supervisor, Alva as consultant and sometime stunt stand-in. Despite her low profile, Richardson is perhaps the most Hollywood-connected of KCRW's serious dance spinners. Her disparate experience and vast music library (both hard copy and in her headspace) have made her a shoo-in as an expert matchmaker of songs and scenes. Maybe you've seen the iconic silhouette-iPod commercials featuring Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" and the Black Eyed Peas' "Hey Mama." She chose the music.
These days, Richardson is hard at work handpicking tracks for the fall debut of NBC's football-flick adaptation, Friday Night Lights, her first primetime network gig. And she's finishing music supervisor work on Surf's Up, an animated "mockumentary" about surfing due from Sony next year. Her song selections have also graced such films as the recent Jack Black box-office hit Nacho Libre, and the aforementioned Dogtown, last year's set-in-the-'70s skateboarding flick, which was close to her heart.
"I'm from the '70s, so I definitely had a reference for it," she says of Lords. "It's definitely from my soul. I did so much research, it was unbelievable: Going through albums, trying to find cool cuts that maybe I missed or didn't know about; finding out what charted a certain month of a certain year. There were 40 songs in that movie."
While her heart currently thumps to the beat of dance music, she's also done shows focused on spoken word, alt-country, jazz, rock, and reggae during her more than 15 years in public radio. Richardson grew up in Phoenix and went to music camp as a child. As a Dallas college student in the 1980s, she started attending rock shows at Deep Ellum, a warehouse of a club, and listening to public radio, soon landing at a community station with a show based on eclectic tastes. (Her audition tape featured Bob Marley and the Butthole Surfers in one set.) A DJ named Chris Douridas got her a job at NPR affiliate KERA-FM, and when Douridas went to KCRW to take over as music director in 1991, he brought Richardson along.
At KCRW, she dabbled in alt-country (Rancho Loco) and spoken word (Man on the Moon), the latter of which paved the way for her to consult on the PBS documentary United States of Poetry. In the late '90s, she took her Dallas turntables and started DJing house and techno, putting her newfound love for electronic dance music on-air Saturday nights in the form of The Drop. At the same time, Hollywood beckoned, and in 2001 Y Tu Mamá También became her surprise breakthrough as a music supervisor. The film's soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy Award.
Richardson says she feels like she leads a double life - dance-music DJ versus deep-vault Hollywood music supervisor, serious audiophile versus the drop-everything surfer. Her massive vinyl and CD collection "is one of the only things in my life that weighs me down," she says. It's an enviable life, surfing the sound waves under the stars.
Published: 08/24/2006
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