Music Head

Standing at a microphone in a small radio studio, facing an array of computerized broadcasting equipment, British-born DJ Mark Wheat talks music to his own picture window reflection—a pale white guy with glasses, a razor-shaved head, and a hawkish nose—and to who knows how many people in cars, coffee shops, and kitchens listening to the radio or the Internet.

“Brand-new local music on 89.3 The Current. The Retribution Gospel Choir—you might be familiar with Mr. Alan Sparhawk, doing the singing there. Mark Kozelek also helping out on that—of Red House Painters fame. A track called ‘Hatchet,’ and that’s from a CD EP that the band hooked us up with.”

As prime-time DJ at Minnesota Public Radio’s The Current, Wheat’s on from 7 p.m. till midnight Monday through Friday. Most evenings, he’s also in his stocking feet. “The first thing he does when he gets to work is take off his shoes,” says 89.3 DJ Steve Seel. “He pads around the station in his socks.”

Minnesota and the Midwest by Minneapolis hip-hop group Atmosphere, accurately presaged The Current’s format: a limited, eclectic range of alternative music, with a heavy focus on stuff created and performed in the Twin Cities. It’s far from freeform radio, but much different from what you’ll hear, and how it’ll be presented, on local commercial music stations.

The Current’s on-air roster comprises a who’s who of voices—among them Bill DeVille, Mary Lucia, and Thorn—from the late, romanticized commercial station Rev 105 and listener-supported favorites, such as KFAI and the University of Minnesota’s Radio K. In this impressive talent fleet, Wheat is the flagship. Passion, a little ego, and remarkably good fortune have defined his path to prominence. “I’ve always been obsessed with music,” says Wheat, forty-five. “I used to say it was my hobby, but hobby has that belittling ring to it. I did the guitar-lesson thing for about a year, but I wasn’t blessed with whatever it is that makes a musician or a performer. DJing always seemed to be the way I could have music in my life.”

As a lad in Clenchwarton, a village hard by the North Sea, he read New Musical Express and Mojo—a British music fan’s holy texts—and listened to the late, seminal BBC DJ John Peel, who gazes at Wheat from a black-and-white magazine photo taped to a huge CD shelf behind his desk. “I was inspired by John,” he says solemnly. “That magical connection, listening to somebody late at night, kind of opened my world.”

Wheat graduated from Leeds University and earned a teaching degree at the University of Bradford. Unable to find school work in England, he came to the United States in 1981 (he’s had permanent resident alien status since 1985). He lived in Missouri and North Carolina—tending bar, trying to be a writer, hanging out—before moving to Hoboken, New Jersey, where his gradual transformation from garden-variety music geek to DJ began.

“[I] waited tables for fifteen years,” Wheat says, “doing radio as a volunteer and learning the craft.” He started in the late 1980s, in Jersey, where he opened the music-library mail at freeform radio bastion WFMU. When an overnight DJ shift opened, he was trained, then wound up hosting his own show. In the early 1990s, Wheat and his then-wife moved to Minneapolis so she could continue her art education (they divorced shortly after relocating). He volunteered at KFAI, eventually starting and hosting a show called Local Sound Department, and writing a weekly local-music e-mail announcement that reached approximately 500 people.

By the mid-1990s, Wheat was programming and hosting a weekly Zone 105 show, Across the Pond, that featured imported European music. Then he heard that Radio K’s program-coach position was open. “For five years, it was a dream job,” he says. “I got to do radio every week [a weekend show, The Music Lovers’ Club], and I got to help young adults and give them a place on campus to come as music heads”—Wheat’s term for people, like him, whose lives are ruled by music.

For more than a year, one of his Music Lovers’ Club listeners—German ceramics artist Maren Kloppmann—frequently called the show. They bonded over electronic and downbeat music, and she occasionally sent him albums she liked. When they finally met, they realized they had much in common as expatriates and self-defined “world citizens,” as successful members in their chosen fields, and as lovers of water—both grew up in port towns, which accounts for their new apartment in a Minneapolis high rise overlooking the Mississippi River. They’ve been married for almost three years. 

Wheat joined The Current a couple of weeks before the station went live. “How often do you get the chance to be involved in creating a radio station?” he asks. “And not just any radio station, but one run by Minnesota Public Radio? This is probably the best place to be in the nation right now. I feel like I’m at the top of my career.”

Some listeners have made Wheat a local-scene icon, creating pop art and seed-art images of him and writing a biographical entry about him on wikipedia.org, a popular online encyclopedia. He’s praised on blogs and shows up everywhere: cohosting the Minnesota Music Awards; reviewing music on American Public Media’s national radio show Weekend America; reading the shout-outs on the last track of A Tiger Dancing, the newest album by St. Paul hip-hop band Heiruspecs; and being featured in such glossy metro magazines as this one.

After twenty years of hard work, he’s becoming more than just a faceless radio voice.

“I’m conscious of fame,” he says. “I’m conscious of not letting it spoil me or go to my head or all those things. But I enjoy it. I’ll admit to always wanting a certain level of celebrity status.”

John Peel’s formidable presence is with Wheat every night: “He never lost that genuine enthusiasm of the fan,” Wheat says. “He never thought he was bigger than the music, and that’s one thing that guides me.”

Wheat appreciated the Twin Cities’ music scene—especially the Replacements and Soul Asylum—years before he lived here. “I used to help out a WFMU DJ who’d come to Minneapolis once or twice a year to check out what was happening,” he says. But Wheat’s affection and respect for the scene aren’t simply nostalgic. Last year, when Minneapolis’s Rhymesayers Entertainment label had three releases in the College Music Journal list of top ten hip-hop albums, Wheat interviewed LA-based rapper and spoken-word artist Busdriver, who said that Rhymesayers is the thing in independent hip-hop. Wheat agreed, then “explained that you can go down the list, and in pretty much every genre, we have strong artists working in the Twin Cities.”

He says The Current’s success depends on the scene: “Some people have said, ‘The Current has totally re-energized the local music scene.’ I back off that. The scene was very strong and healthy anyway. We happen to be here. We couldn’t play as much local stuff as we do if the scene weren’t so strong.”

So how does he learn about new music and decide what to play? He works hard to stay informed, still reading Mojo and NME, and poring over more magazines, websites, and blogs (including The Current’s) than even most fanatics care to tolerate; he digests hundreds of press releases and prerelease CDs every month; and he listens when people on the street tell him there’s one band or song he just has to play. “I have a little notebook with me all the time,” he says, then recounts how a woman at the state fair told him to check out British singer-songwriter Thea Gilmore. “It turned out she was right,” Wheat says. “I played some Thea just the other night. That happens all the time.” He also takes e-mail requests, which appear on a computer screen next to his microphone.

Wheat’s colleagues and some professional critics say he takes his curatorial responsibilities seriously. For his part, Wheat considers DJing an art form. Mining knowledge and interacting with listeners are part of “doing essentially what all good artists do: learning a craft, then finding some way of giving individual expression to it,” he says.

“If you feel like you know Mark from listening to him on the radio, you probably do,” says Steve Nelson, The Current program director. “He’s got no act, no cultivated persona. When you listen to Mark from 7 p.m. till 12 a.m., that’s who he is.”

Some nonbelievers say Wheat’s a snob: pedantic, didactic, and achingly long-winded between songs. He agrees. “I was thirty-five before I came to the conclusion that music doesn’t mean as much to everybody else as it does to me,” he says. “I am a music snob. But, there’s an audience that deserves a station that doesn’t treat music as a commodity, like what seems to have happened on commercial radio.”

“If you say ‘aficionado’ instead of ‘snob,’ it sounds different,” says Heiruspecs bassist Sean “Twinkie Jiggles” McPherson. “To be the kind of music snob he’s talking about, he has to be obsessive—and he is—but in a way that enriches him and the people who listen to him.”

Wheat says he’d like The Current’s DJs to find a way to convey deep knowledge without coming off as pretentious. “We set high standards for ourselves about trying to draw lines through musical eras and genres,” he says. “We have to try to present it in an intelligent way without sounding like we’re lecturing people every time we play a new or old piece of music.”

He’s got other ambitions for himself and The Current—ones that transcends the Twin Cities. “Being a national presence rather than just a local presence is something that I’d like to happen at some point,” he says. “But that would be the result of a team effort—something that represents what we’re doing as a whole here at The Current. A lot of my success has been linked to the local music scene. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to be in the right position to champion it, and I’d like to think that the next step of my career would include some reflection of that. I’d like it to come from the Twin Cities.” 

Chris Godsey teaches writing at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and the College of St. Scholastica.