Real World

DIVISION OF CHURCH AND STEAK: "I don't want anyone calling me up at midnight complaining they had a lousy hamburger," says XPN's David Dye. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

WXPN only broadcasts from the same place World Café Live puts on shows. Why's everybody think the two are more than just friends?

by A.D. Amorosi

After six years of talks and a full year of construction, a rising sun glares off the polished steel signage of the new World Café Live complex. The shiny new duplex is home to the World Café Live music venue and restaurant on the left and WXPN studios on the right.

Mere days ago, 88.5 morning hostess Michaela Majoun signed off from WXPN's old battered bunker at 3905 Spruce and passed the mic to midday DJ Helen Leicht over at the 44,000-square-foot complex, thus beginning a new era for the station at 3025 Walnut.

Every day at the new location brings a new surprise. This morning, employees watch a tropical installation provided by Philly's Mural Arts Project pop up across from Upstairs Live.

That's what they're calling the top floor, home to a gift shop selling guitar picks and tote bags, a modernist, multilevel, multicolor restaurant and bar and, all the way back, a stage. Upstairs Live is gearing up for 365 days of performances from not-yet-main-stagers, breakfast shows, gospel brunches, late-nighters and more.

Another muralist is working on a grayish cityscape outside Downstairs Live, a three-tiered hall with Clair Brothers' digital sound systems, sound-locked doors for hermetic noiseless environments and a cozy couch-filled mezzanine for prime donators and VIPs. A crew from People's Light & Theatre—whose designers created cobalt-blue dividers to adjust the size of the stage to fit the acts—move panels to test the spacing from big shows and standing-room audiences of 700 to dinner seating events for 350.

There's the intoxicating burning scent of freshly installed stage lights in the air. There are smiles everywhere: on construction workers, restaurant staff, stage crew. Almost everywhere.

I'm being directed through WXPN's glass doors by DJ David Dye, the man who 13 years ago created and still hosts the 168-station, nationally syndicated World Café radio program of new music, performances and interviews. The studios and control rooms are not only cross-wired to each other but digitally linked to WCL as well. That's so XPN DJs like Dye can broadcast from WCL's stages, thus letting an audience witness the recording process.

The round-robin discussion in the studio is where the smiles nearly stop for good.

"People ask all the time, "Can you get an act on World Café?" says the venue's creator, Hal Real. The entrepreneur pays WXPN $125,000 to $150,000 yearly to lease the radio program's name for his WCL.

This link between a famously nonprofit radio station and a restaurant/venue leads to lingering questions: Is there some form of unfair trade afoot? Does one word from Dye get an act booked on WCL's stage? Can Real get an act played by Dye or other XPN DJs? Are other venues in town screwed by this partnership?

"Simple answer: No," says Real. "I don't even have an office here."

"I go to the Web site to find out what they're booking," says Dye, disturbed by all this talk of the station being in bed with the club of the same name. "Legally, that could never happen. Why would we want to tie ourselves to a single venue when we've spent years developing relationships with other venues?"

Not that Dye's liked every Philly stage over the years. "From Ripley's to Starz to the Troc—they've all been pieces of shit. To see someone doing something nice and get this headache, it just makes me defensive."

"Everyone would be foolish to compromise that division," says WCL marketing director Nat Gutwirth. "It's in XPN's interest to maintain objectivity to attract underwriting from all promoters in the city and it's in our interest to stay separate because we have [to] deal with all booking agents. We share a musical philosophy and an address. We're just custodians of the brand."

So the brand has two heads.

"It's not WXPN's new venue," says Real.

"I don't want anyone calling me up at midnight complaining they had a lousy hamburger," says Dye.

With World Café's reputation for a certain sound preceding it, WCL's booking—so far—has a too-familiar lineup of Triple-A radio's usual suspects like XPN fave Jonatha Brooke, who christens the venue on Oct. 2.

"There's musical snobbery around us," says WCL's Karl Mullen. "Some people are terrified of the avant-garde, which we're not. Some are terrified of the mainstream, which we're not. Some want hot-buzz artists as opposed to career audiences, which we're both."

Brought in from Pittsburgh late in the game, Irish-born booker Mullen has already added odd twists to XPN's noted "adult album alternative format" in his WCL bookings, with dates for avant rocker John Cale, jazz pianist Chick Corea and eccentric popster Robyn Hitchcock.

"From an outsider's perspective—because I have no hand in booking—these are guys who never booked a venue like this," says Dye, painting the WCL bookers as underdogs. "Look at it—there has never been anything like this. And they're doing this against Clear Channel, against Jack Utsick. Let me restate "against' because these promoters don't want this club to get the acts. So many of these other clubs are worried we're going to put them out of business. I'm worried the other way. I read nothing but complaints. For God's sake, let Hal get started."

A former lawyer with a primary concern in real estate ("I haven't practiced law since 1995"), Real was secretly a piano player with a love of live music. But he found himself at wit's end when it came to enjoying the experience. "My peers used to be fired up to hear live music. All of sudden I'm going everywhere by myself. Why?"

Real realized his crowd—like the reportedly 25,000-plus XPN members whose demographics skew older than 34—didn't dig the venues the music was coming from. Bad sightlines. Terrible sound. Smoky environments.

"I realized there's an underserved market that would go hear the music they loved more often if they had a chance to do it in a different setting," says Real. Artists too, Real found, wanted to be better heard, literally and figuratively, above the din. After going to fiscally plausible, usually conservative friends and investors, Real found agreement rather than disapproval.

Figuring he'd need a strategic partner with a ready-made Rolodex of audiences and artists, Real went toward what he considered the sole defining, trustworthy taste-maker in the musical market: Dye's World Café. "I knew that if it was on World Café -- I may not necessarily always like it. But I can trust that someone thought about it," says Real.

So he came first to station GM Vinnie Curran, then Dye, with his idea: a clubhouse for listeners, new offices for the staff, a concert hall as opposed to a nightclub where the sound within each room held acoustic isolation.

"Whether I played a role or not, whether I licensed the name and raised the money or stepped aside—it was a good idea," says Real. Dye agreed that neither the station nor the university would want to worry about burgers. "But if you want to do it," laughs Dye about his ultimate approval, "the synergy would be there."

"David might have been reluctant at first, but he drank the Kool-Aid," says Bruce Ranes, WCL's musical programmer who started life as Dye's World Café producer.

"What I wanted wasn't one space or another, what I wanted was a home for my concept," says Real, who's already, cautiously, looking to open World Cafés in markets like Boston and Manhattan.

"It was all Hal's dream. No, folly. No, dream," jokes Dye, who had gone through talks of branching out World Café before—"even a TV show providing they give me an extreme makeover." But nothing like what Real would come to propose, something that could extend the intimate experience from Dye's virtual living room to something actualized.

"There's no one venue that used what I do as a programming concept," says Dye. "It all happens in the city: Tin Angel, yes. But it's long and thin. The Point, OK. They became de facto WXPN places. But there's nothing of this magnitude, nothing as concentrated as all this," says Dye.

"When I was a lawyer, there were places to network and play—the Palm, Capital Grill," says Real. "But there's never been the same sort of place for the arts community, consistently, to do likewise. Now there is."

Jonatha Brooke plays Sat., Oct. 2, 6:30 and 10 p.m., $50, World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St., 215-222-1400.