Meet David Weinberg of KCRW in Santa Monica

Today we’d like to introduce you to David Weinberg.

Thanks for sharing your story with us David. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
When I was nineteen years old, I got kicked out of college and found myself adrift. I worked as a janitor at a university during the day and delivered pizzas at night. I was drinking a lot and getting into trouble. One night on a pizza delivery, I got pulled over by the police and it turned out I had a warrant out for my arrest. I was sentenced to 30 days in jail for driving on a suspended license.

Around this time, I heard a story on the radio that had profound effect on me. It was The Test by Scott Carrier. I went to the library and found his book Running After Antelope and my life has never been the same. I knew then that I wanted to become a radio producer. It was the most glamorous life I could imagine, traveling the world, having great adventures and getting to meet interesting people. I saw the vision so clearly in my mind. But I had no idea how to make it a reality. So I spent the next few years wandering and working odd jobs, obsessively recording my life with a minidisc recorder. I hitchhiked through Mexico and Central America, worked as a deckhand on a glacier tour boat in Alaska, waited tables at an Applebee’s in the suburbs and worked at perfume factory in Queens, NY.

In my mind, I was collecting tape for a grand radio story about my life. In reality, I was afraid to sit down and do the hard work of learning how to interview people, edit audio, and write, the skills needed to be a radio producer. For five years, I recorded hundreds of hours but never made a single story. I had staked my own future on this career and looking back on it, I think I was so afraid that my first story would be bad and that would mean that my plan was nothing but a pipe dream and I would be back where I started.

But eventually, I did get around to making that first story. And it was, of course terrible. But then I made another one. And then another. I reached out to people whose work I admired and asked them to give me feedback on my shitty stories. I listened a lot of work and slowly I became competent at putting together a radio story.

In 2007, I bought a van from an old surfer and quit my job as a busboy in a Seattle restaurant and decided to drive across the country. But I never made it past New Orleans. I fell in love with the city the moment I set foot there.

I started freelancing for WWOZ, producing 5-minute stories about the cultural recovery of the city post-Katrina. Gradually my stories improved and eventually, I started filing for national shows like Weekend America and NPR’s Day to Day.

In 2012, I moved to L.A. and got a job as a staff reporter at the public radio show Marketplace. My work took me to India where I rode with motorcycle clubs, Berlin to interview a kickboxing lipstick salesman and to every corner of the United States. Today I am the host of Welcome to LA, a KCRW podcast about people trying to make it in Los Angeles. It was a long and meandering journey but in the end, I pulled it off. That life I dreamed up all those years ago is now a reality.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has not been a smooth road. But as a white man in America the obstacles on my journey were largely of my own making. The biggest obstacle was fear. When I decided to become a journalist, I pursued it with a singular focus and I held it up as the only viable option for my own future. And on the one hand, that was necessary, but it also put a ton of pressure on myself. It felt very do or die. Like if I didn’t become a journalist, I would be stuck cleaning toilets and delivering pizzas for the rest of my life, or worse, going back in and out of jail, living a life of quiet dysfunction.

Please tell us about KCRW.
The show I host now, Welcome to LA is made up of 30-60 minute long episodes. I just wrapped up the second season. The episodes vary in style and subject but are all connected by a few recurring themes. They are stories of people trying to make it. Sometimes they are trying to make it in Hollywood. Sometimes they are just trying to make it through the day. I feel weird talking about my own work so I will leave it to the Vulture Magazine podcast critic and host of KPCC’s Servant of the Pod, Nick Quah who named my show one of the best of this year. He described Welcome to LA as

“A series of love letters to the City of Angels, with each story — some reported, some as memoir — capturing something fundamental about the nature and feeling of that place. There’s something deeply traditional about Welcome to LA, whose classically composed stories are reminiscent of much older stuff in the KCRW/late-night L.A.-radio tradition. And yet it feels gloriously modern like the podcast has figured out how to extract fresh new sounds from an age-old instrument. This is a miracle of a show.”

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
If I had to start all over, I would have tried to get my foot into the door of some established institutions much sooner. I would have applied for internships and educational programs. I spent far too many years trying to go it alone which was not a great strategy.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/welcome-to-la
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/www_dberg2330/
• Twitter: @randomtape
• Other: http://www.davidcweinberg.com/

Image Credit:
The only photo that needs credit is the one of me with my hand on my face. Credit goes to Andrew Wonder

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