’40 Watts From Nowhere’: How a Feisty Pirate Radio Station Stormed the Airwaves in 1990s Silver Lake With Help From the Red Hot Chili Peppers and More

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The 1990s were a very different time — especially in Silver Lake, California — once a fertile neighborhood of artists and musicians and now a pricey hot spot. Three decades ago, the indie music scene was flourishing with homegrown acts like Beck and Rilo Kiley, based around clubs like Spaceland and the Garage.

And for more than two heady years, music lovers within a mile or two of the Sunset Junction area could groove to the wildly eclectic sounds of KBLT, a pirate radio station that operated from 1995 to 1998.

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The mystique of the scrappy station is told in the new documentary “40 Watts From Nowhere,” a fond look back at the Silver Lake music scene and the bands and personalities that came through KBLT. The doc premiered at Slamdance in February and, thanks to Jack Black stepping in as executive producer, it got the attention of Amazon Prime, where begins streaming Tuesday.

KBLT was the brainchild of Sue Carpenter, a journalist and music lover who learned about a “legal bubble” that enabled people to start low-power radio stations without prohibitively expensive FCC licenses. Carpenter learned how to put such a station together from Berkeley, California pirate radio guru Stephen Dunifer, got help building a transmitter, and started her first radio project, KPBJ, in her San Francisco apartment. After moving to L.A., Carpenter (using a pseudonym) selected another food-themed acronym and started making connections to line up DJs.

Opening with shots of Silver Lake’s iconic Walking Man and Happy Foot Sad Foot sign, the documentary is packed with vintage footage of the station and its DJs, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to DJs Mike Watt of the Minutemen, Don Bolles of the Germs and Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks. Also featured are scenes of mid-90s Silver Lake and contemporary interviews with Tom Morello and others who got started around the time.

“What is the answer to corporate ownership of the media?” Morello asks in the film. “Get rid of it. Let’s start over.”

Where did all this nostalgic footage come from? Years after the station shut down, Carpenter was amazed to find out that one of the station’s DJs had boxes of videos of the station in a box in his garage.

“I would never have made this documentary if this video hadn’t existed,” says Carpenter. “Even though there was a sit-down interview with me, and I was shooting some of this video, I have no recollection of ever having done that.” Robert Sullivan, known as Sully from the band Possum Dixon, was shooting the footage for a documentary he never made. After Carpenter wrote a book about KBLT, “Sully just sort of sort of piped up,” says Carpenter. He said, “You know, I have all these videos. They’re just in a box in my garage. I’m about to throw them out. Do you want them?

“I went through the video and was shocked that he pretty much had the whole arc of the story, and that made me feel like I could make a documentary out of it,” she says.

Carpenter had no special background in radio or music before deciding to start the station. “I just wanted to do it,” she says. “Naïveté has been my superpower, and not knowing what it takes — if I had known, I would not have done it,” she says. “You get to a certain point, and there’s another hurdle, and you just have to cross it, and then you get on air, and then it just feels magical.”

After the transmitter was up and running, a 24/7 schedule came together with help from Brandon Jay, the drummer of Silver Lake’s Lutefisk, who became a co-producer on “40 Watts.” The station didn’t just play indie rock — Carpenter’s show was dedicated to French pop, while other DJs spun the blues, jazz, prog rock, punk, funk and techno.

“You didn’t know who would be playing what, and if you turned it on the radio, you didn’t know what you would be hearing, or who would be talking,” says “40 Watts” music supervisor Mara Kuge

It was a time when hearing something out of the mainstream on the radio could pretty much blow your mind, Kuge recalls.

“I don’t even know if people understand the wow factor of hearing something like that back then and knowing, ‘OK, there’s somebody else who listens to the same pretty obscure at the time music that I do, and who is this person, and how can I find it?’” Kuge says.

“It was basically Sue and her cat living in a one-bedroom apartment in Silver Lake with a parade of people she didn’t know, including strange men,” Kuge explains. Carpenter attributes her open-door policy to being a “curious person” with “no boundaries,” though it did result in cleaning up a lot of beer bottles. “It’s not like everyone was a total fucking slob, but there were enough who were when you get that many people together,” she remembers.

The station’s mystique grew when some of the hottest bands of the time dropped by to play live sets, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who squeezed into the hallway to play.

The doc’s soundtrack includes dozens of bands the station frequently played, including Bikini Kill, Rage Against the Machine, Elliott Smith, Mudhoney, and Fugazi, who rarely license their music.

Less than three years later, it all came crashing down when Berkeley’s Dunifer lost his case and FCC officials moved quickly to shut down KBLT.

Carpenter, who went on to become a motorcycle columnist for the L.A. Times and then a radio and TV journalist, is surprised there hasn’t been more content about the distinctive sounds of that time.

“Honestly, I thought that people would have given it more documentation by now,” she says. “Our scene was really, really creative and colorful.”

Carpenter says today’s Silver Lake, with its corporate boutiques and private-equity restaurants, feels foreign to her. “I feel like I don’t relate to the neighborhood anymore, because it’s become so commercial. The mom-and-popness of it, the heart of it, doesn’t feel like it’s there anymore.”

As DJ and Thelonious Monster musician Bob Forrest says in the doc, “Silver Lake was magical. KBLT was this beautiful cherry on top of this beautiful time in Los Angeles.”