You’ve got the KLAP

As of this week, Gerlach’s one and only radio station, KLAP 89.5FM, moved physically from the garage in town to Mama Loella’s old hotel next door.

KLAP 89.5FM sounds like KPIG — playing a vast array of cowboy, country, rock, roll, jazz, reggae, folk, Cajun, Latin, Dixieland, and soul music, in random playlists which skillfully ride the thin line between eclectic and familiar. And that’s because Jeff Cotton, who programmed KPIG, started the KLAP four years ago.

You could listen to KLAP 89.5FM right now, and forever, streaming here.

Maybe you’ll throw something in their 501(c)3 online tip jar if you become a fan? The guys at KLAP need a new amplifier and transmitter. They also have an IRL donation box at the station, and in the Miner’s Club bar next to the old hotel, on Main Street in Gerlach.

Founded as a satellite station to Cedarville, CA’s KDUP (pronounced “Giddyup”), Gerlach’s KLAP 89.5FM broadcasts with the help of a 501(c)3 license designed to bring radio to isolated towns where there would otherwise be literal radio silence. To those for whom music is like breathing, this is a lifeline that can’t be underemphasized. Add the microphone for the DJ and interested parties from the community, as KLAP did this week, and suddenly, more community builds.

On a clear day, you can hear 89.5FM from Frog Pond to Snoopy Rock and throughout the playa. No commercials, all music. Without the KLAP, many workers from Gerlach and from Burning Man both, toiling in the desert on projects by themselves, would surely have gone (more) insane (than they already are) by now.

Interested locals got their first how-to-DJ-your-own-show tutorial last week from owner Jeff Cotton, gathering around the small but hearty stack of A/V equipment and vinyl records which constitute the interior of the radio station. They’re practicing this week for when the hordes of Burning Man start to roll through. All night, back and forth from the Miner’s Club bar they run — Tommy Cosman, Flash Hopkins, Rachel and John Bogard of Planet X Pottery, Brian and Brooke Covey, and whomever else may get roped into a guest-spot on a station ID.

It’s hard to explain how much music complements a setting to those who have no ear for notes. But for music nerds, if you’re on your journey in the desert, imagining cowboys and Indians and cattle drives and gold rushes while sagebrush and gypsum whoosh by you on your vehicular odyssey to the playa, you’ll want to tune in to KLAP-FM 89.5 to complete the rustlin’ ropin’ vibe. Sometimes they play too much Van Morrison (yes, KLAPpers had a meeting about that), but most of the time it’s funky-to-“y’allternative” music, with moments of chaos and live, totally unscripted sublimity.

For example, early Sunday morning, Burning Man ESD’s head physical therapist Miss Franny Panny stopped by to say hi to Flash, and he talked her into singing a Patty Griffin cowgirl song, live on the air, a cappella. And she’s a Singer with a capital ‘S.’ As the town was waking up, Franny’s honeyed, dusty alto voice spilled out onto our nervous systems like shock-red waves of her curly hair — and when she started yodeling, we melted.

It was perfect.

KLAP 89.5 FM. Tune in — you never know what you’ll hear.

Follow Summer Burkes on Twitter.