The Times becomes eclectic

The Times magazine had a fantastic feature last week on Los Angeles DJ and pop music tastemaker Nic Harcourt, host of KCRW's 'Morning Becomes Eclectic' (streaming available here). Like virtually every profile I read these days, the writer strains to brandish the subject's Horatio Alger credentials:

Harcourt was raised in Birmingham in the 1960's, the only child of a television-journalist father and a mother who worked in electrical wholesaling. He has few happy early memories, save for the times when his combative parents would put on Beatles records and dance around the living room. When they separated, he was 7. Harcourt remembers that when his mother broke the news that his father had moved out, he asked, ''Did he take the Beatles records?''

Harcourt says he began drinking heavily as a teenager, left school as soon as he could and drifted through his youth in an alcoholic haze, working construction and factory jobs and playing part time in a few struggling -- and, he notes, not very good -- rock bands. He followed a girlfriend to Australia, married her and spent the latter half of his 20's there. By then Harcourt was a dedicated postpunk partisan of the Clash and Gang of Four, and he quickly became enamored of INXS, Men at Work, the Hoodoo Gurus and the rest of the blossoming Australian music scene. When his marriage came to an acrimonious end in the fall of 1988, Harcourt washed up in Woodstock. Intending to visit for a couple of months with an old band mate, he wound up joining Alcoholics Anonymous, sobered up and stayed for a decade. Talking about it now, he says simply: ''My life changed. In some ways, I'm 16 now.''

In Woodstock he discovered his calling. With no prior radio experience, and now in his early 30's, Harcourt talked his way into doing fill-ins on WDST, the area's local progressive FM station. Before long, he was doing a daily show and programming the station. At WDST, Harcourt earned a reputation for identifying hits far ahead of the curve, and was a crucial early advocate of Alanis Morissette, Moby and Garbage. In 1998, when the ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' slot opened up, Harcourt was chosen after a nationwide search.