Tawn Mastrey, metal deejay

Nice post by Deanne Stillman at Native Intelligence on the passing of Tawn Mastrey, once "the voice of heavy metal" in Los Angeles on the old KNAC-FM. Deanne interviewed her for the New York Times and says:

I don't know how I could have gotten through a certain part of my life without KNAC, the late, great heavy metal station that played the kind of music once known as rock and roll. I grew up in Ohio, garage band central, and as the 80s rolled in with its "greed is good" top ten play lists, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen and Black Sabbath were dropped from the airwaves, and the bands that ran with the groove - Metallica, Alice in Chains, Faith No More, Guns 'n Roses, and so many others - were outlawed. But KNAC played them all and Tawn Mastrey was the siren, calling the faithful to the fire and taking you through the night. "If I played Jethro Tull," she once told a reporter, "the station would get bombed." Ironically, KNAC had a weak signal and in 1989, Tawn left for a better gig at another station.

Mastrey was 53 and died last week of complications of hepatitis C. Deanne's forthcoming book, "Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, is cited in a new Newsweek piece on the plight of the horse in today's West.

Abundance of Native Intelligence: While I've been swamped, TJ Sullivan has posting it up. He's written recently about selling a book that people will read, pondered the term rat runner to describe a rush-hour driver who speeds through residential neighborhoods, and exhumed the ghost of the old Our Times sections in the LAT.