San Diego music promoter and 91X program host got start at Coronado High School
By David Coddon
Little did Coronado-born Lou Niles realize when he began hosting the local-music program “Loudspeaker” on 91X radio 35 years ago that his notoriety would spread beyond Southern California.
Then came a trip to the South around 2001. “I was on tour with the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash (a San Diego band he was road-managing) in Alabama and stopped somewhere to go inside and pay for gas,” Niles recalled. “I paid for it with my card and the attendant looked at it and said ‘Lou Niles? Like Loudspeaker Lou Niles?’ The guy at a gas station in Alabama knew who I was.”
If Niles, now 56, sounded amazed at being recognized, it figures. Not just because he’s happily worked behind the scenes of the music business since he was a teenager and a student at Coronado High School (class of ’85), but because he’s a promoter who’s not a self-promoter.
“I don’t think I toot my own horn very much,” said Niles, who still co-hosts “Loudspeaker” on 91X with Timothy Joseph, aka TJ, on Sunday nights at 7. He also operates the indie company Love Machine Films, which makes films for nonprofits, with his wife, Carly Starr Brullo, and for the past four years, he’s executive director of the annual Oceanside International Film Festival.
His affinity for music began during his early years in Coronado.
“I was always interested in music,” he said. “Getting music magazines, signing up for and ‘swindling’ the Columbia (House) Record Club. It was worth it. I got like 20 cassettes and bought three. I got all kinds of stuff, like the Police, or comedy records — Cheech & Chong and Robin Williams.
“As soon as I hit junior high and high school, I started dyeing my hair, and I moved out. I was putting on shows. I slept on a lot of friends’ couches. I went to all-ages clubs in San Diego. I eventually got myself a Vespa, which really gave me freedom. I would drive that thing over the bridge and back.”
His promotion of local bands, going back to the late ’80s and ’90s, brought attention to emerging artists, elevating the profile of the San Diego area music scene. Among those who credit Niles is the San Diego band Switchfoot, which could be heard on the radio in the late ’90s on “Loudspeaker.” Today, the Grammy-winning group has a national following.
Back when they were starting out, Niles told the young Switchfoot members which bands they should be listening to and where they could go see them.
After a show this January at the UCSD Che Café marking the 35-year anniversary of “Loudspeaker,” members of Switchfoot told Niles that they’d gone to that little UC San Diego venue as kids and “decided that’s when they wanted to be in a band,” Niles said. “So I’ve gotten (credit) piece by piece over time.”
Other musicians whose recordings may have been first heard on “Loudspeaker” include blink-182, Lucy’s Fur Coat, No Knife, a-Miniature and Three Mile Pilot as well as Steve Poltz and Jewel.
Mark Stuart, front man for The Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash, said Niles has “amazing energy that you feed off. He’s super positive. Without champions like Lou in the music world you’d feel like you’re pushing a rock up a hill all alone.”
Stuart credits Niles for getting his San Diego band signed by the Los Angeles label Ultimatum Records, for which Niles was vice president at the time. “He was a big part of helping us get our foot in the door with them, getting a record deal with them and getting out of San Diego,” Stuart recalled of the 2002 record deal. “He’s always in your corner saying, ‘I’ve got your back.’”
Niles’ musical promotion and managing began in Coronado.
“In high school I booked bands at the noon Friday concert there. I booked a band that I managed for a while — The Children’s Hour. They got pretty popular. I was 17. If there was nowhere for them to play, we had a house party and ran around and tried to get people to come to the show. I just didn’t know any better. I just went for it.”
Niles even got executives from England who managed The Cult, a major band at the time, to consider signing The Children’s Hour. “When they found out that they (the guys in The Children’s Hour) were like 17 or 19 years old and that I was just a friend of theirs, it didn’t go far from there,” he said. “They asked me what other bands I had on my roster. My roster?”
No matter. “What turned me on about promotion was turning people on to new music,” Niles said. “It’s like ‘You’ve got to see this band!’”
After moving to New York for college at St. John’s University where his father worked, Niles found more satisfaction DJing for clubs in the area. Upon returning to Southern California in 1987, he found himself DJing at the “underground” club event Playskool, held at the bygone Hotel San Diego in downtown San Diego.
His submitted playlist of songs was chosen by 91X personality Pam Wolf’s “The Great Unknown” contest and earned Niles a spot as a guest DJ that same year and later a job at the station “working phones.” When Marco Collins’ program “The Young and the Restless” migrated from SDSU’s KCR to 91X and became “Loudspeaker,” Niles got involved with the local music show.
By 1990 he was the solo host.
Though he’s had his hiatuses from the program and from San Diego, among other things working in marketing and promoting talent and becoming immersed in the film business in Los Angeles, Niles reflects that “I was really happy that I got the opportunity to be one of the people in charge of ‘Loudspeaker.’” An Industry Achievement honor from the San Diego Music Awards last year “was a nice, full-circle thing, to go from that period of all these bands getting signed to finally feeling like I got recognized.”
Mike Halloran was program director at 91X when Niles returned from L.A. in 2003 and came back to “Loudspeaker” as a co-host with among others Al Guerra and Tim Pyles. Halloran calls Niles “a big passionate person when it comes to music. He knows what he likes, and he’s ready, willing and able to stand up and push the local stuff.”
Recalling Niles’ calm demeanor in a sometimes-crazy studio atmosphere, Halloran described Niles as “the epitome of the SoCal surf dude.”
Looking to the future, Niles calls the Oceanside Film Festival that he runs with his wife “really our passion. We hope to grow the festival to be a good, steady annual event that brings a lot of people to Oceanside,” where he and his family reside.
This past festival, held in February, bridged both of Lou Niles’ worlds. In addition to screening a wide variety of full-length and short films, it included a live conversation on opening night with film-score producer and instrumentalist Jason Hill, onetime guitarist for the San Diego band Louis XIV. On display, too, were photos documenting the history of the fledgling San Diego music scene in an exhibit titled “Moments from the Seen Part II” (a sequel to a previous display at the Casbah in 2018.)
Lou Niles likely had a lot to do with some of those moments.
David Coddon is a freelance writer.