An LA musician moved to Bisbee and finds his voice. Meet the founder of TWIBFEST

SAM DINGMAN: This weekend marks the second annual TWIB Fest in Bisbee, an all-day festival featuring local bands, food and games. TWIB stands for this Week in Bisbee, which is the name of a radio show and newsletter started by LA transplant Steve Moramarco.

Moramarco moved to Bisbee at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. He had been struggling to get his music career off the ground in LA for a while and the quarantine was making him feel trapped in his studio apartment. I spoke with him recently and asked him how he ended up in Bisbee.

MORAMARCO: I was like, I gotta get out of LA. And I was trying to think where I would go. And I remembered a friend had visited Bisbee and went to Sidepony, one of our festivals here, and posted something. And I saw something about that and remembered it. And then another friend visited me in December of that year, just coming from Bisbee, saying to me, like, "Dude, it's like the Brooklyn of the Southwest. You've got to gotta check it out."

Just sort of casually. And I was like, I just registered those things. So, you know, when I was just thinking about, you know, where I might just, you know, get away for a little bit while. The world sort of took a strange turn. I didn't plan on moving here.

DINGMAN: It's pretty amazing to me just hearing you in the story so far. You pack up, you leave LA, you get to Bisbee. And something about the place, it sounds like before too long, makes you feel like, this isn't just where I'm gonna hang out for a little while. This is where I'm gonna put down new roots.

I'm gonna buy a house here. What was it about the place that made you feel that way?

MORAMARCO: That's it. I mean, we're a mile high, so we're 10, 15 degrees cooler than Phoenix temperature-wise. And you know, social wise, I think we're very cool down ...

Yeah, it's a magical place. Once you come through the tunnel, we call it the "Time Tunnel." You're sort of flying in, looking, you know, on the mountain road, looking in this valley and seeing a town that's been around since 1880. And a lot of it is still intact. You know, you're listening to classic rock in Tucson.

Then you come through and 96.1 is our station, KBRP. And then, you know, some weird — who knows what you'll hear on the station coming through.

DINGMAN: Talk a little bit about the, the music scene in Bisbee as, as you got enmeshed in it. What kind of music were you hearing? What kind of musicians were you meeting?

MORAMARCO: Oh, man, there's — I mean, it's amazing how many musicians and bands there are in this small town. I mean, it's so diverse. We've got, like, Juniper Djinin or like a jazz-Americana band. ... We got the Exbats are like a pop-punk kind of garage band. .... This band Fatigo, that's — I call it like jazz, pop. ...

My band was called the Steve Moramarco Conspiracy. Now I'm just going by Moramarco. ...

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DINGMAN: At a certain point, once — after you got there, you started curating this newsletter This Week in Bisbee, which also became your radio show on KBRP. What was that in reaction to? Why did you feel like there was a need for something like that?

MORAMARCO: Well, basically, my drummer at the time and my bass player also were in other bands. And that's sort of a feature of most of the Bisbee bands. So I sort of needed to know when they were playing in order to book my own shows. ... So that was part of it.

But I just. I come from, you know, big city Los Angeles, New York, San Diego. We had our LA Weekly. We had the Village Voice, the Reader. You had one central spot for all the listings.

DINGMAN: That makes sense. So, like, you were looking to kind of replicate this experience you'd had in bigger places where there was kind of a central repository of, like, look here for all the cool stuff.

MORAMARCO: Exactly. Yep. And this was around the same time I was thinking about, you know, be doing a radio show. So I just, you know, went through the training, and they mentioned, you know, it would be great if someone was, you know, doing the listings. And I was like, I was you know

DINGMAN: And is that. So it's like a community radio station.

MORAMARCO: Yeah. KBRP. Yep. We are Bisbee's radio for the people.

We just celebrated our 20th year. ... So we've got — it's crazy all the things we have in this town. It does. It does really feel like a mini Brooklyn of the Southwest or whatever. If you walk down the streets and we got, you know, feels like Greenwich Village a lot with the brick facades and all that.

DINGMAN: Let me ask you, Steve, I mean, do you feel like it's a version of the life you were looking for back in LA?

MORAMARCO: Couldn't have a radio show in LA. My band, you know, I'd be lucky to get a, you know, 45 minutes on a Tuesday at midnight or something ... in LA. I mean, it was just a lot here, you know, they're like, "OK, you know, you're playing 7-10 p.m. ..."

DINGMAN: I'll see your 45 minutes and raise you three hours.

MORAMARCO: Yeah, exactly. So it's, it's basically. Yeah, I, I can do my art a lot easier without the rat race aspect of it. Feels Like a dream when I wake up and I look around and I go to this town — this town feels like an imaginary place.

DINGMAN: Well, Steve Moramarco is the host of This Week in Bisbee on the radio on KBRP 96.1 and the curator of This Week in Bisbee the newsletter. Steve, thank you so much.

MORAMARCO: Thank you very much. Come on down to Bisbee. I'll show you a good time.