An Occasion to Revisit the Past

KDKB, an early stop in my career, is celebrating a big anniversary. It is unusual for a pop culture entity to last forty years, and its current caretakers are rightfully proud. They’ve asked the alumni to recollect a bit, and so I have. If you’re interested in radio, history or the popular culture, this might be worth your time. Otherwise, keep moving; there’s nothing to see here.

My time as PD and Afternoon Drive host was short at eighteen months, but quite eventful. I'm working from memory (always a risky proposition!), and trying to keep it short. I have undoubtedly left important people out and have probably misspelled some names. The mistakes, inaccuracies and oversights are mine alone, and I apologize for them.

Co-owner and general manager Eric Hauenstein brought me to the radio station from WIOT/Toledo shortly after Bill Compton's untimely death. My task was to institute a little more musical discipline in an effort to expand audience and move KDKB into adulthood after a long and successful adolescence. Bill's KDKB was a wonder of free form progressive rock. Compton had a distinctive vision that he, Eric, Dwight Tindle, Hank Cookenboo, Belle Nusbaum, Lynda Clayton, Mark Nycannon, Frank Warfield, Tommy Vascocu, Liz Young, Eric, and, I'm sure, many others not of my acquaintance, executed brilliantly. The station was archetypal in its connection to the youth counter culture of the time. Artists respected it, and freethinking young adults rallied around it.

Following a legend in any job is not recommended, and for good reason. The edict from ownership was to evolve KDKB into a commercial success that would match, but not overshadow its cultural success. The job was to bring enough comfortable predictability to the music, talent and marketing to spike the ratings and revenue, while not turning it into a soulless corporate jukebox that could exist as easily in upstate New York as in the Valley of the Sun.

A tall order. Fortunately, I was really young and naive. I had virtually no appreciation for what I had walked into and the resistance I would likely get both internally and externally. But ignorance, as they say, is bliss, and I merrily cut the playlist from infinity to about 1500 songs, a shock to the 1978 free form sensibility, which is in itself a point of interest since most hit stations today play about 300 songs. Next, we hired a morning show from Lansing, Michigan. The inimitable John Geise and Bill Andres. They had shtick never before heard on morning radio in Phoenix, and the audience took to them at once. With the new night guy we imported from Indiana, Frank Baum, who wove mystical aural tales in a deep baritone, we had great bookends to the broadcast day.

Belle Nusbaum, then Lynda Clayton, and I rounded out the day, and I must say, I enjoyed doing afternoon drive in Phoenix more than anything else. It was a respite from the other demands of the job, and the music was particularly good at that time. Elvis Costello was bursting on the scene, Valley faves Buckingham-Nicks were reinvigorating Fleetwood Mac, The Who released their last great album, "Who Are You," so too with the Rolling Stones and their 1979 classic, “Some Girls.” Led Zeppelin sprung “In Through The Out Door” on an unsuspecting but grateful public, and Pink Floyd gave us “The Wall.” We used vinyl in those days and Chief Bob, the audiophile engineer, made sure the control room (and the over-the-air signal) sounded great.

Also unusual for a Rock station was the approach to news and public affairs. It was one of Compton's lasting legacies, and I was pleased to continue it. The news department (yes, a stand alone news department at a Rock station!) was superb, and every evening at six we did an hour of news and interviews. Then governor Bruce Babbit and his wife, Hattie, were regular guests of Frank Warfield's. The consultants hated it, but the commitment to the community was important to Eric, Dwight and me. We had all come from two progressive stations in Ohio where the music of our generation was the soundtrack to the often troubling world events that our stations' news people chronicled. It seems impossible in our current era of 24/7 cable news that exists apart from the culture of music, but there was no way to separate the news from the music then. (If this thread interests you, watch for a movie this spring called "The Music Never Stopped.")

KDKB was blessed with many creative people and we had the best, and worst of ideas brewing together most of the time: •Bill Andres had a morning show character, Nerl Fartley, that was a great vehicle for song parodies, and before too long we created a radio station band around that theme, and gigged around town a little. Bill played lead guitar and sang, John Geise played rhythm, I played bass, and actual musicians, Lynn Ziegler and Mike Davis (of the very talented local trio Booth, Davis and Lowe), anchored us. •Each year, we took the best songs recorded by Valley musicians and released them on a charity LP. (Find the ’79 edition and listen to Booth, Davis and Lowe’s “Gamble”!) •The famed KDKB hot air balloon could only fly in the very early morning most of the year, as it required the ambient outdoor temperature to be lower than the hot air envelope, so each morning at sunup we would launch and, to the delight of no one, the Valley's dogs would go off like car alarms in an earthquake. Still, it was the most unusual radio promotional vehicle of its time and always gathered a crowd when it landed, however unpredictably. •And, I suppose the inverse was the world's worst mascot, the KDKB Carrot. His (who knew vegetables had gender?!) origins were never sufficiently explained to me, and his mission was even murkier, but he was a favorite of owners Eric and Dwight, and with so much other unpopular change to institute, I decided that was not the hill I was going to die on.

So with unusually "sticky" marketing, really talented personalities, and a new musical discipline thriving in an era great original works, our ratings shot up and KDKB was briefly the number one station in all of Phoenix before settling into a perennial role as the leading 18-34, then 25-54 music station in town.

I always define the cultural Sixties as actually taking place from the mid 60's to the mid 70's. KDKB's roots are in that milieu of youth rebellion, an unprecedented time of musical creativity, and the subsequent generation gap fueled by the Viet Nam War. By the late 70's the Baby Boom generation was coming to power and its subversive traits were slowly being assimilated into the mainstream. I arrived in Phoenix at this moment of transition, and was honored to have a hand in one of the great social/media experiments of the day.

©2011 Jon Sinton for Progressive Agenda, LLC. All rights reserved