I drove through Quartzsite about 6 years back, listened as I got to town and visited the station. It was being leased to a man who would become the new owner.
The format was oldies based lite rock with some late 50s and early 60s top 40 tossed in the mix. The format is 100% music.
I love knowing specifics and Buck Burdette, who passed away some time back shared much with me.
Buck went around town borrowing record collections and recording music on reel to reel, back announcing every song and inserting a legal ID every third song. Maude, his wife, did a show every Monday morning from 10 to Noon and everyone listened. Buck took any community annoouncements and grabbed the latest weather forecast for an 8 am, 1 pm and 5 pm airing. Commercials were inserted manually by stopping the reel to reel and firing off the cart machine. There were a couple of Christian programs added, mostly on Sunday.
When I visited, Maude told me all the 'old' music had been dropped and they were running a more modern format via computer. I asked about 'scheduled programming'. I was told no weather, news, etc., just music. If someone brought a community announcement by or a PSA they'd run it but they really seemed not to make this well known. I only heard one announcement in about 5 hours of listening. The only things aside from music was a daily 5 minute devotional on weekdays and a 15 minute Salvation Army produced program Sunday morning.
Long ago, Buck had told me he might have a dozen or so advertisers in winter months but only 1 advertiser outside the winter visitor months. When I stopped by I was told the single advertiser not longer went with their annual schedule and outside the winter months the station had no commercials. I am guessing the station did about $15,000 to $20,000 a year in billing. And I must comment on their rates for commercials: many stations in such cases are dollar a holler but KBUX knew what they had, charging a fair mid-range rate for commercials (I think it was $6 in winter and $3 in summer) years ago. I thought this was smart.
The new owner, I think, is named Marvin (I hope I got that right) and he was a great guy and had been out to sell outside the community itself. His hard work might maximize what KBUX could be.
This is not to say Buck and Maude were bad operators. There's a point where a station is a joy to run and a point where it becomes a true headache to operate because you're so frazzled running it, it overtakes you. Buck and Maude chose to simply to keep it fun and entirely local. While others said it was a joke, I can see their point in that it seemed to not be professionally run, but you know, it was exactly what Quartzsite wanted and the community was connected to the station in just the same way those legendary entrenched in the community hometown radio stations always were.
KBUX is a station I applaud. I'll take a local radio station just off the living room of a home run by people who are a part of the community anyday compared to those in a closet, hooked up to a national feed (satellite) run by a person a few states away. They're a story that lives on of local radio run by people who live there and that makes the point moot as to whether they have that major market sound...they sound just like what Quartzsite wants.
Personally, on my visit about 6 years ago, I enjoyed listening to the 15 minute sets of lighter top 40 hits with only a liner (not unlike the old beautiful music liners) interrupting every 15 minutes. It sure beat the canned formats with crammed commercial breaks that included national spots for businesses not even represented in the listening area.
Somewhere I have a minidisc recording I made of KBUX I recorded in the car. It isn't that interesting, just wall to wall music with professionally done voice only liners every quarter hour such as "Quartzsite's home for music, 94 point 3, KBUX".
Buck had sent me a cassette, that is in the garage somewhere, years prior that offered an hour of the typical sound of the station and one of him substituting for Maude's Monday two hour program. The typical hour, recorded in winter, included a couple of commercials and the hour of Maude's program was during the big event each February where Buck played a commercial between each song. Obviously they squeezed in as many commercials in live hours as possible to get a bit of breathing room, say to watch a TV show without having to go insert a commercial here or there (remember they ran the station 16 hours a day, 7 days a week manually inserting commercials and only got time away when a friend would take over for a few hours). Musically back in those days, all the music had been recorded from records that were sometimes scratchy. Being too young, I did not recognize hardly any of the songs but you heard the likes of 40s, 50s and 60s MOR performers and he even tracked a song sung by Marilyn Monroe. Virtually none of the songs were the 'safe' MOR songs...no Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and such but more along the lines of the base library stuff that would be known to people who grew up in that era. Keep in mind Quartzsite is virtually an all retiree community and an RV City in winter.
The station is located at a home on a corner lot on the west edge of town complete with a tall wooden pole with antenna attached. The modest home had been modified to set up two small rooms with a studio while the processing and transmitter were in a room by the side door nearest the wooden pole.
If I seem to wax nostalgic on this, let me say I have experienced what they did and still do at KBUX. I have worked such a market. I sold more advertising in the coffee shop than in the business because more often than not I'd see a 'be right back' on the business door. I knew everyone in town. At the coffee shop I signed my ticket and paid at the end of the month. It took a while to get across town because you had to talk to everyone along the way. It was fun but not something that made you wealthy. There's something rather charming about being the only local station where even the local paper doesn't see you as a competitor but as a comrade. In my book, I'd rather get a town looking for a lost dog via the radio than talk about how many minutes it will take to drive from point A to point B on a certain freeway.
