Who was running KGO at the time? Mickey Luckoff. He was the one who brought in KSFO. He had no interest in FM or music.
KGO-AM didn't need any financial support. It was #1 in town. They were swimming in money.
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KEXP Buys KREV
- Thread starter TheBigA
- Start date
Who was running KGO at the time? Mickey Luckoff. He was the one who brought in KSFO. He had no interest in FM or music.
KGO-AM didn't need any financial support. It was #1 in town. They were swimming in money.
Until they weren't.
C'mon, BigA. Mickey would have loved it if 103.7 had performed as well as 'PLJ or KLOS. A second solid revenue stream is never a bad thing.
I will footnote one thing from earlier though----ABC never moved one of its heritage AM talk stations to an FM signal. There's no reason to suspect that if they still owned 103.7, KGO would have been the exception.
He was likely one of the reasons it didn't. They tried the Love experiment just like the other ABC FMs. He got there in 1972 and became GM in 1975.
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Before Mickey's time. He became GM in 1975.
"Love" ran from 1969 until late 1970. The ABC FMs then went freeform until the fall of '71 when Allen Shaw implemented the highly formatted "Rock 'n Stereo") format, which worked everywhere except San Francisco.
KSFX went dance music in '74, the year before Mickey became GM, and it did reasonably well until disco cratered.
When KSAN left album rock for Country in October of 1980, Mickey took KSFX back to the ABC-FM rock format...and it once again failed, this time against KMEL and KOME.
But five months after KSFX became KGO-FM, KFOG decided to try, and became the legend that we're discussing in relation to KEXP.
(Hey! I did it!)
So as you confirmed, Mickey had a lot to do with why KGO-FM never became WPLJ or KLOS.
Is that what I did? The first time it failed was before Mickey ran the place. He actually put it back on the air and gave it a chance to find an audience a second time six years later.
Unless you're suggesting he deliberately sabotaged it, I don't see how that confirms he "had a lot to do" with why it didn't work.
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And then it failed. That's when he seemingly gave up and put ABC Talkradio on it, where it became the lowest rated station in town. As I said in post #228. As you yourself said in #233, "they didn't know what to do with the signal."
Right. Mickey was able to give ABC clearance for Talkradio in San Francisco without blowing up a successful KGO-AM schedule. Rational move given that KSFX wasn't getting traction.
That's different from:
Mickey inherited a reasonably-successful music format on KSFX when he became GM in 1975. When it cratered, he saw an opportunity to bring back the successful-everywhere-else ABC FM rock format, and did.
Not sure how that translates to:
He gave it an opportunity. San Francisco rock radio listeners, who preferred KSAN in the 70s and KMEL and KOME in the 80s, had a lot more to do with why KSFX never became WPLJ or KLOS.
KSFX as a dance station did well. It did better than either of the ABC rock stations were doing in NY and LA. But the anti-disco revolt hurt anything that followed. That was also the case at other disco stations. The irony to me is that in the 70s, ABC was competing against (and losing to) Metromedia rock stations in NY and LA. (the gap between KLOS and KMET was huge in 1979) It was interesting they chose not to do it in SF.
I can't speak to New York, but in L.A., Sam Bellamy finally found the right approach for KMET to counter KLOS. A loose, wild, fun atmosphere and exactly the right records. She almost tied them in the spring of '77 (2.7 to KLOS' 2.8), and Tom Yates, who'd been programming KLOS since the fall of '71, resigned:
KLOS pulled ahead by 0.8 in fall '77 under new PD Frank Cody, and then KMET overtook them in spring of '78 (3.6 to KLOS' 2.8) and widened the lead in summer (4.8 to 2.3).
By spring of '79, KMET had a 5.8, was in second place and stayed in the top three stations for a year (peaking with a 6.4 in the summer of '79). KLOS was pulling low-to-mid 2s and was ranked between 13th and 18th.
KLOS replaced Cody with Tommy Hadges in May of '80, he brought Bob Coburn back from Chicago, and started promoting Frazer Smith's morning show.
KMET fell off a cliff in the fall of '80 (8th place with a 3.6, though KLOS was worse---15th with a 2.7), worked back up to 3rd place with a 4.6 in the spring of '81, but KLOS was climbing and edged KMET by 0.2 in the spring.
After that, it was kind of a see-saw battle, with both of them unsure as to how (or if) to respond to KROQ. Sam Bellamy left KMET in September of '83 and the station began the slide that ended with the flip to KTWV in February of '87.
Well, um, blushbowwondermentthanks. Alas, I have outlived almost all my radio enemies, even the ones I thought were too mean to die, and have gone up into the mountains (well, almost) to engage in wanton punditry. I have retired from the cyber-batterfield and now choose to live in cyber-peace, possibly one day to teach the cyber-world to live in cyber-harmony.
But I will be in the East Bay in two weeks to conclude dental-implant torture. Lunch?
But this thread seems determined to go off in its own direction.
Roberts' Seventh Law of Bay Area Radio Discussions: It always ends up being about KGO.
It could be worse.
We could be arguing about which radio stations aren't licensed to Arden-Arcade.
Like a certain topic on the national radio board 🤣
That's what makes it fun!
I have noticed that there's no explicit ban on political discussion here (as I believe I've pointed out before), which makes things, uh... interesting?
Fortunately, most members seem to be mostly reasonable about it most of the time
It's pretty easy to assume that if I tune in, I won't be hearing any oldies (esp. any that predate The Beatles) or classic easy listening/soft pop on the new KREV/KEXP, yes?
I would be quite surprised if I do....
c
You can hear pretty much anything on KEXP, depending on the context. Would I say you could hear that reliably? No. But it is heard, based on current events or what a DJ is exploring in their set.
From time to time, a lot of the KEXP music seems to have a yacht rock or soft pop influence, just filtered through modern sensibilities. Chillwave, to name but one genre.
From time to time, a lot of the KEXP music seems to have a yacht rock or soft pop influence, just filtered through modern sensibilities. Chillwave, to name but one genre.
I see. Interesting.
I don't understand modern sensibilities very well (what's Chillwave? It sounds a bit like vaporwave, the existence of which I know only because I kept getting album art for this vaporware artist who called themselves "Macintosh Plus" while trying to search for photos of the Apple Macintosh Plus computer a few years ago), but I guess I'll have to tune in and see what they're about before I jump to any conclusions (the state of affairs on the SFBA radio dial has left me rather jaded).
As for soft pop/yacht rock (a modern genre applied retroactively to what was then called soft rock, by the way), I like that era of music quite a bit (especially the early to mid 70s). Bread, Ambrosia and the Eagles are among my favorites (they're also almost as soft as you can get without being orchestral "beautiful music" fare).
c
I don't understand modern sensibilities very well (what's Chillwave? It sounds a bit like vaporwave, the existence of which I know only because I kept getting album art for this vaporware artist who called themselves "Macintosh Plus" while trying to search for photos of the Apple Macintosh Plus computer a few years ago), but I guess I'll have to tune in and see what they're about before I jump to any conclusions (the state of affairs on the SFBA radio dial has left me rather jaded).
As for soft pop/yacht rock (a modern genre applied retroactively to what was then called soft rock, by the way), I like that era of music quite a bit (especially the early to mid 70s). Bread, Ambrosia and the Eagles are among my favorites (they're also almost as soft as you can get without being orchestral "beautiful music" fare).
c
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Not likely, unless they're doing some kind of theme. The guys in Ambrosia wrote hits for others. There were spin-offs of the Eagles. They play unusual classics, such as Rain by The Beatles (a B side) or Burning of the Midnight Lamp by Jimi Hendrix.
It's more mellow incarnations of late 80s synth-driven tracks, with lots of reverb (Vaporwave likes to sample, loop, slow down and heavily reverb/effect those samples into background music styles... "the music of dead malls").
Chillwave is more like Miami Vice stye music at the core, using retro instrument sounds but modern electronic production techniques. Personally, I feel the band "The Midnight" is the best example of this.
Me too, I program a SomaFM channel called Left Coast Seventies that is my incarnation of that. Inspired by listening to KNX-FM and KMET late nights in the mid 70s. I try to play some deeper tracks and shy away from the most overplayed "yacht rock" tracks.
Someone ought to have a performance art piece with people showing up with boomboxes of cassette tapes in this genre setting up shop in the Bayfair Mall in San Leandro so that there would finally be some life there.
I'll have to try that. It sounds reminiscent of St. Louis's KCFM during its two years as "The Natural Sound" in 1978 and 1979 (KCFM had previously been beautiful-music), which was a station I enjoyed as a counterweight to the heavy progressive-rock influence on the dial there at the time.
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