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KPOP 93.5 Sacramento's Rock of the 80s format- holy grail aircheck!

A

Alan Smithee

archive.org

KPOP 93.5 FM Sacramento/Roseville CA circa early January 1984 Rock of the 80s format with Carmy Ferrari : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

This was a holy grail find- a recording of Sacramento's short-lived Rock of the 80s station which lasted only from August 1983 until mid-January 1984, at which...
archive.org

Thanks to the person who let me download and share this. I posted about this station in the Sacramento board but it's been closed due to inactivity. Words are not enough to describe how this station influenced me in the five short months they were on the air, I've given plenty of commentary in the link above.

It's 93 minutes long, just by coincidence. Bad news is the commercials were cut out, but most of Carmy Ferrari's talking remains. Date is uncertain but he mentions a caller getting a new stereo for Christmas so we at least know it's after 12/31/83. I was REALLY getting to love this music by this point (my only present-day criticism is they play two Adam Ant songs within 90 minutes, and the inclusion of 38 Special is a bit questionable for the format but I'll take it) but it only had a few weeks left. Although KPOP had announced the launch of Rock of the 80s several weeks ahead of time, they abruptly switched to top 40 in mid-January 1984 without any notice. Among the first songs I heard then, clearly showing something was wrong, included Running With the Night by Lionel Richie and Joanna by Kool and the Gang. (Those are still far preferable to any popular songs today, but they certainly didn't belong on a Rock of the 80s station and Sacramento already had TWO other top 40 stations that played those, we were left with nothing for this music aside from The Quake out of San Francisco which thankfully came in dependably, softening the blow a bit.)

Looking back, I can say with conviction that 1980s new wave was my favorite era of music. That said, I wouldn't want a station now that played nothing but that (I have most of these songs on CD now) ; I WOULD want one that played NEW music in the same spirit which certainly exists even if it doesn't get enough airplay. Sadly if this format had stayed, it likely would have met the same fate as KROQ which is now a shadow of its former self. But thanks to everyone who made this happen even if it was only for five months; hoping some other recordings of KPOP from August 1983 through January 1984 will surface somewhere or any other proof that this station existed. (As far as I know, they never had a station logo, I never saw it promoted anywhere. After they went top 40 they had billboards and bumper stickers everywhere.)
 
They DID have a station logo- this was from a calendar given out at Tower Records. I'd seen this before but wasn't sure what year it was and didn't see "The Rock" on it- It was often ID'd on air as "KPOP The Rock" possibly imitating KROQ's name "The Rock". Likely they had this on a 1984 calendar only to then be killed just a few days into that year.
KPOP logo.jpg
 
Here's another logo... not sure whether they had two different logos, or the calendar logo was more "artwork" than the station logo.

1751225833261.png
 
That was after they went top 40. I wonder if that was an “approved” spelling of the DJ’s name. Notice how laid-back he sounds in this recording, after the format change the DJs who stayed on suddenly had a phony positivity to them. I’ve confirmed that at least one of them ended up leaving because they couldn’t stand the new format.

Random memory that just popped up is they did a haunted house somewhere in the area on Halloween 1983, they aired promos for that. Wonder if there is any documentation of that?
 
The air talent also mentions it is Monday night. Christmas was on Sunday, so part of me wonders if the real date is December 26, 1983 (no way of knowing, though). The inclusion of "The Reflex" and "I Want A New Drug" would make me think January, though.
 
Yeah, really wish the commercials had been left in. He also says the live Pretenders track was from “This year’s US Festival” but it’s a common mistake to say that after January 1st. On Sunday mornings this station played three complete albums all the way through, and remember on Christmas they played the Eurythmics’ “Touch” album which hadn’t even been released yet in the US so that was a treat.

While the format officially started on August 1st 1983, they played promos announcing it in the weeks prior (was never sure what their format was at that time, I know it wasn’t all soul like it was earlier) like it was going to be the next big thing. Around January was when I was REALLY starting to love it, making it that much worse when they abruptly killed it. (Don’t know how the ratings were, but the station was sold then so that was likely the deciding factor. Obviously the new owners just wanted to copy what the higher-rated stations were doing and not do anything original or memorable.)
 
Duran Duran’s The Reflex heard here is the album version, the single version was different. They had played the Seven and the Ragged Tiger album in its entirety when it was first released a couple months earlier, and while the top 40 stations were all just playing “Union of the Snake” ad nauseum KPOP was playing several other tracks from that album as well. That was one thing that attracted me to it- they didn’t just play the songs released as singles. I caught on pretty quickly to that and was insulted when you’d usually hear just one song from a new album and then when the next single was released they’d call it a “brand new” song. In the thread I posted on the 40th anniversary of this format’s launch, I heard MANY songs that became mainstram hits months and in some cases even years later. Then there was stuff that the “mainstream” wouldn’t even dare touch at all.
 
Thanks for that article, I’ve been meaning to get a newspapers.com subscription to look up stuff on KPOP and a bunch of other things from past years but have to do it when I have a lot of free time because I know I won’t get anything else done. That “new owners for KPOP” blurb sure is ominous.
 
Slightly off-topic, but kind of on-topic based on this quote:
Alan Smithee said:
Looking back, I can say with conviction that 1980s new wave was my favorite era of music. That said, I wouldn't want a station now that played nothing but that (I have most of these songs on CD now) ; I WOULD want one that played NEW music in the same spirit which certainly exists even if it doesn't get enough airplay.
Click to expand...

Not exactly what you asked for, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that former KROQ legendary air personality Freddy Snakeskin hosts five hours on both Friday and Saturday evenings of classic 80's New Wave and Modern Rock (which is just enough for people's memories to be satisfied, not as overbearing as a full-time format of such would be).

"Flashback Weekend" is integrated into my Classic Hits format The Eighties Channel™.
 
KPOP carried a syndicated “countdown” show with Freddy Snakeskin, in fact now that you mention it I MIGHT still have some of that on tape somewhere. To add insult to injury, after they went top 40 they acquired the “American Top 40” show with Casey Kasem.
 
Alan Smithee said:
To add insult to injury, after they went top 40 they acquired the “American Top 40” show with Casey Kasem.
Click to expand...

"Insult to injury" only in your view, although justified. AT40 was a program nearly every top-40 station tried to get the rights to in their respective markets.
 
I have some of those old Duncan radio book scans. For fall of 1983, KPOP is listed 12th in the ratings in the core Sacramento metro (KXOA was easily the market leader). KPOP ranked fourth in listeners aged 12-18. I don't know when the diary period would have taken place.
 
TheRob said:
I have some of those old Duncan radio book scans. For fall of 1983, KPOP is listed 12th in the ratings in the core Sacramento metro (KXOA was easily the market leader). KPOP ranked fourth in listeners aged 12-18. I don't know when the diary period would have taken place.
Click to expand...
Fall '83 survey was Sept 22 through Dec 14
 
Did being in the top 10 matter then? It doesn't seem to matter so much now; I remember KSFM was usually #1 around that time. (Lately they've been closer to the lowest-rated at least among English-language music stations, keep hoping they'll try something new eventually. Never got to hear their Earth Radio format as that ended right before we moved to this area, but that also seems to have been a shame to get rid of for a tighter format.)
 


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