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KQUE/KNUZ QUESTION

O

OldChicago

There has been a lot of talk on here recently about the old superpower KQUE. I have another question. I remember visiting Houston and hearing
KQUE in the early 70's but did not really listen to it. I did hear "beautiful music" on it then, but did they ever simulcast with their sister station KNUZ. Also why did KNUZ need those call-letters. Were they ever a "news" station.


Old Chicago
 
According to Bruce Williamson's Houston Radio Blog:

The station was never a news station; Dave Morris told the Chronicle the call letters were chosen because two of the owners had been newsmen. Morris had been Assistant General Manager of KTBS, Shreveport, before coming to Houston and had also worked at KTBC, Austin. Max Jacobs had been the Washington correspondent for the Post, Douglas Hicks had been with the Press. The other partner was Tom Harling. All were veterans.

Here is the link:
http://houstonradiohistory.blogspot.com/2009/02/1940s-part-8-knuz.html

Eventually the name would change to Texas Coast Broadcasters which also owned 1450 KAYC and 97.5 KAYD in Beaumont.

There was never a simulcast; the two stations were independent of each other. Although they did share a news department. Eventually, KNUZ would go all news in the early to mid 1990s which included CNN Radio.

KQUE played a lot of variety in the way of music. When Paul Berlin became program director in 1973, it was more of a standards/middle of the road (MOR) station. There was a huge library of music to choose from.

 
I only heard KQUE once on a weekend trip to Galveston for work purposes. This would have been in the early 1990's. KQUE was a really good sounding radio station back then. But then I like that format. Today's equivalent would be KZQX in East Texas.
 
Well, in its last years KNUZ was a news/talk station because Dave Morris told me he hoped to use the "News" sound of K-NUZ to build ratings but that didn't happen. Still, it was a cheap idea; I anchored afternoon news in the last year or so of KNUZ but I was on the KQ payroll, so I would do, say, Paul Berlin's news for five minutes on the hour, then run to KNUZ and go on after CNN top-of-the-hour news on KNUZ and stay there for 45 minutes, then repeat that every hour. Never a dull moment.
 
Chuck is right about there being a big library of music, but with considerable restrictions. There was a roomful of LPs, but they couldn't be played on the air when I was there (from 1983 till SFX took over and replaced me with a satellite feed.) There were no turntables in the control room, only five cart machines and there were over 4,000 individual songs on carts. Some were more than twenty years old and sounded remarkably good on the air, considering. When college radio stations were playing tracks from CDs, KQUE was still playing the carts.
I always assumed that someone, David Morris, probably, didn't trust us to play a track that wasn't authorized. Where most program directors would write something like "Don't play" next to a track on an LP jacket that he didn't want aired, or cross through it with a Marks-A-Lot, Webb Hunt laboriously cut spoke-like gashes with a razor blade into the restricted tracks on a vinyl LP so that, should it somehow be (Gasp!) played on the air, it would make a loud pop about every half second.
 
"Don't play" was sometimes accompanied by an indeterminate amount of exclamation points. The more !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the more we were not supposed to play track whereas !!! meant we might get away with it while !!!!!! meant only a marginal chewing out. ROFLMAO!
 
Berln said and still says we were "aor" ALL over the road..not many stations where you hear the crusaders "put it where you want it" along with Wee Wille Wayne's "Doody Woo" and Tony Bennett...ecletic mix and glad to have been a part of it..and Berlin did have his own "secret stash" of carts :p
 
Walter 1 said:
Berln said and still says we were "aor" ALL over the road..not many stations where you hear the crusaders "put it where you want it" along with Wee Wille Wayne's "Doody Woo" and Tony Bennett...ecletic mix and glad to have been a part of it..and Berlin did have his own "secret stash" of carts :p
Click to expand...

Ranks up there with the old KTWC in Phoenix. Where else could you cold seg from Dreamweaver into The Days of Wine and Roses on purpose?
 
johndavis said:
Walter 1 said:
Berln said and still says we were "aor" ALL over the road..not many stations where you hear the crusaders "put it where you want it" along with Wee Wille Wayne's "Doody Woo" and Tony Bennett...ecletic mix and glad to have been a part of it..and Berlin did have his own "secret stash" of carts :p
Click to expand...
bada boom bada bing
Ranks up there with the old KTWC in Phoenix. Where else could you cold seg from Dreamweaver into The Days of Wine and Roses on purpose?
Click to expand...
 
Over on the KNUZ side, I had my stash of carts and two 10" reels which I would bring to work in my raggedy briefcase. I would rotate the progressive country stuff into the mix. Ahh, yes. Charlie Daniels Band, Marshall Tucker Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils to name a few. I played the long version of "The South's Gonna Do It Again," from CDB and the long version of "Fairytale" by the Pointer Sisters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQWgKvvbT1g

KNUZ/KQUE; what a place. We loved it and hated it too! LOL But looking back over the years, I know I loved it more.
 
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