• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Live 105 Named "Legendary Radio Station" for 2026...

The link:

I watched it yesterday. The time flies by. Particularly in its original form, Live 105 sounded like a station where people were having a lot of fun in a manner that got listeners engaged. The stories confirmed that. Especially notable were the stories about getting the station back on the air after the Loma Prieta earthquake. Some of the gloomy, dour, and frequent posters that populate RadioDiscussions should watch what Mark Hamilton and Roland West had to say about that.

Strangely, until I heard some of the stories, I never realized that the period of formatic exile otherwise known as "Dave" was named after David Field. No further comment on that.

I wish I had been there, but the video is the next best thing.
 
Alex Bennett kinda told it like it was- Live 105 exists now in name only. Notice that none of the "memories" talked about at that event were from after the year 2000.

GM Ed Krampf who started Live 105 and brought Alex Bennett on appeared on Alex's YouTube 'show' this week, 43 minutes in:

They tell more of the truth here- Krampf says the current station basically operates out of a broom closet. If there were an earthquake today, nobody would even be in the building to say anything about it. If the equipment kept working, you'd just keep hearing the pre-recorded voices saying that everything was normal.

As someone who previously listened to The Quake from 1983-85 (where I discovered Alex Bennett, he was like a god to me back then), I didn't think this format had a chance of coming back. It's amazing that KITS (which was pretty bad as a top 40 station, though most stations of that format were pretty bad) actually dropped top 40 and made it work this time around. I lived out of the area but got The Quake in reliably, Live 105 however was sandwiched between two local stations at 105.1 and 105.5, and nearly impossible to get here. I convinced my parents to upgrade our roof antenna, and I spent about $600 on a Carver tuner that had super-fine tuning to get stations positioned like that. I had the station on nearly 24/7, I couldn't tear myself away from it- they hardly ever played a song I didn't want to hear, and of course many of them were brand-new and have gone on to become all-time favorites. I'd also called and written the Sacramento stations begging one of them to give this format another chance (it had previously only lasted 5 months here from August 1983 til January '84) but everyone said it was too "sophisticated" for Sacramento, the market couldn't handle anything beyond top 40. KWOD finally took a shot at it in 1991, it was adequate but not as great- by the time the music started to decline on KWOD, playing mostly grunge and phasing out the dance/pop stuff, Live 105 and even KROQ had done the same.
 
Alan Smithee said:
As someone who previously listened to The Quake from 1983-85 (where I discovered Alex Bennett, he was like a god to me back then)...
Click to expand...
I was a 14-year-old in Queens, NY when a 29-year-old Alex popped up on WMCA, a Top 40 station that was beginning a slow transition to talk in the Spring of 1969. He instantly became one of my radio heroes -- I learned so much about lefty politics and the counterculture from him. When I moved to SF 22 years later, hearing him on Live 105 was like reuniting with an old friend. And his morning show there, featuring the best stand-up comics around on a daily basis, was great, funny, entertaining radio when such a thing still existed. (And of course the station was great musically as well.)
 
RadioJunkieMike said:
I was a 14-year-old in Queens, NY when a 29-year-old Alex popped up on WMCA, a Top 40 station that was beginning a slow transition to talk in the Spring of 1969. He instantly became one of my radio heroes -- I learned so much about lefty politics and the counterculture from him. When I moved to SF 22 years later, hearing him on Live 105 was like reuniting with an old friend. And his morning show there, featuring the best stand-up comics around on a daily basis, was great, funny, entertaining radio when such a thing still existed. (And of course the station was great musically as well.)
Click to expand...
Alex Bennett is the greatest! The only morning show that consistently made me laugh. He had a great relationship with the stand up comedy community. I know he's 80 now, and won't be coming back to radio. But what a great run.
 
KilowattKat said:
Alex Bennett is the greatest! The only morning show that consistently made me laugh. He had a great relationship with the stand up comedy community. I know he's 80 now, and won't be coming back to radio. But what a great run.
Click to expand...

More like 85, but still going strong. He's obviously done with radio (after getting laid off at SiriusXM about a decade ago) and back living in New York, where he currently does a weekly big group podcast sorta thingy.

He also put together an audio autobiography called "Life In The Passing Lane", where he goes into much behind-the-scenes detail about his early radio stops, the decade in New York, featuring Abby Hoffman, John and Yoko, "Midnight Blue" and others, moving back home to the Bay Area, working at KMEL, The Quake and Live 105, a horrible brief experience at WIOD in Miami, and much more. And it is an absolute trip to listen to. The series is located in the middle column of his website:

GABNet™

gabnet.net gabnet.net
 
Fighting Irish said:
More like 85, but still going strong. He's obviously done with radio (after getting laid off at SiriusXM about a decade ago) and back living in New York, where he currently does a weekly big group podcast sorta thingy.

He also put together an audio autobiography called "Life In The Passing Lane", where he goes into much behind-the-scenes detail about his early radio stops, the decade in New York, featuring Abby Hoffman, John and Yoko, "Midnight Blue" and others, moving back home to the Bay Area, working at KMEL, The Quake and Live 105, a horrible brief experience at WIOD in Miami, and much more. And it is an absolute trip to listen to. The series is located in the middle column of his website:

GABNet™

gabnet.net gabnet.net
Click to expand...
Thank you! I'm listening to it now.
 
KilowattKat said:
Alex Bennett is the greatest! The only morning show that consistently made me laugh. He had a great relationship with the stand up comedy community. I know he's 80 now, and won't be coming back to radio. But what a great run.
Click to expand...

I grew up in the Bay Area around the early to mid-80s. And to this day, still feel Alex Bennett, at his peak, was the best morning guy I ever heard. Even better than Dr. Don. Better than Howard Stern.

While he was more than capable of running the show, working the phones and doing interviews, he knew how to occasionally play straight man when he had great comics on like Bobby Slayton. He wisely got out of the way, for the sake of making highly entertaining radio.
 
Don’t know if they’re still in print, but I have a few DVDs of “The Best of Midnight Blue” which include Alex Bennett.

Most morning hosts and DJs in general always put on a fake positivity- “Everything is great” and told jokes that were more annoying than funny. Alex told it like it was. He wasn’t afraid to say that something popular really sucked. I never got to hear him on KITS when it was still top 40, but that must have been interesting. I couldn’t imagine him on that format but he was probably at a point where he would’ve taken anything. His contract kept him employed at The Quake even after the ownership and format change, but he wasn’t on because they wanted him to play more music and do less talking and he wouldn’t do that, so under his contract they had to pay him to do nothing. I have one of his last Quake shows on tape and he keeps saying he’s still going to be on the new station, but listening that first morning he wasn’t there.
 
Alan Smithee said:
Don’t know if they’re still in print, but I have a few DVDs of “The Best of Midnight Blue” which include Alex Bennett.

Most morning hosts and DJs in general always put on a fake positivity- “Everything is great” and told jokes that were more annoying than funny. Alex told it like it was. He wasn’t afraid to say that something popular really sucked. I never got to hear him on KITS when it was still top 40, but that must have been interesting. I couldn’t imagine him on that format but he was probably at a point where he would’ve taken anything. His contract kept him employed at The Quake even after the ownership and format change, but he wasn’t on because they wanted him to play more music and do less talking and he wouldn’t do that, so under his contract they had to pay him to do nothing. I have one of his last Quake shows on tape and he keeps saying he’s still going to be on the new station, but listening that first morning he wasn’t there.
Click to expand...

I had moved away from the Bay Area by that point, but on a trip back, was surprised to hear him on KITS. By that time, the original Hot Hits thing had run its course, and they were a straightforward CHR. He still did his same show, with about two songs an hour, and with Lori Thompson as the newsperson/sidekick instead of Joe Regelski (who was still bound to his KKCY contract - Entercom didn't buy him out like they did Bennett).

The whole premise of KKCY (The City) was more music, less talk. It was a somewhat mellow AAA format, probably inspired by the original KTCZ (Cities 97) in Minneapolis, so it sounds like they weren't enthused about having an all-talk morning show as its anchor. So, after he refused to do a music-heavy show, they simply paid him to just stay away (which Bennett found somewhat insulting - getting paid to NOT be on the air). Eventually, the GM of the then-struggling KITS approached Bennett and KKCY, offering a deal for the station to pay part of the contract (two years remaining) in order to add the show to the KITS lineup. Allegedly, there were plans at the time to eventually move away from CHR, with a Quake-like modern rock format the most favored. It took a while for Entercom to sign off on it.
 


Back
Top Bottom