Or, Radio Tales, Part 2.
I'm finally continuing a series I had tried to start five years ago, basically me bitching about radio, which for some reason is one of my favorite past times. This one is about how different the two places I've lived, Austin, TX, and the area surrounding Louisville, KY are, and about how a good number of people view Alternative Rock. I'd recommend you read this old blog entry before going any further with this one. And keep in mind, my family didn't have full time access to MTV for all of the 1980s and most of the 1990s.
I guess I should start with a brief history of Rock radio in Louisville from 1988 to 1998. In August of 1988, I started 6th grade, and my transformation into a music nerd was just beginning. By the end of 1988, there were two Rock stations in Louisville that I knew of, 96 WQMF, and LRS "The New Rock 102". WQMF had an emphasis on Classic Rock, while WLRS seemed to have more of an emphasis on what would be known later as "Hair Bands". At first, I split my time in between the two, but later I developed more of an interest in Classic Rock, and grew tired of the saturation of Hair Bands on LRS, so by 1990 I leaned heavily towards QMF. LRS supposedly played cool bands like Jane's Addiction or Concrete Blond, but I was so sick of the current crop of "I gotta stick my thang in you" music that I couldn't listen to it long enough to hear the good stuff. At the very beginning of 1991, 102.3 changed from LRS into an Adult Contemporary station, "Mix 102.3", leaving QMF as the last Rock station standing. In October 1992, QMF made the bone headed move to do a "Classic Rocktober" gimmick where all they played was Classic Rock. By this point, I had gotten burned out on Classic Rock. The only upside to this gimmick was that they mixed in some Talking Heads, Squeeze, and The Clash along with all the usual tired crap. Instead of going back to a mixed AOR format in November, they made the even more bone headed move of officially becoming a Classic Rock station. So basically, if you wanted to hear any new Rock in the Louisville area and didn't have access to MTV, you had to listen to 99.7 WDJX, the CHR (Contemporary Hits Radio) station. QMF slowly started integrating some new Rock in April or May of 1993. That June, a new Rock station popped up, 100.5 The Fox. To my disappointment, it was more AOR than Alternative. To put it one way, I think it was The Courier Journal's Jeffery Lee Puckett who expressed his disappointment with, "They played Pat Travers within the first fifteen minutes." But The Fox gave QMF the kick in the pants it needed to get with the times. QMF was the first station I heard play Stone Temple Pilots, so to me, they automatically won the war. They were also the first station I heard play Porno For Pyros and Smashing Pumpkins*. Later in the Summer, The Fox started up a couple of hour long niche shows, The Metal Pit and Detour. Detour was an Alternative show, while The Metal Pit was, obviously, a Metal show. QMF had had an Alternative show at some point that year, but I wasn't real impressed with it.
In September 1993, I heard a promo on QMF telling us to check out 105.9, which I did, but not until I finished listening to David Bowie's "Suffragette City" on QMF. I then flipped it over to 105.9, and I think the first song I heard was a Boston song. Not long after that though, I heard something that totally made me lose my shit... "Head Like A Hole" by Nine Inch Nails! Better yet, I later heard "Sex On Wheels" by My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. This new station was known as Q-Too. It started out with some Alternative, some Metal (old hair bands, but also heavier Metal that I dug like Anthrax, Sepultura, and Fight), and Classic Rock. It took a while, but they eventually phased out all the Classic Rock and a lot of the Metal, and you were mostly left with new and classic Alternative. Around the end of 1995/beginning of 1996, they changed the name to WXNU. New name, same format.
Later on in 1996, the Telecoms Act happened. The owner of QMF and XNU sold the stations. I can't remember who bought 105.9, but in September it switched to something that was like a prototype of what is now known as "Hot AC". It was like a mix of the more MOR (middle of the road) side of what Q-TOO/WXNU had been playing, along with newer stuff from John Mellencamp and Eric Clapton, and some occasional Soft Rock. I still had QMF, which made things somewhat less harsh for the remainder of 1996. But Clear Channel bought QMF, and at the beginning of 1997 it was Classic Rock. So if you wanted new Rock, you were stuck with the Butt Rock of The Fox, and if you wanted to hear Alternative, you had to listen to their Detour show.
On Memorial Day week of 1997, 102.3 changed its call letters back to WLRS, and became something of an Alternative station. Unlike 105.9 though, which started out kind of iffy but improved over time, this new LRS started out good, then got worse over time. At first, you could hear some occasional female voices, and some occasional electronic oriented stuff like Sneaker Pimps or new Depeche Mode. I noticed later that the oldest song they played was "Jane Says" by Jane's Addiction, and the station had devolved to mostly White Guy Guitar Rock. As of 1997/1998, this could've meant a mix of Matchbox 20, Dave Matthews Band, Alice In Chains, and "Cryptic Writings"-era Megadeth, which was sadly more diverse than what LRS would become years later. But either way, this didn't bode well for Alt Rock in Louisville. It's a good thing that my family got DirectTV in the summer of 1998, where I got to discover new music via MTV2, making that summer suck slightly less hard than it could have.
I should mention before I go any further that I tried listening to 91.9 WFPK a few times, but it seemed like every time I turned it over to them, they were playing some acoustic folksy singer-songwriter/Americana stuff that was not to my liking. I realized in the post-Austin era that if I stuck around, I'd hear plenty of stuff to like. I did end up listening a lot to an R&B Oldies station on 94.7.
In September of 1998, after getting sick of the overall mediocrity of the Louisville area, and of putting up with my dad's shit, I moved to Austin, TX. I was pretty amazed by how much more Alternative friendly Austin was than Louisville, like I got to hear a lot of the stuff on the radio in Austin that I could only hear on MTV2 in Louisville. The first station I heard was Mix 94.7, which was kind of like what 105.9 in Louisville had been from September 1996 to August 1998, except way less crappy. The best thing 94.7 had was the Friday Retro Mix, where they played a lot of old Eighties New Wave type stuff from 5-7:00p.m.. I would've been disappointed if that had been the closest thing to an Alternative station that Austin had, but then I found out that there were not one, but TWO Alternative stations! One was 101.5 KROX (or 101X), the other was some Clear Channel owned station on 105.9. The station at 105.9 soon changed formats, but I didn't mind since it became Jammin' Oldies, which was the only thing I really thought was missing from Austin radio. Austin also had an Album Adult Alternative (AAA) station, 107.1 KGSR Radio Austin.
101X wasn't as good as Q-Too/WXNU had been, but it was far better than LRS. You could hear some female voices, you could hear some electronic stuff, and you even got to hear some classic Alternative via the Flashback Lunch everyday from noon to 1:00 p.m.. In 1999, the Modern Rock/Alternative format seemed to be at a crossroads. There were some things at the harder end of the spectrum (Rob Zombie, Orgy, Static-X, System Of A Down) that seemed to be more genuinely interesting than the Modern Rock crap that the corporate labels were trying to push (Lit, Marvelous 3). My hope back then was that we'd get to hear new stuff from bands like Anthrax or Pantera alongside this exciting new stuff. By 2000, Nu-Metal had taken over Modern Rock radio, and instead of getting to hear new stuff from Anthrax or Pantera, what we got were a ton of Korn and Marilyn Manson clones, along with bands that sounded like Pantera-lite. Hell, I was sick of Korn by then, realized how obnoxious Fred Durst was, and I was looking towards bands like At The Drive In (2000), The Strokes (2001), The White Stripes (2002) and The Hives (also 2002) to save Rock. In 2001, a new wave of post-Grunge had popped up. Creed was huge and still going on, and they were joined by the likes of Nickelback and Staind, who were previously mediocre bands that blew up by becoming straight up awful, and Puddle Of Mudd, who like Staind were discovered by Fred Durst. This was the kind of crap I usually heard when I tuned the radio to 101X. I had read that 101X were playing some good new stuff like System Of A Down, The Strokes, and Tenacious D, but much like the 1990 version of WLRS, I couldn't put up with the chaff long enough to get to the wheat. It wasn't until the end of 2001, when I got a job at a retail store, where I got to listen to 101X for long periods of time while unloading trucks that I finally got to hear that good shit.
My knowledge of Louisville Rock radio from 1999 to 2002 is pretty limited since I wasn't living there at the time, I only got to listen when I visited. I remember nothing remarkable from my summer 1999 trip to Kentucky regarding LRS. It still seemed pretty bland. I do know that at some point that year, 102.3 switched to some "All love songs, all the time" format, and that after much protest, LRS was reborn as a Modern Rock station in 2000 on 105.1. So, I was stuck with The Fox on my Christmas 1999 visit, but thankfully that was a short visit. It was Spring of 2000, when my brother visited Kentucky for a funeral, that he discovered that LRS was on 105.1. I visited in the Summer of 2000. I really didn't do a whole lot of radio listening, but I do remember that hearing new No Doubt on LRS seemed like an improvement from where it had been in 1998. And while I can't remember what all I heard while listening to The Fox, it also seemed like an improvement over what it had been a couple of years before. During Christmas 2000, I remember hearing "Yellow" by Coldplay on LRS, which I had previously only heard/seen on MTV. It struck me as odd that I heard it on the radio in Louisville before I heard it on the radio in Austin, since it seemed more Austin-friendly than Louisville-friendly. On my summer 2001 visit to Louisville, I heard a song on LRS for the first time that just screamed "Louisville". It was some boring ass three chord(?) song that had a break where some douchebag says, "I like the way you smack my ass!" That song eventually hit Austin a couple of months later. My brother and I's next visit was in Spring of 2002. Our sister and brother-in-law subjected us to The Fox, who by that time played mostly Nu-Metal and post-Grunge. It got real old, real quick, and my brother and I eventually begged them to turn it over to LRS.
Back to Austin, sometime in August or September 2002, an Eighties station on 107.7 in Austin slowly transitioned to a Classic Alternative station, becoming 107.7 The End. They played some crap, but it had the best good song to bad song ratio of any commercial Rock radio station I had heard since WXNU. I freaking loved it! However, it didn't last long. In April 2003, it was bought by The Hispanic Broadcasting Corp., and changed to a Tejano station.
I remember finding it odd, while talking to my sister on the phone in late 2002/early 2003 about bands that had been on Saturday Night Live, that she had never heard The White Stripes or The Donnas. I thought it was because she was listening to The Fox too much as opposed to LRS. When I moved back to Kentucky in June 2003, I got to listening to LRS, and realized that it was basically just an Active Rock station that had some Pop-Punk and Emo crap thrown in for good measure. Where were The Donnas? And while they did play "Seven Nation Army", where were older White Stripes songs like "Fell In Love With A Girl" and "Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground"? Instead, they would play a Sevendust song from 1999/2000 that I don't remember hearing on Austin radio, "Waffle", along with "Lit Up" by Buckcherry. (More on Buckcherry another time.) LRS would occasionally play some legitimately Alternative stuff like Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand, or Silversun Pickups, but it remained a Modern Rock/Active Rock hybrid until April 2008, when it changed to "Everything That Rocks". That only lasted a year, then 105.1 became a Talk station, leaving The Fox as the only Rock station playing new Rock in Louisville. In early 2009, The Fox started incorporating more Pop Punk and Modern Rock stuff, then late in the the year they made the plunge to Modern Rock. For the first three years, it was even worse than LRS. By late 2012, it seemed to start improving, playing bands like M83, The Naked and Famous, and Grouplove. I even heard some old No Doubt, who I'm not a fan of, but was a welcome change. Then one morning in February 2013, I turned the radio on to The Fox and heard Led Zeppelin. Don't get me wrong, I like Led Zeppelin, but that's not the direction I wanted them to go. I looked up the playlist, and they were now playing shit like Five Finger Death Punch and Halestorm. The Fox's playlist these days largely consists of the same old tired 1990s Grunge, 2000s Nu-Metal and post-Grunge, new stuff from those bands, and a lot of unremarkable new stuff, most of which are throwbacks to the late Nineties and Aughts. I'm amazed that they even play The Black Keys. I especially couldn't believe my ears when I heard the band Ghost, who look like they should be playing Black Metal but are closer to something like Blue Oyster Cult, on there. I got to thinking, even if they are sort of a Seventies throwback, Ghost are the kind of band that The Fox should be playing, instead of these Nineties/Aughts throwbacks. That's why I found it hilarious when I peeked at the Listener posts on The Fox's Facebook page and saw some nimrod telling them to stop playing that Ghost song because it's "not Rock music!" That says a lot about Louisville, but I'm afraid I'll have to save that for the next part, which will be largely about the actual difference between the Austin and Louisville demographics.
Meanwhile, sometime in the mid-to-late 2000s, 101X eventually went back to being a full fledged Modern Rock station again. I don't know who in Austin currently plays that shit from the late Nineties and Aughts that The Fox won't give up, but 101X's Mainstream Rock sister station KLBJ doesn't seem to want it either.
*But before I go, I have to tell the story of when I first heard Smashing Pumpkins on WQMF. I think they intended to play track 1 of Siamese Dream, "Cherub Rock", which was also the single, but instead they played track 11, "Silverfuck", by mistake, all 8+ minutes of it, including the spoken f-bomb at the end. Man, radio was fun back then!
Here's a ten-year-old report I found that might be of interest to you called The Graying of Active Rock, which puts some perspective on the changes in the Active Rock and Alternative Rock formats during the Aughts. Note, it's in PDF format.
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