Audio By Carbonatix
Two years ago, Phoenix’s then-newest oldies station, KPSN-FM “Sunny 97,” hit the airwaves playing Arthur Conley’s 1967 hit “Sweet Soul Music.” At noon on November 28, 1994, KPSN played it again for the last time. David Bowie’s “Changes” followed, along with a new ten-minute station ID spelling out exactly what the big “ch-ch-ch-ch-changes” were going to be.
KPSN had suddenly become KHTC-FM–K-Hits–devoted exclusively to “the greatest hits from the Seventies!”
The ensuing succession of tunes by Fleetwood Mac, Chicago and Peter Frampton was nothing unusual–none of those cuts have been missing from the airwaves since they left the pressing plant nearly two decades ago. More telling was the symbolic slamming of the door on the music of the Sixties. After all, human ears can stand only so many listenings to “Wooly Bully,” “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and “I Can’t Help Myself.” Moreover, the all-Seventies format is the signal from advertisers that the Big Chill generation isn’t buying its share of soft drinks, cars and sneakers. Time to move on to the next demographic.
If there’s one thing you learn about broadcasting after visiting K-Hits headquarters, it’s that no music makes it to the airwaves anymore without clearance from volumes of research data. Ironically, this is a far cry from what radio used to be like in the Seventies, particularly “progressive radio,” which is where Buz Powers, vice president and general manager of K-Hits and Sunny 97 before it, got his start.
Powers’ first job was in Oklahoma City at KATT-FM, better known in those parts as The KATT. “That was freeform radio at its best,” he says during an interview at K-Hits’ Phoenix headquarters, a sterile office devoid of any Seventies decor other than the odd lava lamp. “I don’t think any of our jocks went on the air unless they were stoned or wiped out. That was the sound they wanted back then.” And how’s this for market research: “You’d throw something on and wait to see if the phones lit up or not!”
Since those carefree days, radio has become a big-dollar business, and Powers has followed the medium through every permutation. All-news to all-talk, country to classic rock, big bands to beautiful music to alternative. Now, with the all-Seventies format, Powers is taking another bold step into radio’s future. Sort of.
“What we’re trying to do is identify with a generation,” says Powers. “I think when you hear the testimonials from people who call in, that’s exactly what we’re doing. They say, ‘Wow, I graduated from high school with that music, went through college, got married and had my first child to that.’ Anything that gets you through puberty, you’re gonna stick with a while.”
All of those touching Kodak moments develop into dollar signs for the folks at K-Hits, and they’re not the only ones cashing in. “All-Seventies” stations have spread like wildfire across the country; it all started at Los Angeles’ KCBS-FM. “Theirs was more of a classic-rock version,” Powers clarifies. “We call ours the pop version.” Rather than utilize the same collected data at most Seventies-format stations, Powers and company researched Phoenix specifically. “Seventy-two percent of the marketplace came back and said, ‘If somebody were to play this form of the Seventies, we’d listen to it.'”
And those listening are advertisers’ dreams, the legion of “consumerholics,” as Powers calls them, people who were brought up to spend instead of save. That, in case you didn’t know, is every human from 25 to 54.
“That’s the demo, which is really weird,” shrugs program director Joel Grey, a member himself. “But the difference with KOOL and us is we’re moving; with the Sixties format, you’re not dropping off and adding new people on.”
Brian Bieler, vice president and general manager of KOOL-AM and KOOL-FM, claims his stations are adding new people, those who mourn the loss of the Sixties music Sunny 97 used to program.
“I see their [K-Hits] station as a complement to ours, not a competitor,” he says. “We’re happy not to have to compete with another Sixties oldies station. Sunny was never going to beat us at our game. We’ve had this format almost 20 years. KOOL-FM is Coca-Cola, while Sunny was always going to be RC Cola.”
Bieler says there’s no overlap between what his station and K-Hits play now. “We play very little of the Seventies,” he says. “Our cutoff is ’71, ’72. We’ve found through surveys that this demo doesn’t cross over from Sixties to Seventies. It’s like mixing gasoline and water.”
However, the curiosity factor is bringing many alternative listeners from the Nineties into the Me Decade. “We’ve also found a lot of college kids are liking the Seventies,” he says. Quite possibly, listeners born post-1970 are looking for an alternative to alternative radio, which in recent years has become yet another formula, playing the same R.E.M. and Cranberries songs as MTV.
But why shouldn’t Generation Xers dig the Seventies? As if bell-bottoms weren’t enough, the era gave birth to a host of musical genres that are still with us today in some form or other: heavy metal, punk, glitter, disco, New Wave and the earliest forms of rap. Since K-Hits concentrates mainly on singles that charted in the Top 40 from that era, some of these genres are barely represented, if at all. And a lot of Top 10 hits–even some significant No. 1s–are being ignored by the station. No Osmonds. No Bobby Sherman. No Carpenters. No Debby Boone!
“We won’t play ‘You Light Up My Life,’ but we do get calls from people who want it,” Grey admits. “We made a judgment call at the startup. We don’t want people tuning in for the first time hearing Barry Manilow or John Denver and saying, ‘That’s not what I want.’ I don’t want people to think it’s the mellow station. After everybody knows that K-Hits is a Seventies station, then you can open up the library a bit.”
Though K-Hits initially kept away from the sappy Seventies classics found on Rhino’s Have a Nice Day series, Grey notes that all 21 volumes are in K-Hits’ library and are slowly being integrated into the playlist. Good thing, too; for many, nuggets like the Buoys’ 1971 hit “Timothy” (in which three men are trapped in a mine and resort to cannibalism) are an important part of the decade’s musical heritage. Incidentally, the author of “Timothy” is one Rupert Holmes, who scored the last No. 1 of the Seventies with a song many people found even more offensive–“Escape (The Pia Colada Song).”
Powers notes that you have to be careful scheduling songs with a novelty factor. “The other day we played Ray Stevens’ ‘The Streak.’ It’s fun to hear once. If we’d have played that again, I’d have yelled and screamed.”
So. What does get played, how often and when? Here’s the breakdown: Every song on the playlist is categorized based on how well it tested with the random listeners, which then determines how many times you’ll hear it. You’ve got your A list–the biggest songs by acts like Fleetwood Mac, Doobie Brothers, Eagles, Cat Stevens. The B list is made up of secondary hits by those same artists. And the C list is home to novelties like “Seasons in the Sun” or “The Night Chicago Died,” what the high command at K-Hits refers to as the “Oh, Wow” category. Phoenicians’ civic pride may be in question here–Mark Lindsay’s Oh, Wow-level “Arizona” rated only low C.
Also, the station’s offering of soul music is slanted. You’ll hear lightweights like the Chi-Lites, Johnny Nash and the Stylistics, but nothing militantly black. Forget about Curtis Mayfield, the Staple Singers or Isaac Hayes. Grey explains: “It could be, because in our music tests, there were only about three or four black people.”
Once songs are categorized, Selector, a music scheduling system, scrambles them so they don’t reappear at the same time slot the entire week. To take the Big Brother-as-deejay analogy one step further, on your next lonely, late-night drive, keep in mind that K-Hits isn’t even live after midnight. “I have a person in there pushing buttons, but there’s just prerecorded drops saying the station’s slogans,” says Grey. “What we play from 5 o’clock in the morning to 10 o’clock at night turns around and plays in a different order from 10 o’clock to 5 the next morning.” The music goes ’round and ’round.
Even more Orwellian is the diminished importance of the disc jockey; you’ll find no Wolfman Jacks or Alan Freeds spinning platters in this day and age, thank you. “Every single CD is inside cases, and they’re deejay-proof,” explains Grey with no trace of irony. He picks up what seems like a standard jewel case with a chastity belt around it. “You load this in the machine [still in its case], nobody ever touches the music. Jocks don’t know what’s on the discs without checking the logs. If someone requests a specific song, the jocks look it up in the books.” Don’t get the idea that the station is devoid of humanity. Tacked on the wall in the on-air studio are numerous Polaroids of listeners, all captured for posterity in front of the K-Hits van. Each photo has a name written on the bottom of it. Here’s Danny. There’s Angie. Here’s Monica and her kids. “We put our listeners up so our deejays can identify who they’re talking with,” Grey says. You can almost hear him at staff meetings: Remember, troops, there are real people out there! Moms and dads and sons and daughters with real faces and real lives, dammit! People whose hard-earned happiness is up to you and the buttons you push. Don’t ever forget that!
Yet if music is–as Powers claims–so important to these baby boomers, when they phone in with a request, why do they always sound as if they’ve been marooned on a desert island with no access to a record store or a stereo? I just wanna hear “My Love,” I useta make out when that came on! There’s not one song K-Hits plays that’s not readily available on CD.
Grey has theories. “Like many listeners, I own a lot of these songs on 45s that have been in storage a long time. It may be a matter of not wanting to dig them out. I think calling in to request a song reminds many listeners of when they requested the same songs as teenagers.”
That was a time when Top 40 had at least some tolerance for different styles of music. These days what you have is a kind of musical apartheid, with no two diverging musical styles allowed to co-exist under the same call letters. Top 40 radio may still be the best way to gauge what’s popular throughout the country, but it’s too broad in scope to attract advertisers anymore. No station is going to program Wu Tang, Boyz II Men, Pearl Jam and Trisha Yearwood in one format. In a sense, radio has turned the average listener into a radio programmer, endlessly button-punching down the dial for a variety radio no longer provides.
“It used to be, ‘Be broad, be good,'” laments Powers. “Now it’s, ‘Be niched and be remembered.'” You can’t even run a McDonald’s commercial with a rap beat to it on a classic-rock station without fearing that some listeners will tune out.
“A lot of our listeners have come to our station from country,” notes Powers. “And a lot of country listeners were originally rock listeners that were alienated by rap and alternative. I think the days of one station totally dominating a market are history. You’ll always have oldies stations, but the descriptions will change. KCBS, who started this format, have now stopped using the term oldies. It’s detrimental. I don’t want to call my music old. And I don’t think radio will wait ’til 2005 for an Eighties oldies station.”
But that’ll mean having to get rid of something else. Just as the Muzak stations had to die off to make way for lite-music stations, the Fifties have been replaced by the Sixties, which now has the Seventies breathing down its neck. “The advertising community controls a lot of what is played, and unless they see the benefit from the numbers to spend money, there’s no sense in doing it,” Powers says. “Sad to say, but that’s the way it works.”
When the day comes and advertisers see no sense in “all-Seventies” music anymore, you can be sure that K-Hits will have “Changes” cued up and ready to move on to “all-Eighties.”
That wouldn’t surprise John Sebastian, program director for KSLX-FM, Phoenix’s premier classic-rock station. For the past several years, he has watched with bemusement at how K-Hits (which is owned by the Mormon church through Bonneville International Corporation) is just the latest in what he calls “the format of the month” club.
“Of course, I’m biased,” says Sebastian, whose own station plays predominantly Seventies music. “K-Hits’ format is so limited in scope. Here you have songs we’ve all heard before that we never wanted to hear again.”
His skepticism about “all-Seventies” radio is reflected in the format’s numbers leveling off in other markets around the country. “They’ve peaked and are now going down in the ratings,” says Sebastian. Based on the rating from November through January, K-Hits’ ranking rose only from 14th to 13th place. However, in the estimated ratings for January, K-Hits showed a significant jump that will be reflected in the next quarter’s ratings.
Interestingly enough, KSLX has made an astonishing rise from 14th to second place in just a few months. Sebastian credits the leap to KSLX’s mix of Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and Nineties music. “The only way you can keep listeners is to constantly challenge them,” he says.
If it’s challenges you want, K-Hits is attempting to throw a few curveballs, formatwise (the new Eight Tracks at Eight lets listeners program their eight favorite songs from the Seventies). Yet the bulk of the station’s playlist will always come from the same 1,000 songs. “It’s a constant battle,” on-air personality and assistant program director Alan Cook says of the process of shuffling and reshuffling a limited pool of songs. “You’ve got to make the most with what you have.”
When it comes to songs played at a radio station, decisions ultimately fall into the lap of the program director. K-Hits’ Grey has a serious background in his station’s music. He had a Top 40 radio show in college in the mid-Seventies. Now those same songs have followed him up all the way to 1995, but the guy must be listening to something besides Gerry Rafferty and Eagles songs. “I listen to KMLE, KZRX, Variety and KEZ because we’re going to take a little from all of those places,” says Grey, grinning. “We listen to our own station the most. I don’t think we can enjoy radio anymore. We don’t listen like listeners.”
“I can’t listen to radio because I’m always critiquing,” nods Powers. “I’ve gotten into Windham Hill and alternative music. I also have what I call my mood tapes, which consist of all the Seventies stuff I love with all the singles programmed out.”
But for your non-Seventies-format-radio-station employee, there’s more to it than critiquing, numbers and programming. “After 20 years, you start reminiscing,” Powers offers. “When your future doesn’t look as bright as your past did, you start going back.” If you were listening the first time around, the music on K-Hits may remind you of the good old days–assuming your old days were good–a time of youthful discovery and unadulterated fun. But at the same time, you might find yourself feeling a little guilty, as if you’re being seduced by an old girlfriend. It feels familiar, comfortable, but a little odd. A staple of K-Hits’ playlist is a song by Foreigner; the chorus goes like this: “It feels like the first time, like it never will again.” And if you’re 15 right now and can’t relate to any of this, don’t worry. Before you know it, you’ll be sweating to all those oldies from the Nineties.
