Don’t look now (oh, OK, go ahead) but there’s talk on FACEBOOK of all places of bringing KYMC back from the dead. Now, obviously, it wouldn’t really be KYMC… no one is planning on starting a new brick & mortar public radio station in suburban West St. Louis County (and they’d be big ol’ fools for trying to do such a thing, especially in this economy), but it would instead be a more modernized version, with an exciting new name, and operating online as a streaming-audio “Internet” station and/or podcast. I’m kinda, sorta part of this as I used to be a programmer at KYMC back in the 1980s (I still haven’t gotten around to posting any of my old air-check tapes, but SOON, I promise…) and am friends with the girl that set up this KYMC FM 89.7 Alumni Facebook group.
What the hell is KYMC, you may be asking at this point? KYMC was a small public radio station out in Ballwin, MO, that was owned by the YMCA of Greater St. Louis (the ONLY YMCA-owned radio station in the world), and it’s where I got introduced to the world of broadcasting after first joining up there with my friend, Bruce Clayton, during my senior year of high school. The station existed for about twenty-nine years until the YMCA finally axed it in January of 2007. When I first joined KYMC, I think it was only a 10-watt station. Later it was upgraded to 20 watts and I think at the most it may have been around a hundred watts, broadcasting as far east as Creve Coeur and west as St. Peters.
So am I excited about it? Eh. Not really. I mean, I guess it’s cool that they’re coming together to work on a project like this, and I’m in no way intending to throw any water on their fire, but honestly, with KDHX (struggling to stay afloat) in town as well as thousands (millions?) of other online “stations” out there begging for more ears (and dollars), is it going to be worth the effort? Did KYMC have that big of a following to easily and seemlessly translate that listenership into instant listeners today? Probably not, but hey, who am I to criticize them for their efforts? More power to ‘em!
So, anyway, with all that said, I wanted to post about it here in case some of you may know someone who used to be a DJ at the station… or maybe you know someone that was just a big fan or supporter. In that case it would be great if you could pass the info along to them about that Facebook group. The more people they can round up to get involved with this, the better the outcome will probably be. Thanks!
UPDATE: Interestingly enough, not long after posting this entry I happened to check out KYMC’s entry on Wikipedia, and read the following:
In July 2008 and with the final remain silent authority about to expire, the YMCA of Greater St. Louis reached an agreement to sell this station to Missouri River Christian Broadcasting, Inc. The deal was approved by the FCC on August 22, 2008, and the transaction was consummated on September 19, 2008. The new owners announced plans to return KYMC to the air with religious programming as a member of the Moody Broadcasting Network, including some programming as a simulcast of KGNV in Washington, Missouri. On October 30, 2008, KYMC was granted a main studio waiver allowing the station to be run from facilities far outside the station’s community of license.
Ha! Looks like the “resurrection” (pardon the pun) has already begun! Moody’s motto, by the way: “Think Biblically, Live Christianly, Serve Effectively, Evangelize Constantly”
Have you listened to 1430 AM KZQZ? They are a throwback to the (old) KXOK format and play obscure ’50s & ’60s stuff INCLUDING instrumentals. Steve “ELVIS” Davis does a lame show on Saturdays. Most other slots seemed filled with pre-recorded segments. Doctor Boogie plays some really good stuff, too. Look into this. I have heard some stuff on this station that I have not heard anywhere before.
I haven’t checked this out yet but I will now fo’ sure! An “oldies” station that actually plays REAL oldies? Sign me up!!
As I’ve posted here before, I was a DJ on KYMC 89.7 FM from early 1984 through mid-1989, hosting a few different music shows including Pipeline Radio Fanzine. The show was originally called Ground Zero but I renamed it in honor of the original Pipeline radio show on KWMU after that program was canceled in September of 1985. “Radio Fanzine” was added to the name in honor of the short-lived punk rock fanzine I put out while in college at CMSU in Warrensburg (also called Pipeline). Sometime in the late ’80s I acquired a KYMC T-shirt, which I had almost completely forgotten about until a couple of years ago, when I found a photo of myself wearing it at my parents’ house in St. Peters in the spring of 1988:
So recently I used that photo to design a new, updated version of the shirt, complete with a Pipeline Radio Fanzine logo on the back! I added the shirt to the TIRC T-shirt shop on SpreadShirt.com and you can order one for yourself here. Here’s what it looks like:
The shirt is $16.99 plus shipping and features Spreadshirt’s awesome, durable “flock printing process” which gives the designs “a velvety feel, like a thin layer of plush.” Much nicer than any screen-printed shirt I have ever seen! I really made the shirt so that I could buy one myself and wear it, but I thought it might be a good idea to leave it up online in case anyone else would want one, too. If you’d like one of these WITHOUT the Pipeline logo on the back, you can have that, too, for just $15.99.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Doubleday Publishing had a broadcasting division. They owned stations in several cities: Denver had KHOW, Minneapolis had KDWB, Detroit had WLLZ, Washington D.C. had WAVA, New York had WAPP, and St. Louis had KWK (which, by the way, had been a prominent St. Louis R&B station in the 1960s).
Doubleday had purchased KWK in 1976. At the time, their frequency was dark. A flood had damaged the transmitter three years earlier. When they did sign on in November 1978, they began as Top 40. One year later, they (as well as other Doubleday stations) shifted their format to AOR, and added an FM. KWK’s tightly focused format proved very popular for several years, until CHR regained popularity in 1983.
What was unusual about this station was that both KWK AM and FM had separate AOR formats (not to mention the fact that AOR was a rare AM format anyway). They did a morning/afternoon drive simulcast, but they had different jocks at other times of the day.
KWK-AM featured a two-hour program called “Freeform,” which aired six nights a week. The show included a mix of new wave and progressive rock cuts.
I had been a fan of KWK in the late ’70s/early ’80s and listened to it probably more than I listened to KSHE-95. I was aware they were also broadcasting on the AM dial but I didn’t mess with that much since the signal was pretty weak and it sounded so good in FM, anyway. Why bother with AM, right?
John Hutchinson
Well, sometime in early 1983 my world was turned upside-down by the discovery of a nightly radio show on KWK’s AM side called “Freeform” that was hosted by a British DJ named John Hutchinson (”Hutch” would later go on to be the board op for David Lee Roth’s shortlived syndicated morning show in 2006). I stumbled upon this show one night while I was bored and flipping through the AM dial, just goofing around, basically. The funny thing is, I had the tape running while I was doing this…
But before getting more into that, a little background: Prior to hearing that show, I was your typical teenager listening to typical teenage rock and pop of the era, mostly the stuff that I’d hear played on the FM side of KWK… my favorite band throughout junior high (ya know, “middle school” as they call it now) was ELO and I also had records (and 8-tracks!) by bands like Foreigner, Queen, Blue Oyster Cult, AC/DC, REO Speedwagon, Rush, Judas Priest, Bowie, ZZ Top… you name it. I also loved ’50s and ’60s rock’n'roll and would often listen to (and tape record) songs off of the oldies station. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Creedence, Kinks, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Doors, Monkees, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc. I’d listen to Casey Kasum on the local Top 40 station and would make my own lists of songs that I liked, and run out to Peaches and buy the 45s… mostly early ’80s new wave pop hits by bands like Bow Wow Wow, Felony, J. Giels Band, The Vapors, The Waitresses, Wall of Voodoo, Missing Persons, The Tubes, The Fixx, Thomas Dolby, The Stray Cats, The Romantics, Romeo Void, Berlin, Blondie, The Cars… you name it. Looking back, I’m not sure why but I just never seemed to be exposed to any of the really early punk or new wave music that was making such waves internationally from around ‘77 through ‘82. It’s probably because I had other interests (baseball, girls, my silly coin collection, etc.) and I’d be one of those late bloomers when it came to going headlong into music.
Once I did get clued into the fact that there was something else out there aside from the bland and predictable AOR that I’d been listening to for so many years, I could usually find some of this stuff at Peaches, and would take chances on full-length LPs that had that new wave look about them (Devo, Adam & The Ants, Sex Pistols, Robert Gordon, X, B-52s, Joe Jackson, Fabulous Poodles, Gary Numan, XTC, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, Ramones, Elvis Costello, The Polecats, The Knack, Split Enz, The English Beat, etc.). This was before the days of challenging college or independent, public radio (for the most part), there was obviously no Internet and it was also before we had MTV. Jet Lag Magazine and a few other local punk & new wave fanzines had been in print for a couple of years, but it would be a while before I would know of their existence. Luckily, I didn’t live very far from KYMC, and I discovered that station (at the time with a power output of just 10 watts - barely covering a ten-mile radius around the West County YMCA) around the same time and that, combined with the aforementioned discovery of “Freeform,” greatly increased my interest in this exciting new music and also my desire in wanting to host a radio show of my own, and it wouldn’t take me long before I was on the air myself at KYMC, spinning, of all things, ska and reggae! (It wouldn’t be until my senior year of high school that I would hear hardcore punk for the first time, thanks to friends introducing me to bands like the Circle Jerks, Fear, Minor Threat and the Germs.)
Anyway, so here I was, a very musically curious 17-year-old kid hungry for something, ANYTHING different or unusual. I was already sick to death of the typical ’70s arena rock that I’d grown up listening to, so I would turn on the radio on my Zenith boom box and go up and down the radio dial, first FM, then AM, in search of whatever interesting stuff I could find. That’s how I discovered this show on KWK AM 13.8 with a host that was playing this great mix of new music without regard to your typical radio format boundaries. Punk, pop, new wave, rock… all on the same show, and a commercial station at that. Talk about a breath of fresh air! I was hooked. I made many tapes of this stuff that I’d hear on the radio, but unfortunately only kept a couple of them. I still have several tapes of my shows on KYMC and may put together a couple podcasts of that stuff in the near future… we’ll see.
Below I have a link to an MP3 that was ripped from a cassette tape I recently unearthed in my basement. I had obviously stuck the tape in the deck, hit record, then started scanning the dial for something worth taping. That is when I happened upon “Freeform”… you can hear it right there on the tape, flipping through some stations, then settling in on KWK, fuzzy static and all (the station had a pretty weak signal). The first song I heard was Sting’s version of “Tutti Frutti” from the newly released Party Party soundtrack. It sounded decent, so I kept the dial on the station and continued to record much of that show. After that I listened religiously. John Hutchinson was responsible for introducing me to a lot of artists I’d never heard before, and played others that I’d only heard on KYMC, heard about from friends at school, or had seen the records in the shelves at Peaches. Within a few months I had been transformed from being your typical ’80s teenager into a full-on punk/new waver.
So with that, I present for you, KWK Freeform, circa January or February 1983. As I mentioned before, KWK’s signal was a little rough when I recorded it, but I think you’ll enjoy this one:
I did some further digging online recently and found a couple of other recordings of the same program from a few months earlier that someone else had put online. I downloaded them, re-ripped the files in mono (for a much faster download) and added them to my Blip account, too. These are from October 22, 1982:
Hey creeps, if anyone would like to try to get a new garage punk/surf/trash radio show (similar to The Wayback Machine) rocking and rolling on KDHX, now’s your chance. Nico, the station manager there, told me to let anyone know who’d be interested to get in touch with him ASAP. I guess they’d kinda like to fill the forthcoming vacated slot with similar programming, which, to me, could be the biggest compliment of all for the years I’ve put into my old, rusty ship.
Anyway, if you’re interested, you can call Nico at the station and ask what exactly you’d need to do: 314-664-3955 (M-F/9-5).
I just wanted to let everyone know I’ve decided to retire The Wayback Machine after almost 11 years on KDHX. The main reason behind this decision is I need to free up some time for my family and personal life. When my son was born three years ago it became increasingly difficult to find the time necessary to continue producing what I would consider a great radio show while also performing my necessary duties as husband and father. In the past, I would spend many hours a week seeking out and reviewing new music, digging up old stuff, and creating my playlists for each show (not to mention posting the playlists online, emailing them out to hundreds of bands and record labels, email lists, etc.). But after my son was born and life became a lot more hectic, that time started to dwindle.
Then, to make matters worse, about a year ago Bill Streeter and I decided to start a podcast at GaragePunk.com. At first it wasn’t that big of a deal, but as time went on and more people jumped on board, we started posting shows more frequently, until sometime this past winter when it became a daily podcast. Once that happened, time was again at a premium as I would spend probably about an hour every day downloading, reviewing, and posting each submitted show, several more hours each week managing and promoting the network, and then even more hours every couple of weeks producing my own podcast show.
As time went on I knew something would have to give, and I’d be needing to make a decision soon about what I really wanted to continue doing. The whole podcasting thing is very exciting, and I’ve become a lot more involved with it than I have been with my regular radio show as of late. Because of that, I feel The Wayback Machine has begun to suffer. The quality of the shows has decreased considerably over the past several months, mainly because I haven’t been able to dedicate the time to it that I need to produce a quality show like in years past. I found myself getting more stressed out over the whole thing, causing anxiety, lack of sleep, family tension, the whole 9 yards. I just feel that I need a break from it all, and I think I can free up a lot of my time and relieve a lot of the stress involved with producing a two-hour radio show every week if I just hang it up for now.
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m not saying it’s permanent. Who knows, the whole podcasting thing may fizzle out in a few years and maybe then I’ll take another stab at a show on KDHX. But as of right now, I can’t continue to do it all, so I’m throwing in the towel and will retire the old girl. She’s seen a lot of miles with over 560 episodes on KDHX spanning several different time slots, each of them unique, fun, and exciting.
Thanks to everyone who has helped out with the show over the years: Jaimz Fete, Jeff Hess, Jason & Ann Rerun, Bill Streeter, Scott Lasser, Ryan Katastrophe, Beatle Bob (heh, JUST KIDDING!), etc. Thanks also to everyone at the greatest radio station on the planet, KDHX-FM 88.1, and especially to all of the fans, bands, and record labels that supported me and the show over the years. I honestly couldn’t have done it without any of you. We gave it a helluva good run and I hope the local music community benefited from it being on the air during these years.
It will be up to the Program Committee to fill the vacated spot that I’ll leave open on Monday nights, but I’m sure they’ll either move another current show there or introduce another great new one to the KDHX roster (or both). It would be great if that show also had somewhat of a garage rock slant, but frankly, I’m not holding my breath.
So while the demise of The Wayback Machine may signal the end of an era for KDHX, myself, and the local music community, I feel that the podcast more than makes up for it by ushering in a fresh and exciting new era of great rock’n'roll available daily. So I’ll still be around, just not on the airwaves in St. Louis.
My last episode will be Monday August 28th.
Thanks again for everything, and stay sick!
kopper
