One of the best things about Runaway Radio, Houston TV news veteran/media columnist Mike McGuff’s tribute to heritage AOR KLOL Houston, is that it lets the radio people speak.
There are celebrity testimonials to KLOL from artists who actually had a close relationship with the station, and don’t feel forced in as they do in some artist docs. Some are no-brainers (ZZ Top’s Dusty Hill, Sammy Hagar), but some come from outside the dominant era of Album Rock radio (Lyle Lovett, who grew up with the station, and Melissa Etheridge, who somehow ended up in a prank war with legendary host Dayna Steele.)
But Runaway Radio — the title comes from a KLOL logo featuring a scampering radio with legs –also gives voice to a wide swath of managers, programmers, and DJs from the station’s 1970-2004 history. As the radio-station documentary becomes a sub-genre unto itself, McGuff serves by doing what the best radio columnists did: finding a way to speak both to industry people and rock-radio fans.
Runaway Radio, which came to streaming services in February, traces the history of Album Rock radio through KLOL’s evolution from early ’70s freeform to a more mainstream challenge from KILT-FM, to AOR’s kickass era (as the “Rock and Roll Army”), to its battle with ABC-owned KSRR (97 Rock), a station with deep-enough pockets to buy out a Who concert. Eventually, KLOL’s problem was not direct competition, but fragmentation from Alternative KTBZ (The Buzz) (where GM Pat Fant ends up) and the Classic Rock format.
Much of the second half of Runaway Radio deals with the Stevens & Pruett morning show, fined by the FCC and so controversial that PD Andy Beaubien recalls, “There were times when I hated my job.” But there’s ample jock representation from throughout the station’s history: quirky early star “Crash Collins”; eventual R&B PD Levi Booker, who taunted George Harrison into coming to the station; consultant Ed Shane; “Rock Army”-era host Colonel St. James; KSRR morning man Moby; and late-era night host Greg-O (Onfrio).
One of the strengths of Runaway Radio is showing just how big a star Steele became in Houston radio. She and Fant are executive producers, as is promotions director Doug Harris, whose legendary promotions could have filled a documentary of their own.
McGuff spent 14 years making Runaway Radio. The movie serves as an elegy for an entire era of rock radio, but also for a half-dozen interviewees who didn’t live to see the finished product, including Hill, Shane, Collins, and Jim Pruett. One could as easily wax elegiac for the writer who covers radio/TV on a regular basis, but McGuff’s column lives here.
