First Listen: KROQ, 91X, February 1983

Here’s how R.J. Curtis, now Executive Director of Country Radio Broadcasters, remembers KROQ Los Angeles in the early ’80s. “They sounded rogue and underground and played music I never heard anywhere else but was instantly attracted to. Their jocks weren’t ‘jocks.’ They were people — real, slightly flawed, and a perfect alternative extension of the music … great radio station!”

“They were the right degree of adventurous and entertaining in that moment,” recalls veteran programmer Fred “Smokey Rivers” Flanzer. “They were lightning in a bottle.”

“KROQ had so thoroughly permeated the air when I was a teenager that I did a cheerleading tryout routine to ‘Wham Rap,’ and we did aerobics class in PE to Sparks’s Angst in My Pants album on vinyl,” remembers Superior Music president Mara Kuge. 

“I was programming a college station at San Diego State [before XETRA (91X) went Alternative.] We would get thousands of requests from the dorms and the surrounding areas playing the same music as KROQ,” recalls podcast creator/coach Ed Hill.

At his Michigan State station, veteran programmer Haz Montana remembers grabbing Radio & Records to read about KROQ. “Every week there were photos of groups stopping by on promo [tours] at KROQ, and you felt like you knew Rick Carroll and all the DJs by how much they appeared in print.”

“A co-worker at ABC Radio in New York gave me airchecks of KROQ in early ’82 which blew our minds,” recalls Mike Schaefer. A few months later, the new-wave format returned to New York on suburban WLIR Long Island. (WPIX had made a short-lived attempt at the format in 1979-80, ending after an infamous chainsaw-in-the-studio incident involving the Plasmatics.)

I managed to hear WPIX in that era. I heard plenty of the Clash on the University of Michigan’s WCBN. I also heard those bands when I could manage to hear Radio Luxembourg’s UK service or Canadian Top 40. On those stations, Squeeze and XTC were the mainstream pop artists I understood them as and not so exotic. A friend sent me tape of KROQ, but he chose Ian Whitcomb’s eclectic specialty show, not the regular format.

These days, there’s a lot of early KROQ online. But by the time I finally heard KROQ, it was spring ’83 and a lot had changed. Eighteen months after the launch of MTV, the Album Rock stations that ruled contemporary music just a few years earlier were struggling with consultant Lee Abrams’s edict to play mostly new wave. CHR stations weren’t struggling to embrace new wave at all. My favorite station as a college senior, former AOR WABX Detroit, played it with a Top 40 presentation, punctuated by some of the R&B and harder rock that you’d expect in that market. 

By that time, KROQ had been influencing most of L.A. radio for a while. Another ROR reader, also named Mike Schaefer, was MD of KIIS from 1982-87. “I have always given KROQ credit for helping KIIS-FM become the No. 1 radio station in L.A. and achieve an Arbitron 10.0 12-plus share in 1984. Every time we added KROQ’s hits, our ratings went up, and our listeners loved hearing those songs in our Top 40 mix.

“Full credit goes to research director Gene Sandbloom, who brought KROQ’s hits to our music meetings each week. Gene eventually moved over to KROQ and had a hugely successful 25-year career there,” Schaefer adds.

KROQ’s buzz was such in early 1983 that copies had been popping up around the country, some (but not all) of them consulted by KROQ PD Rick Carroll. One of those was former AOR 91X, which was a month old when I arrived in Southern California for spring break 1983.

Throughout the years I’ve been taking First Listens to new radio stations, including the relaunch of 91X, roughly two years ago. Recently, I returned to my aircheck collection trying to recreate my first thoughts about legendary stations. The first was WHTZ (Z100) New York. This time I went back to my KROQ and 91X archives.

KROQ’s rotations were like Top 40. Its jocks talked over the intros. Its hits had been ending up on Los Angeles CHR, not just KIIS, for more than two years. But KROQ didn’t sound particularly mainstream when I heard it. The morning show, with Richard Blade, was full of running bits and in-jokes that were (appropriately) hard to figure out on first listen. 

The host I taped was Dusty Street, who had joined from AOR radio in 1979, just as KROQ was beginning its segue to Alternative, and still gave the station the feel of a rock station that just happened to play new wave. One bit you’ll hear on this 1983 aircheck involves a cover of Trio’s “Da Da Da, I Don’t Love You, You Don’t Love Me” by a local indie artist, Suzy Andrews, who was part of the four-way cover battle that spring over “Der Kommissar,” eventually won in the U.S. by After the Fire. Street played just a second of Andrews’s version on the air, then blew it up. 

Here’s KROQ on Feb. 18, 1983:

• Culture Club, “Time (Clock of the Heart)

• Iggy Pop, “Lust for Life”
• Call, “The Walls Came Down”
• Pete Townshend & Ronnie Lane, “My Baby Gives It Away”
• Ric Ocasek, “Something to Grab For”
• A Flock of Seagulls, “Committed”
• Duran Duran, “Hungry Like the Wolf”
• Siouxsie & Banshees, “Hong Kong Garden”
• Bad Manners, “Samson and Delilah”
• Adam Ant, “Friend or Foe”
• Suzy Andrews, “Da Da Da, I Don’t Love You, You Don’t Love Me” — for a few seconds
• Trees, “Shock of the New”
• Danse Society, “Somewhere”
• Psychedelic Furs, “Goodbye”

91X was easier for me to get a handle on. The presentation felt a little less hectic, perhaps a function of it being early days. There was a little more from hipper AOR bands — the Who, the Kinks, etc. Over the next few months, I would hear a lot of KROQ-inspired stations, including WIFI (I92) Philadelphia and KEGL Dallas. 91X was my favorite of the Class of ’83, in part because I was living in Southern California a few months later.

Here’s Max Tolkoff on 91X at 5 p.m., Feb. 23, 1983:

• Thompson Twins, “Love on Your Side”

• Pretenders, “Back on the Chain Gang”
• Blondie, “Will Anything Happen” (from “Parallel Lines”)
• Human League, “Mirror Man”
• Boomtown Rats, “Up All Night”
• Young Executives, “Original Sin”
• Translator, “When I Am with You”
• Duran Duran, “Hungry Like the Wolf”
• Toto Coelo, “I Eat Cannibals”
• Culture Club, “White Boys Can’t Control It”
• Rockpile, “Teacher Teacher”
• Blasters, “Border Radio”
• Trio, “Da Da Da, I Don’t Love You, You Don’t Love Me” — the international hit; not blown up on-air
• Cars, “Double Life”
• Men at Work, “Be Good Johnny”
• Oingo Boingo, “Violent Love”

I had another memorable road trip listen to KROQ nearly 20 years later. In May 2002, the Alternative and Active Rock formats were at their closest. There wasn’t much for first-generation Alternative fans at the time, but I remember appreciating how Sandbloom and then/current PD Kevin Weatherly were trying to play just enough of the early indie acts to make the station workable for both sets of listeners.

If your tastes run to tru.alt, this monitor may recall the bad old days of the format for you. I remember at the time thinking how much more I enjoyed KROQ than many of the other stations in the format at that moment. Two songs after this monitor, according to Mediabase, the station was playing “The Metro” by Berlin as part of a flashback lunch-type program. With the help of Mediabase, here’s KROQ just before 11 a.m., May 22, 2003. 

• Incubus, “Wish You Were Here”
• Korn, “Freak on a Leash”
• Weezer, “Hash Pipe”
• Linkin Park, “Papercut”
• Jane’s Addiction, “Jane Says”
• Vines, “Get Free”
• Limp Bizkit, “Re-Arranged”
• Chad Kroeger & Josey Scott, “Hero”
• Smashing Pumpkins, “Zero” — I don’t remember if the juxtaposition of the two was commented on at the time
• Rob Zombie, “Never Gonna Stop (The Red, Red Kroovy)”
• Violent Femmes, “Blister in the Sun”
• Staind, “Epiphany”
• Sublime, “Wrong Way”
• System of a Down, “Toxicity”
• Lit, “My Own Worst Enemy”

To hear KROQ now is to hear all the eras of the station’s legacy, including acts from both sides of the station’s early-2000s mix — Linkin Park and Weezer. These days, it’s the rockier acts that are being threaded back into the format, while you might hear “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” as a gold title, as one reader noted. Here’s KROQ at 5 p.m., on Jan. 31:

• Linkin Park, “Runaway”
• Depeche Mode, “Enjoy the Silence”
• Bad Omens, “Just Pretend”
• Weezer, “Island in the Sun”
• Ataris, “The Boys of Summer”
• Bakar, “Hell and Back”
• Foo Fighters, “The Pretender”
• Sublime, “What I Got”
• Shinedown, “A Symptom of Being Human”
• Gorillaz, “Clint Eastwood”
• Green Day, “Brain Stew/Jaded”
• M83, “Midnight City”