Every Station Tells a Story: An Odd Encounter with a Recent Sign-Off

To be clear, I do not expect anybody to leave money-draining AMs on the air just because I might be sentimental about them. I would rather see owners dedicate resources to keeping radio people employed, promoting their stations, reducing spotloads, or otherwise improving the streaming experience. I’d rather see every extant station be the best advertisement for radio. I wish that cutting bait on some AMs was actually allowing owners to do this.

Besides, I’m sentimental about a lot of radio stations, not all of which were industry names in their heyday. I don’t write about all of them. I probably should have written about the original CKLG (LG73) Vancouver’s frequency going dark, but I felt the same twinge about CHML Hamilton, Ontario, a full-service AC less known to the industry, but no less of a behemoth when I listened to it from four states and a province away growing up. 

The AM stations that are shut down rankle in the aggregate, particularly because they seem to come on the heels of other dismaying industry news — retirements; passings or illnesses of friends or radio legends; jobs that aren’t filled but added to another market manager’s existing duties. Losing AMs that were providing minimal service doesn’t hit me nearly as hard as the still-vital FMs (KLTY Dallas or KRTY San Jose) that lose their homes to K-Love or other owners, even though most of those continue to serve the market in another way. 

But last week’s sign-off of 20 underperforming stations by Cumulus and Townsquare, not all of them AMs, did trigger some interesting memories. One of those stations was the current KLIK Jefferson City, Mo., a station that I had unlikely knowledge of in my early radio geekdom, although until now, I had never actually heard it. 

The KLIK I knew is not exactly going away, just the station on 1240 AM that now bears its call letters due to a format swap. The 950 AM that was KLIK when I knew it is now Zimmer’s N/T KWOS with an FM translator on 104.5. KLIK’s Top 40 format of the ’70s and early ’80s effectively  moved to FM a few years later — the happiest possible ending for an AM top 40 of that era — and is now the station that we know as Zimmer’s heritage CHR  KTXY (Y107), currently tied for No. 3 in nearby Columbia, Mo., with a 6.9 share.

How I know about KLIK when it was Live 95 in the late ’70s/early ’80s might embarrass anybody who is not the author of this column. As a teenage radio-station-survey collector, I had several friends who managed the (long-defunct) radio chart at the (more recently defunct) Broadcasting Magazine. They passed me playlists from reporters and would-be reporters around the country. One of those was KLIK. 

KLIK also reported to The Gavin Report, but not Billboard or Radio & Records, meaning that it wasn’t much on the industry’s radar. The first MD of the station when I began seeing its playlists was Matt Hudson, who went on to prominence in Madison, Wis., and then as an industry researcher. The second MD was Forrest “Chip” Mosley, who added a weekly open letter to record reps. Those are why I remembered KLIK.

As was the case with a small-market station of the time, Mosley’s notes are often about the need for record service. But there was also KLIK’s “All-Time Live 950,” which Mosley hand-tabulated from national charts and radio-station surveys, as well as extensive callout to his own market with calls he made himself! That one ended up getting written up in R&R. Another week, in response to an R&R article, Mosley promised that KLIK would never do “paper adds,” although only R&R and perhaps Billboard reporters were under any real pressure to do so. There’s also a bringback. In 1980, KLIK readded “Magic Man” by Heart as a current.

Because of the Live 95 missives, I kept track of Mosley throughout his career. I next remember seeing him the trades in the way that nobody would choose, sharing news of his battle with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and ending up as MD at WFMI Lexington, Ky., where he was undergoing treatment. After that, Mosley had mostly a medium-market “U-Haul career” — his words — and eventually became a GM for Cromwell’s Central Illinois markets. I didn’t know, until I asked today, that by the time Mosley came back to KLIK in his hometown, he had already worked at legendary Top 40s WHB Kansas City and KSLQ St. Louis, as well as syndicated programmer Century 21.

Mosley has already been in these pages for his streaming retirement project, Jukebox 92.7, which plays a wide variety of oldies — it just went from “Martian Hop” by the Ran-Dells to “Living It Up (Friday Night)” by Bell & James. A year ago, “WEPQ” added jingles. I also didn’t quite get the depth of his oldies fandom until re-reading the Top 950 story, but there were ample clues throughout.

I also didn’t really know anything about KLIK’s history in the market. The FM Top 40 in Jefferson City was KJMO, best known as the home of eventual KIIS Los Angeles MD Mike Schaefer. KWOS and KLIK were AM competitors that both had some Top 40 programming. At various times during the day, KLIK also had MOR, Swap Shop, and news blocks, something that you wouldn’t have known from seeing those playlists. 

I had also never heard KLIK until yesterday. It’s rare that radio friends go that deep or far back on old airchecks. Sometimes they’re buried in storage (or, in Mosley’s case, lost in a basement flood). Mosley didn’t have any tape of himself on Live 95, but he did have one of then-traffic director Art Morris filling in for him in July 1980, which is included below. 

For an station in the twilight of AM’s Top 40 era, the KLIK aircheck was actually pretty good. Like many of its contemporaries, KLIK doesn’t have jingles and is minimally produced. It’s also playing the hits of July 1980, not a high-water mark for a format descending into yacht rock, but Morris’s energy is good (especially for that time), and there are some left-field oldies (which were all jock picks at KLIK). If you are cynical about whether radio history was all that special, hearing this audio probably won’t change your mind. If you are dismayed by today’s radio, it sounds like there’s much more going on here.

AM 950 wasn’t one of the Jefferson City stations affected by the recent signoffs, but Mosley had worked in some way at both of those that were, including KJMO, now a syndicated Oldies FM. (His career had started at the original KWOS.) In a Facebook posting, Mosley noted that all three stations were successful under local ownership–albeit in a much different time, to be fair

As stated at the outset, this column isn’t a brief on behalf of the syndicated N/T AM that bore the KLIK calls, although I’m surprised by a Classic Hits FM going away. (Several of the commenters on the original story are equally hard-nosed.) But at this moment, when the industry is again lobbying in favor of keeping AM on car radios, it does highlight the problem of keeping the AM band populated with a variety of content. (Why we are not pushing “AM/FM for Every Car” at a time when both bands are fighting for their place on the dashboard is another question.)

Saluting a 45-year-old radio station likely unknown to you at this length is deep geekery, but also a reminder that every station buried in the recent litany of signoffs launched careers, meant something to its market, and is being mourned by somebody now. It’s also a reminder that you don’t know who’s out there that you might run across later. I believe that to still be true, even in our radically altered business.