KTRU Leaving the Airwaves

The University of Houston Board of Regents voted 4-3 last week to purchase the transmitter and license of Rice University's KTRU 91.7 FM, effectively ending the station's 43-year run as a college radio trailblazer. KTRU will now become KUHC, a 24-hour classical music station, which frees up KUHF, UH's other radio station, to be a 24-hour NPR affiliate. KTRU will live on as an online streaming station, but that's a far cry from broadcasting with a 50,000-watt transmitter.

I first discovered KTRU as an impressionable 12-year-old listening to the S&M Show on Friday night. In 1980, KTRU was the only station in Houston where you were likely to hear anything to the left of "Whip It" on a regular basis. The first time my own music was played on the radio was on KTRU. Having worked as a DJ at UT Austin's student-run KTSB/KVRX in its cable radio infancy, I can authoritatively state that many of us considered KTRU's programming a benchmark to measure ourselves against.

Rice University's leadership shamefully engineered this $9.5 million deal in secret and made sure it went down in the dead of August to avoid the firestorm they knew would ensue if word got out while students were in town. Even so, a hastily assembled group called "Save KTRU" has formed in response.

Although the sale of KTRU to UH is still subject to FCC approval, it's unlikely the feds or anyone else can or will do anything to stop it. According to today's Houston Press, KUHF/KUHC is scheduled to take over KTRU's programming on Monday.

To some, the hue and cry over Rice's off-loading of KTRU may just seem like a bunch of music snobs whining about a station that played weird noise that most people don't listen to. But as someone whose student radio experience helped foster my career path as much as any class, I know there's way more at stake here. Former KTRU DJ Ray Shea sums it up as well as anyone:

KTRU was the driving force that would eventually propel me through six years and two college degrees. My best lifelong friends are all people I met at KTRU. And together we learned about music, about business, about media and promotions and organization and scheduling and budgeting. We learned how to deal with people, how to compromise and reach consensus. Sometimes we didn't learn as well as we should have, but goddammit, we learned.

And somewhere in all that craziness, all those late nights drinking beer and listening to records and arguing about music, we accidentally participated in a movement. A movement that would permanently change the face of the music industry forever.

Rice is short-sightedly gutting a learning laboratory that helped generations of students channel their passion for music and radio into viable skills for business and life. At $9.5 million, they're selling out cheap.

This is Only a Test

When I was growing up, long before I understood the threat of nuclear holocaust, I was profoundly disturbed any time a broadcaster in my area conducted a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

Having a mellow afternoon of Al Brodax-era Popeye cartoons callously interrupted by that godawful attention signal was pure nightmare fodder to my young mind. Even though the Emergency Broadcast System was replaced in 1997 by the Emergency Alert System - which has its own equally annoying attention signal - I still occasionally have nuclear war dreams in which EBS figures prominently.

When I was a college radio DJ at UT, I always hoped I'd one day get to conduct an EBS test myself as a symbolic triumph over childhood fear. Sadly, KTSB was only "broadcasting" on cable radio back then, so we didn't commit the time, training and expenses to do EBS tests. By the time the station took to the airwaves as KVRX, I'd long since graduated.

Occasionally, you'd hear a local EBS activation for a tornado warning or something like that, but the system was never activated for a national emergency. Except once. Sort of.

At 9:33 a.m. EST on Saturday, February 20, 1971, the EBS was accidentally activated because of an erroneous message from the National Warning Facility at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado. Interestingly, very few stations did what they were supposed to do if it had been an actual emergency. Many stations didn't get the activation messages and the vast majority of those that did ignored it. A contemporary Austin American-Statesman story about the goof reported that KVET didn't do an EBS activation because it occurred at approximately the same time as a regular weekly test of the system. Although the National Warning Facility sent a cancellation message at 9:59 a.m., that message didn't use the proper authentication code. A cancellation message with the correct code didn't go out until 10:13 a.m.

I've read several print accounts of this false alarm, but I've always wondered what it would've sounded like if I'd been listening to one of the stations that actually announced the false EBS activation back in 1971. Fortunately, an astute radiohead named Jim Cassell has preserved a recording of WOWO's broadcast out of Fort Wayne, Ind. from that morning. You can hear it - with the attention signal presumably (and mercifully) edited out - right here.

Although announcer Bob Sievers is very professional and careful not to unduly alarm the public, hearing this would've scared the oatmeal out of me. Needless to say, this would've been a much bigger deal had it occurred in the middle of a weekday instead of on Saturday morning. And the worst part of it is that the last record you would've heard before the missiles struck was "Doesn't Somebody Want to be Wanted" by the Partridge Family.

New Year's Day, Dallas, 1973

From Robert Wilonsky at the Dallas Observer's Unfair Park blog via Dallas radio know-it-all George Gimarc, here's a six-minute snippet of a January 1, 1973 aircheck tape from Dallas progressive rock station KAFM.

The DJ on duty epitomizes the laid-back prog attitude mocked by Bill Murray's "Mel Brewer" character on the 1975 National Lampoon album, Goodbye Pop. A little Boz Scaggs, something obscure from a cat named Jack Schnectman and a spot for the upcoming Traffic/Free concert at Tarrant County Convention Center makes this a super-mellow New Year's Day come-down.

Mayyors at SXSW 2009

One of the best sets I saw at SXSW this year was from Mayyors. No, they don't have a website or MySpace account.

Even so, this elusive Sacramento, Calif. supersonic spaz-punk quartet laid figurative waste to Spiro's in a manner that reminded me of when that space housed the Cavity in the early 90s. It was as if a hundred sun-warped hardcore singles were playing simultaneously at 78rpm on a shitty (but unimaginably loud) transistor radio. This was music you felt in your bones.

I reviewed Mayyors' take-no-prisoners squall here, but you can actually hear it for yourself at WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

Photo: Mayyors at SXSW 2009 from WFMU's Beware of the Blog

I gotta take a Nixon

Kliph Nesteroff posted this captioned 10-minute rant from disgraced former President Richard Nixon concerning Archie Bunker and homosexuality on WFMU's awesome Beware of the Blog yesterday.

It's clear early on that Tricky Dick does not approve of either All in the Family or homosexuality. Aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman can barely get a word in edgewise.

At the end, Nixon expresses faith in his administration due to its honesty and intelligence. Now that he's safely dead, it's sort of funny to hear what a raving lunatic the man could be when he got going.

BBC reveals post-nuclear broadcast script

BBC has released a chilling script written in the Seventies that was to be broadcast in the event of a nuclear attack on the U.K. The script tells citizens to stay indoors, avoid flushing the toilet and turn off the radio at the end of the broadcast to conserve battery power. For levity's sake, the Beeb's story on the script's release includes a reading of the script by Harry Shearer in the voice of Walter Cronkite (via MetaFilter).

Here in the U.S., Time reported in 1992 that Arthur Godfrey had pre-recorded morale-boosting announcements during the Eisenhower administration to be broadcast after a nuclear attack. The Cold War fanatics at CONELRAD have been trying to find this recording for years. While former CBS president Frank Stanton confirmed in a 2004 interview that the announcements were indeed recorded, the recording itself remains elusive to this day.

KOOP Damaged by Fire (Again)

Has any radio station in history been more beleaguered by fire than KOOP?

For the third time in two years, Austin’s eclectically-programmed community station has been knocked off the air by a fire. The station’s Airport Blvd. studios and offices sustained extensive damage in a Sunday morning blaze. An investigation into the cause is under way. KOOP executive director Kim McCarson expects the station to be broadcasting again in about two weeks.

KOOP’s previous home, a dilapidated building at the corner of 5th and San Jacinto that also housed Sweatbox Studios, was razed after a massive fire in February 2006, just weeks after incurring $600,000 in damages from a smaller fire.

The Other Johnny Walker

Reading about longtime DJ Johnny Walker getting fired from KLBJ-FM in last week’s Chron made me feel sad, old and very glad I never decided to pursue a career in radio.

Writer Kevin Brass’ description of the 52-year-old Walker’s cramped apartment, his collection of antique radios and his "long-divorced" status reads like something from the margin of a Coen Brothers script. Having to record seemingly live airbreaks into a computer sounds like the ultimate indignity of them all.

I once chafed at the classic rock kick assism embodied by stations like KLBJ, but I can't help feeling bittersweet at the knowledge that it's all about to go the way of the caboose.

Photo of Johnny Walker by John Anderson