This post will reflect somewhat of a change in course for this blog. First of all, I have to backtrack two years before I graduated from college. Second, I did some of my previous employers in two parts. My involvement in this radio station may span more than 10 parts, so there's almost no point in portioning it out. I'll just tell the stories as they happened. I've already mentioned a few things that happened at the station in previous posts, but there was so much that went on, it's going to be like the re-telling of my childhood, except that I didn't have to go to school.
With this post, I'll give a brief history of what happened at the station during the four years I was there. I've already written how I started working there when it had the call letters KCPK-FM and went by the name K108-FM. It was an Adult Contemporary station when I started. Two years before I started working there, it utilized an Album Oriented Rock format that had a lot of listeners there at ENMU, but couldn't produce enough revenue through advertising to keep going. Toward the end of the format, the station reportedly had only two regular advertisers: the two main record stores in Clovis. A friend of mine woke up one morning and heard a DJ say something like, "We're different now and we're better," and started playing softer music.
The station was still barely able to sustain itself, but was doing better than it was during the AOR format. When I came in, they played a lot of "oldies" mixed in with the current A/C hits. There was this huge shelf in the studio with hundreds of 45s that ranged from the 1950s to the 1980s. One of the nice things about having an A/C format is that the station played a lot of songs that didn't get played on KTQM-FM, which was our main competitor. I liked how we offered somewhat of an alternative with a wide range of styles of music. (Although, it was not "alternative" in the college sense.)
When I interviewed for the position in the summer of 1984, I was told that the station was undergoing a change in ownership. Crad, the Program Director who interviewed me, told me that there were going to be changes very soon and he didn't know what to expect. He warned that the new owner may bring in a new staff, so my employment there was not 100% secure.
The new owner was a man named Jid. He had a long and glorious history of working in radio. He was most noted for being the Music Director for KLIF-AM in Dallas, TX during its heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s. After that station was sold, he left and became the Program Director for KROQ-FM in Los Angeles for a period of time. After that, he bought an FM station in El Paso, TX at a time when it was the only major metropolitan area where most of the residents were still listening to AM radio. He came in with a lot of the techniques learned from KLIF and his station dominated the market. He got a huge return on his investment and sold the station. He planned to use the proceeds to conquer small market radio. His plan was to buy some struggling little station, turn it around, dominate the market like he did in El Paso, and use the profits to buy several other small market stations throughout the Southwest. His decision to start with KCPK in Clovis would turn out the be the biggest mistake of his life.
I will go into more detail about the rise and fall of KZZO-FM (also known as "The Zoo") during the following series of posts. In short, we were not able to generate the advertising revenue needed for Jid to realize his goals. A lot of it had to do with the timing of when he took over the station, which was something he had no control of. I had mentioned earlier about the first Arbitron report that came out after the switch. The ratings had been recorded before we changed format, but the new call letters were listed in the report. KTQM was able to use that report to show advertisers that, despite all the hype, more people were listening to them and there wasn't a thing we could do about it.
I was the only person on the staff from the moment that the station became "The Zoo" to the point that Jid washed his hands of the whole experience and handed control over to his silent partners.
The first time I met Jid was the night we were going to switch from K108FM to The Zoo. I had been told to attend this meeting or I wasn't going to get to work during the weekend. Jid was in his early 40s. He told us about how we were going to change formats at midnight that night and all the exciting things we were going to do. He said that we would sound like a large market station in a small market. He played these amazingly produced promos that sounded nothing like what had been heard in the Clovis/Portales area, or even Albuquerque, for that matter. He also played our first contest promo, which instructed listeners to write "The Zoo 108" 108 times on a piece of paper and carry it around with them at all times. At some point, someone may come up to them and ask, "What's your favorite radio station?" If they answered "The Zoo," they would get $20. If they had that piece of paper with them, they would get $1000! ONE-THOUSAND FREAKING DOLLARS!
Yeah, that did sound rather excessive, but it's the same thing Jid did in El Paso and that was what rocketed his station to #1 in the Arbitron ratings. All of us DJs looked at each other. We were all wondering how we were going to be able to do this. But Jid exhibited enough confidence that we just ran with it without actually questioning it.
Usually, I worked at midnight on Friday nights. I nervously asked Jid if I was going to be working that night. He said I wasn't. It was going to be Deed, who worked the overnight shift on weekdays. After the meeting, I went home and listened to the station beginning at 11:30pm. Right before midnight, Chid, a part-timer who worked Friday nights, announced that Deed was coming up next and that she had a little surprise. The new top of the hour ID announcing Deed came. Deed played the first song, opened her mic and started laughing. She wasn't able to get through the spiel that she was supposed to deliver and turned off her mic after a few seconds. I'm certain that Jid, Crad, Chid and any number of the other staff members were in the studio at the time this happened. I know that if I had done that, I would have been fired on the spot. I'm certain that the only reason Jid kept her on was because she was the only woman on the air staff and he had paid for these elaborately produced introductions by an extremely well-known announcer he used to work with in Dallas before he became big-time.
I have to admit I thought it was going to take a few months for our station to catch on and even longer for someone to win that $1000, but I was wrong. Even after that shaky start, everybody was buzzing about our station. Jid actually succeeded in creating excitement out of what he probably considered a hicktown staff. I have a feeling that he couldn't get any of the pros he knew to come to Clovis, so he had to make do with what he had.
One of the changes I noticed during my first shift was that Jid had gotten rid of that shelf with all the 45s. We were down to about 150 45s, with nothing from the 1950s or 1960s. There were very few songs from the 1970s. Jid said more would be added, but our library of older material would never be as massive as it was for K108FM. I really missed playing a lot of those older songs.
A couple of weeks later, Jid and the "J Team," our morning personalities, went to Towne Crier Records in Clovis. A few people said they listened to The Zoo, but didn't have it written down 108 times. Then, this one woman approached them and said they should ask someone older. They then asked her and she had the piece of paper. That woman and her family went on to win several more of our contests, but never got the $1000 again.
A couple of weeks later, they drove The Zoo van down to Portales. Everybody got excited when they saw the van and were holding up their pieces of paper. I had come up to Clovis that day for a meeting at the station and had to wait for Jid and everyone else to get back from Portales. I remember Jid coming out of the van and holding the cassette tape with the $1000 winner high in his hand. I didn't realize this until later, but I guess they found out after the meeting that they didn't record anything on that tape. This forced Jid to have to go out and find another $1000 winner the next day so they could have something to put in a promo.
For a few months after that, we put a bit of a freeze on the money contest. Then, we got our bumper stickers in and connected those to the $1000 prize. A few people won. This was all great and everyone was listening to us. But after the Arbitron ratings goofed everything up, we didn't give away any more money for a long time. People kept calling the station asking when we were going to give away more money. We had to keep saying, "Soon, keep listening," but all of the air staff lost confidence after that.
In order to keep the station afloat, Jid brought in a partner. This was Mr. W. He was a very large man and had a bullhorn voice. He was a very successful accountant from Los Angeles. He had a few celebrity clients. He left that business behind so that he could concentrate on helping run the station and became a morning air personality. Jid depended on Mr. W to provide new funding for the station so we could fix a few things. A short time after Mr. W came on board, our signal went out. It turned out we had our engineer remove the air filters at the transmitter and clean them. Somehow, he forgot to put them back. The transmitter had been receiving unfiltered air for more than a year and finally gave out. It cost $10,000 to fix. If it hadn't been for the injection of fresh money from Mr. W, we would have been off the air indefinitely.
Within one year, Mr. W was flat broke. As he had given up his accounting practice, he had no revenue. Mr. W was fired and bought out by the silent partner investors because he had given the station a bad name. Mr. W was gay, and while he never mentioned it on the air, he had no problem letting everybody he met know about it. He never encountered any problems while living in Los Angeles and vowed never to be ashamed of his sexual orientation. However, before he was fired, he admitted that if he'd known how much gay people were not really accepted in Clovis, he wouldn't have been so open about it with local businesses and advertisers.
Very soon after Mr. W left, Jid stopped all his involvement in the station and let the silent partners take over. A meeting was held in which they told us we could no longer refer to ourselves as "The Zoo." We also could not refer to ourselves as being 108 on the radio dial. We had to call ourselves KZZO 107.5 FM. The problem with this was that it killed our jingle package. Almost every single one used "The Zoo" or "108" in the lyrics. There were maybe two jingles that we were able to continue using. It was frustrating.
It's interesting, because Jid had left KLIF after the station was sold and he could see things going downhill. I did the same thing because I knew that things were never going to be like they were before. After Jid left, we no longer had any structure and too many people on staff who had no clear vision of what we were trying to accomplish.
After KZZO, Jid went to work for a jingle company in Dallas. This was the same company he purchased our jingle package from. He continued to work for them selling packages to radio stations across the country. He died of brain cancer in 1993. I found out about two years after it happened. It was Daz who told me.
I don't know what happened to Mr. W, but one day, I was working in the box office of the Mayan Theatre in Denver. During rush hour traffic, I could have sworn I saw someone who looked just like him in a car stopped at a light on the corner. I used the PA system to call out to him, but I guess it wasn't him. He never turned his head. Other than that, I have no idea what happened to him.
So, this is a preview of sorts of what's to come over the next few weeks. It was a rollercoaster ride working at the station, and for me, there were more downs than there were ups. Stay tuned.
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