Radio Daze and KFAT

Turn up your radio 

And let me hear the song

Switch on your electric light

                                            -- Van Morrison

 

Before YouTube and MTV, there was radio. My first radio was a transistor, the size of package of cigarettes. I earned it by selling subscriptions to the newspaper I delivered in a canvas bag slung over my shoulders. My transistor radio was bright orange. I carried it with me during my route so that I could tune in Chuck Berry and Fats Domino while I traipsed through the neighborhood tossing papers on porches. But the trouble was, the signal kept dying and I rarely heard an entire song.

Then there was the clock radio next to my bed. I woke up and went to sleep by it -- sometimes listening to a Dodger game. But most of the time it was tuned to KFWB, KRLA or KHG, all AM, all rock n roll. Rock music in those days included R & B, bubble gum, popular, surf, Motown, some folk even a tad of jazz, like "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck. There were no music categories. The songs were mixed together by the DJs.

Then came FM radio, stereo music transmitted over the airwaves. Wow! In early 1970 we were living in San Jose. The hippest rock station came broadcast from San Francisco, KSAN. It was a talisman that kept you informed as well as entertained by disc jockeys with clever names like Dusty Street and an acerbic news reporter named Travus T. Hipp.

The airwaves slowly became more predictable. These were commercial stations. FM radio also introduced publicly supported programing including PBS which offered a news magazine format that helped attract listeners.

This story, however, is about a commercial radio station that suddenly appeared during the mid-Seventies and broke all the "rules" during a time when rules were becoming the radio norm. Music categories had developed and stations were narrowing their playlists, to the point of near automation. KSAN eventually became a country music station. Out of San Francisco!

Enter Lorenzo Milam and Jeremy Lansman, a couple of off-beat "geniuses" who saw opportunity buying and selling radio stations. Small stations with weak broadcast signals that couldn't compete with the big dawgs were going up for sale.

One such radio station was KSND in Gilroy, California. Where and what is Gilroy? Good question. You may have heard of the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Its existence is also part of the story of this unique radio station, renamed KFAT by Lansman and his crew. Their station ID became, "This is K-F-A-T Gilroy, Garlic Capital of the World."

No more than a fraction of an inch away from KSAN on the radio dial, KFAT radio began broadcasting a country-style of music popular in West Texas with artists like Willie Nelson and Rodney Crowell, Waylon Jennings and Delbert McClinton. You might hear a guy named Kris Kristoferson and a gal named Emmylou Harris back-to-back, followed by a racy commercial for an adult bookstore. You knew right away that the horny-sounding commercial was not your typical slick radio ad.

I was employed as entertainment editor for a 65-year-old daily legal newspaper, the San Jose Post-Record (which is still being published). I had lots of leeway regarding my choice of stories, and lots of space to fill. I contacted KFAT radio in Gilroy, about 20 minutes south of San Jose, believing this would be an interesting piece. It was. It was also disjointed and strange, reflecting what I found out when I visited the station in a funky upstairs "closet" in Gilroy and later met Jeremy Lansman in tony downtown Los Gatos.

"You can buy a radio station and sell it for a nice profit," he told me when I asked him about his motivation or purpose behind KFAT. He was the most unlikely businessman you could imagine, from his messed up hair to his bare feet. A very un-Los Gatos look.

The type of music KFAT played was termed "progressive country," by his wife Laura Ellen. It was a hodge podge that included old, little-heard records from the original low-wattage Gilroy station. KFAT also introduced listeners to story-teller Utah Philips, whose "Moose Turd Pie" became the most requested "song" on KFAT, ever. 

The real story of KFAT radio is now in book form -- "Fat Chance" -- authored by Gilbert Klein, who was a member of the improbable-yet-lovable KFAT crew. Klein developed his own unique program called "Chewing the Fat." He's a wonderful wordsmith and he's done a magnificent job. "Fat Chance" was published in 2016.

Fat-heads, or Fatties, will want to peruse this nearly 600-page volume of goodies about the station and its characters (includes photos!). I learned that Lansman was an electronics wizard who one night hooked up a transmitter on the highest peak in the Santa Cruz Mountain range, Loma Prieta, which enabled the KFAT signal to reach the entire Bay Area and beyond from podunk Gilroy. It became the most popular radio station in Santa Cruz County and drew a wide audience from the surrounding region.

If you're interested, read the book. Oh, Lansman paid $150,000 for the little station that sold about five years later for more than $3 million! 

Last Wave:

KFAT introduced a new music genre to radio, known as Americana. Although the station is now defunct, its boot prints have been filled by KPIG radio with much of the same off-beat humor and music. And KPIG relies on real disc jockeys, including one or two from those Fat Days of yesteryear.