And welcome back to 35,000 watts, the podcast. My name is Michael Millard. I’m here with Scott Mobley and Keith Porterfield. We are three ex college radio DJs and executive staffers. And today, we are really delving into that even more than usual.
We usually talk a lot more about music and college radio, in college college radio’s influence on music and artists that got their start on college radio. This time, we’re actually gonna talk more about our personal experiences, with college radio. This is our our final episode of season two, and I’ll just go ahead and call myself out. In in classic college radio fashion, we actually recorded this episode a lot about six months ago for the end of season one. And as as befitting, an episode about college radio, I completely muff the audio and ruined the entire interview and and, wasn’t able to put the episode together.
So, flashing back to my my years in college radio trying to figure out the analog tape machine and learning how to edit on analog tape, it was it was something akin to that. So so, yeah, we’re actually kinda redoing the episode, but we we really loved how it came out. We enjoy talking about our personal experiences, so we’re gonna we’re gonna do it again. This is this will be new for you guys out there, but, a little bit of a redo for us. But I think we decided it was, like, six months ago that we recorded.
We really don’t remember exactly everything we said and and all that. So it should be hopefully fun and fresh. And so 35,000 watts, the story of college radio is a documentary film that I made about, not necessarily about my experience with college radio, but it was certainly informed by my experience at KTXT, Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas, which is where all three of us worked and and met, at the radio station. And the film kinda delves into my personal story, so I’m I’m gonna be relatively brief with my experience. But I I discovered KTXT when I was a junior in high school, and, I literally tried to start my car one one night, and the battery had died.
And when I got jump started, the radio reset to 88.1 because that’s, like, the very first, station on the digital dial. And I was listening to and I will I will cop to the fact that in the film, I kinda mentioned, a Nirvana song as being kind of the entree into KTXT. It was really Nine Inch Nails Sin was actually the first song that I ever heard on on KTXT. A show called Shockwaves was on. It was a late night Friday Friday night show that was, like, club music and dance music.
And I was kinda getting into that a little bit already. I was getting into techno, and a friend had introduced me to, like, Nine Inch Nails, actually, relatively recently. And New Order was another band that I was just getting familiar with. So when I was hearing this music on on the radio, I was I was digging it, and I was really liking it. And it took me probably ten or fifteen minutes before I was like, this is not the top 40 station.
Like, I could definitely tell that this was something new, and I realized what had happened. And that was it. Like, I was kinda hooked on on listening to eighty eight point one a lot more. I was I will say I didn’t just immediately, you know, throw away all my albums and and change my radio presets and give up on the music I was listening to. It was definitely a process, but that was when I understood what college radio was and figured out that Texas Tech had a college station, and and I started listening to it more in high school.
And then when I got to Texas Tech, I didn’t immediately go to the station, but halfway through my freshman year, I was living in the dorms, and a a friend of mine knew I was really into radio because I was definitely a radio geek, and I talked about radio all the time. And, he was like, you know, I I listen to KTXT, and I I think they, like, they look for DJs and they need DJs and you should go down there and see. And that isn’t exactly how KTX T worked. Like, you actually kinda had to be there at the beginning of the semester and and be part of the meeting to get a to get on the air. But, the semester had already started and I actually worked up the courage to just walk into the station.
And I introduced myself to the first person I saw who happened to be Chad Kopeck, who was the operations director at the station and is in the film and is a super nice guy. And I I think he kinda took pity on me, and he could tell that I was like a fellow radio nerd and let me sign up and and put me on the sub list at the very bottom. And, you know, that was kinda how you broke into to KTXT was being a substitute DJ where they would call you at the worst possible time and the worst possible hour, and and you’d have to go up and do a shift. And if you didn’t screw it up and ingratiated yourself to the right people, you might be able to get more shifts and and maybe even, you know, eventually get a permanent shift. And I didn’t get called, initially, and I think it was maybe probably about six weeks after that, the women’s basketball team at Texas Tech won the national championship.
And after they won the national championship, they had scheduled this really big rally at the at the football stadium. So, you know, it was like 40 or 50,000 people were gonna go and celebrate the women’s national basketball championship. And, of course, everybody wanted to be there, and nobody wanted to DJ during that particular time. And so that was when I got my my very first call to come in and substitute. I was more than happy to miss I would have missed almost anything that that had been going on that day so I could go and do a shift to a KTX T.
And so I got, like, the quick, here’s how this all works. And I think I did a a stop set and they were like, okay. Yeah. You got it. And they went off to go to the the celebration.
So I was DJing for maybe three people because everybody was, you know, at this big women’s national basketball championship thing. So I guess I I probably had it easy in that I I had a inkling that there weren’t maybe that many people listening for my first shift. But, man, I I was hooked. I enjoyed every minute of it. It went by so fast.
I couldn’t believe that three hours went by. It felt like ten minutes. And, yeah, I still remember some of the music I played that day. I absolutely remember, like, the smell of the station and and being nervous and my fingers shaking when I was trying to put the needle on the record for the first time. And just, you know, doing the film helped me kinda go back and and remember that.
And hopefully, you guys had, like, a similar experience with, watching the film. And then maybe now that we’re doing the podcast, kinda like going back, it’s about roughly thirty years or so for all of us, you know, to look back on those times. And, I mean, you know, I I I think we’ll talk about this, and I’ll I’ll let you guys talk about this more. But for me, once I got over the initial excitement of just being on the air and playing music for people and being a DJ, the thing that I got out of KTXT was meeting the people. And, like, here was the, like, a station full of people.
There were probably what, 30 ish, like permanent DJs, like 10 executive staffers, and then maybe 20 or 30 substitutes. So there was, you know, let’s say 50 people or so that were orbiting around the station who were all for the most part, to a person, men and women, like, super into the music, super into radio, who were kinda serious about about doing radio and wanted it to be good and wanted it to not suck and wanted people to listen to the station. So it wasn’t just that they loved music and that we had that shared experience, but also that we actually tried really hard, I think, for the most part, all of us, to not suck, you know, to be to be good, to to be on the air and sound good and not make mistakes. And I I I think that made it more exciting for me than if it had just been like a half assed, like, I just go up there and do whatever. And, you know, nobody’s listening because that wasn’t the case.
People were listening and KTXT was an influence in Lubbock because we predated alternative music really, you know, leaking over to, like, the classic rock station, and we never really had a commercial alternative station in Lubbock. So we were the source for a lot of music that was coming out, and we were there at a time when it was becoming so big that, of course, we had a lot of listeners. And so I really appreciated the fact that not only was I getting to hang out with people that, had the same interest as in me and not only was I able to do this thing that I had wanted to do for years and years and years, it was really cool that people wanted it to be a successful station and a a station that people wanted to listen to and and that people took it serious because that just made it kinda more fun for me. But, yeah, that’s kind of a quick a quick overview of my story. I think you guy I wanna give you guys time to go into more depth because, again, I I I talk a lot about my experience in the film.
So I I know that I met both of you there. I think I met Scott. I met you first, because I I think you were doing a power lunch, and I think I came in after you. You had been there for a year or two maybe already. But I was I remember you had won an award already for being, like, one of the the best announcer at KGXT, and I was really watching you really closely.
I would come in a little early and, like, be in the booth, and so that was how we met. And, yeah. I’m kinda curious, like, what your story was before that. Like, before I met you, kinda what your how you got into the station and how you felt about it. So I started there in the summer of ninety two.
I remember sort of being peripherally aware of KTXT, but I didn’t know much about it. What happened to me was that I this was, you know, between my third and fourth year at Texas Tech. I, went there for five and a half years, so I don’t think the story gets shorter. But this was summer ninety two between my third and fourth year there. I had just taken my first class in radio with doctor Kinghorn, who was the faculty advisor for KTXT.
And he told me, we have a radio station here on campus. You should go put your name in the hat and see if you can get on there. It’s a lot of fun. Blah blah blah. He kind of sent me that way.
And he told me, you should go in the summer. He goes, if you’re gonna be in in here in the summer, go in the summer because there’s less people vying for spots. And later on down the road, and I’ll get to this, but the other one down the road, I was the guy who did that hiring. I was I was the operations manager for, I I think, only half a year, but I was the guy that made those decisions, who goes on the sub list, who gets what shift, whatever. What people maybe don’t realize about that is that once you got in at KTXT, you really weren’t getting out unless you just did something egregious.
You know? There was no, you know, well, this guy’s not that great, so we’re gonna boot him out and bring this new guy in. Basically, once you got a spot, you had a spot. You know? Yeah.
And so when you’re talking about getting on there, like you said, I think there were probably roughly 40 to 50 spots, maybe, you know, on the air. 40 is probably a good number. And 35 of those were already taken by people who were there the semester before. So getting in the door was nothing more than a brush of luck. It’s really all it is.
I would love to think that somebody said something to somebody, and somebody said I should be on there, and somebody said, you know, I don’t think any of that happened. I think they reached into a hat and pulled out a name, and it happened to be mine. And I think about how much of my life was affected by the moment someone pulled that name out of that hat. You know? It was I made a career out of this for a long time and loved it, and I really found my place there.
So I I go in the summer of ninety two. I get the call that I’ve been given a shift. My shift was, I wanna say, six to 9AM on Saturday mornings. It was if it wasn’t bad, it was seven to ten. It was early in the morning on Saturday.
And so I go for my first shift. James Faust, who’s in your film, meets me there. He gives me kind of a runaround. The first hour, we just play music. No talking.
No messing with the microphone. I mean, we just play music. And then we get to the end of the hour, and we had a little dead spot. And he said, okay. When this happens, you get to pick a song.
I this may or may not be true, but in my head, I’ve always thought it was some kind of test. You know? What what song is he gonna pick? You know? And I picked the song Ripple by Jane’s Addiction, which is a cover of a Grateful Dead tune.
And got a nice day. He said, okay. That’s a good one. He plays as when that song’s over, do your top of the hour, do your announcement, whatever. I turn on the mic.
I do that. I turn off the mic, and James says, alright. I’m out. And he left. And I had two more hours to do with just the knowledge that I had at that point.
It was nerve wracking. It was terrifying, and I still left that day going, I want to do this. What whatever this is, I wanna do it. I had a blast. And so that’s that was my start at KTXT.
Now I, in the short two years I was there, moved up the ladder pretty quickly. I never really pursued, like, being the station manager or anything else because I really wasn’t my interest. I never really had an interest in the management part of radio. I was more interested in talking into a microphone and being on the air, and that’s what I was doing. But after I had been there I think when the fall started so that summer, I did that shift.
And then when the fall started, I was given a power lunch, like you said, which was this daily request show we had around lunchtime. And then after that, I was offered a show called the weekend assault where the station manager and operations manager at that time, would go out to a bar or restaurant or something and hang out and do kind of a remote thing. And I was the guy in the studio that was playing music and, you know, doing their their phone ins and all that kind of stuff. That was a fun show. I I don’t think it it ever got as popular as maybe we wanted it to get, but it was but it was fun to do.
It was fun to execute. And every once in a while, they let me out of the cage and let me go out and be the guy in the bar. That was fun. So, like you said, at the end of that year, I won the award for most promising broadcaster. And then the next year, because of some shifts in the management, some people came and went and whatever, and there was a little controversy and stuff there.
But I was asked to be the operations manager for the spring that year. That’s, you know, that’s where I get this thing about pulling names out of a hat because that’s what I did. I we got 60 applications. We had 10 spots, and I randomly picked the people to get them. I did not know their knew who they were.
I did not know anything about them. They weren’t auditioned. I just put them on the air, and, you know, I was the guy that trained them and all that stuff. And so that was that was fun. I did air checks with people and things like that.
I enjoyed that part of job. The next big thing that happened to me there was Coca Cola was hiring college radio DJs to go down to South Padre Island and DJ on the beach for this volleyball tournament and basketball tournament they were having. This was offered to the station manager and operations manager at the time, and I cannot tell you why. I don’t even wanna know why, I think, but they didn’t wanna go. And so they offered it to me, this guy who had been there for maybe eight months at the time and, you know, whatever.
But they said, you can do this if you want to. So I flew down to South Padre Island. I DJ’d on the beach every day for four hours during spring break. They gave me an envelope full of cash and a two bedroom suite at the Radisson there on South Padre and let 20 year old me go nuts. And it was a good time.
So the end of that year, I won the outstanding broadcaster award. And so, you know, two years at that station, I, you know, kind of rocketed to success. I really enjoyed what I did there. And in that short time, the the impact made on me by working at that station is undeniable and a huge part of who I am and what I became afterwards and all that stuff. And it all came down to somebody reaching into the hat and pulling my name out.
And so I am thankful to the universe for that, whoever guided their hand to my name. And, you know, that is a part of my life that I I cherish above almost any other. And it it really is a big, big part of who I am. So I have KTXT to thank for that and and kind of the point of all these stories being that I really kinda fell backwards into all of it. You know?
I I got hired on a on a stroke of luck. I moved up the ladder on a stroke of luck. I went to South Padre Island on a stroke of luck. It was all it was all just kind of falling into place for me in a way that it probably didn’t for anybody else. I was very, very, very lucky and, was happy to be there.
But that’s that’s my story of of KTXD, one of the biggest chapters of my life. Yeah. When I when I was trying to decide what I wanted to do when I knew I wanted to make a documentary film, and I had this vision of, like, a door. Everybody at some point in their life walks through a door, like, a literal physical door. And once you walk through that door, your life is never the same after that moment.
And for me, that door was the door to the Journalism Building at KGXD. The I walked through that door. I met Chad Kopec, and every single thing that happened in my life after that, the friends I hung out with, the jobs that I had, what I wanted to do with my life, like, literally, you know, a life changing thing. It it seems that that’s a pretty common thing. Like, so many people’s lives, it wasn’t just like, oh, yeah.
I did this thing in college, and that was all. Like, no. They have a hundred stories. They talk about all the ways that that made their life, you know, the friends they still have, their job, their career. Even if they didn’t go into broadcasting, it still maybe made an impact on what they ended up doing in their life.
So I find that I found that pretty fascinating while we were interviewing people for the film, just how big of an impact that it had on on me, on other people, and and it seems like almost everybody who did it. And I and so, you know, for me, I don’t know if it was someone pulling a name out of a hat so much as me just pestering the hell out of everybody all the time to get on there. Like, I was I just lived at the station constantly once I got my foot in the door. So, for me, it may have been a little bit of luck and a little bit of just being annoying to the point where they’re like, alright, we gotta give this guy a shit. I think that was my next move.
If I hadn’t gotten on there, I was just gonna go hang out. And, you know, and and if I was if I had made the sub list, I was gonna go hang out and tell people, hey. If you need a sub, I’m your guy. You know, I was gonna I was gonna sell that. I just ended up not having to do it.
You know? I just got unlucky. And I’m I’m totally fine admitting it. It was luck, because it was. But I think once I got in that door, I I certainly I certainly put in the work and time to prove to them that that I deserved to be there and and wanted to be there and and could excel at it.
And that’s probably responsible for most of those other moves I I mentioned. But, you know, it still was a matter of, you know, this guy quit or this guy had to leave or this guy, you know, this guy didn’t wanna go to South Padre Island and get handed $500 a day. Don’t ask me why. And I kinda got to do all those things because of that, you know, and I I do consider it a little bit of a stroke of luck. But, yeah, I definitely had I not gotten in on that first try, I would have been living at that station until somebody let me talk into a microphone, and I just didn’t have to do that.
And and you’re right. I really think you know, I mentioned this in another episode that there was a moment there, a couple of moments actually, where I finally, after being at tech for three years, and I had friends and I had, you know, I had a job. I I I had lots of going on. That was the moment where I found my gang. That was the moment where I found the group of people that were interested in the same things I was and going down the same path I was and been pursuing the the same things that I was.
I hadn’t met them before I got to Gate DXT. And once I did, I just I embraced it with both arms and and enjoyed the ride. So I annoyed myself right into an executive staff position, which eventually became a station manager position. And, one of the first things you have to do as a station manager is is choose your executive staff. And, I had started putting names together, and I had someone in mind for music director.
And it was kind of almost a done deal, but I wanted to go through the interview process. But you, Scott, actually, were like, hey. I got this I have a friend who’s who I think really could do this job, and you introduced me to someone who was on this very podcast by the name of Keith Porterfield. Yeah. Well, you guys you mentioned the different ways you got there.
Scott, you kinda lucked into it. Michael, you said you you kinda pestered your way into it. I kind of a hybrid of that because when I got involved with radio station, you know, Scott and I were already friends, and so you were already there. You had you had already been doing shifts. I don’t know that you were the exec staff yet.
I’m not sure about the timing of that. But So not that I necessarily had an in, but I did know somebody there already. And so for me, it all started in the fall of ninety three. I went the to the the meeting at the beginning of the of the semester, ended up getting on the sub list. I didn’t get a a shift right off the bat.
And I went through most of that semester without ever receiving a call. It was late in the semester before I finally got a call. At that point, I had I had gone to the meeting and I had saw had signed up. I had more of a set foot in the studio at that point. So I showed up on the day, you know, someone finally called me for a a shift.
It was the shift after a power launch. So I think it was like three to six in the afternoon. And I showed up just sight unseen. I had never even stepped foot in the booth at that point. I was just, I’m here.
Let’s do this thing. The guy that was on the shift before me, you know, was able to show me a couple of things, but he had to get out of there. I guess he had class or something. Who knows? And so I’m just kind of sitting there like, I you know, I’m supposedly about to be on the radio, and I don’t have thing you know, don’t know a thing on about what’s going on here.
Luckily, there were some, you know, some of the exec staff there at the time, James Faust being one of them who’s also in the film and who who Scott also mentioned. He came in and helped train you a little bit. And so got got through that that first afternoon shift, that one, sub shift. I don’t remember a lot about it. You guys talked about specific memories, about your first time there.
To me, everything was happening so fast that, like, you know, by the time it was done, I was like, okay. We got through that. What did I just do? I already remembered pretty much everything about it. You know?
But a few weeks after that a couple weeks after that, anyway, I, I I got a call and a full time shift had come open. It was a 3AM to 6AM shift on Saturday morning. But it was open and they wanted someone to do it and they were asking me, and so I said, yes. Of course. I’m gonna do that.
And that was late in the semester because I didn’t have to do that shift very often. I would probably only did it five or six times, dragging myself up there at 03:00 in the morning. I can’t go until 06:00. And I do have one funny story about that. I, found out later that at one point, my mom had tuned in, you know, I the town I grew up in was about an hour’s drive out of Lubbock, and she knew I was gonna be on that morning.
So she got up early and tuned in, and, I played a song by The The and announced it as being by The The. And And she didn’t know that that was the name of a band. And so she thought that I was so tired that I was stuttering. She’s like, oh, oh, poor Keith. He’s been out there all night.
He’s tired. And he’s stuttering. He’s not getting it done. He’s not getting it right on it. No, mom.
Yeah. That’s the name of the band. It’s The The. So but yeah. So I finished out that fall semester doing that, overnight shift.
The spring semester rolls around. I got a power lunch shift, which may have had something to do with Scott as well. That that’s entirely possible. But but, you know, those were pretty pretty sought after shifts. You know, that was the lunchtime request show.
So we were on twelve to three. We took requests for the first couple of hours. Really enjoyed that. And that was when it was that spring semester that I started hanging around the station a lot, while I was doing the power launch. And, sure enough, when the end of the semester was rolling around, we’re getting ready for you know, to get the exec staff set up for the next, next semester for the summer session.
And, Michael, you got the the job as the station manager. I had we did put in an application, for, music director at the time. And and this was, Stuntee, you mentioned you had somebody in mind. I I gotta tell the story. I’m in the booth one day, and it’s right toward the end of the semester.
You had already gotten the job as a station manager, but were had not hired the rest of the exec staff yet. And I’m still on the thing, and you and and someone else, more born Faust or Kopec or one of those guys came into the booth and we’re kind of talking about some stuff you were gonna do once you took over and all that. And I’m sitting there doing my thing and I’m listening to what’s going on, but I’m trying not to, you know, to act like I’m listening. And, you said something to the effect of, and then when Jason moves into the music director’s office and you pause for a second, you’re like, or whoever the new music director is. And you’re kinda on the finish line, whatever it was you were saying.
And I was just like, alright. Well, okay. You know, all I can do is make my pitch. Go into my interview and make my pitch. And and that’s exactly what I did.
We had our interview and I did have a pitch. I had an idea, you know, when we went in or when I went there, my thought was, you know, the kind of music we play at this radio station right now is having its moment. You know, this was in the, you know, spool of ’94. And so, you know, the grunge movement is in full swing and, you know, you’ve got one hundred and twenty minutes and alternative nation on on MTV. And so alternative music, as it was called at the time, was was having its moment.
And that’s when I’m in there, that’s what I said. We this is the time for this kind of music. We can capture a big audience. I don’t want us to be a niche sitting in this market anymore. I wanna trade punches with the big boys.
I wanna go against the rock station. I wanna go against the top 40 station. And I think we can streamline our sound and do that. I think we can kind of ride this wave into bigger, bigger portion of the, of the Lubbock radio market. And I guess it was on the strength of that interview because we hadn’t really met aside from a meeting in passing before that.
And sure enough, once the the, you know, exec positions got posted, I went and checked it out and and there was my name. I was the next music director. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know what what I wanna use, a special moment for me because I did not expect it. Like, I really thought this other guy was gonna get it.
I was just I’m gonna go through the process and then hopefully get back on the air and keep doing my thing. And to find out that I got in that position was was really great for me. So, yeah, I had this movie, yours, music director. It was a lot of fun. And we did, go in and and kinda radically rework the the sound of the station.
I don’t I’m sure you remember this, Michael, but we did a pretty serious overhaul on the way the music system picked songs or the the rotation system. When we went in at the time that I started there, you know, you were just as likely to get a random album track from some band that had only put out one album as you were to get whatever the huge song off the most recent Smashing Pumpkins album was, you know? Like, those once they were through with their main run through the top 35, those songs were, like, you know, equivalent in the the rotation system. And so we set up some tiers where you were going to more likely to get the stuff you had heard before from bigger bands and all that so that you didn’t have long, you know, runs through the through the, program, or you won’t hear anybody you’d ever heard before or never heard before, you know, that kind of thing. And so, and we did well.
You know, we got added to the the core 50, CMJ reporter list during my time as music director there. That was one of my favorite or the things I’m most proud of about that time. You know, we were really, really able to get the full validation to find out what our ratings look like, but I know that we were able to look and see that there was a in the book, there was a category for, you know, non commercial radio. And we were able to see that that our listenership kept rising. I mean, it was only us in the classical station.
So maybe it was the case that the classical station was suddenly, pulling in a lot more listeners than they had ever pulled in before. But I’d like to think that probably wasn’t the case, that it actually was what we were doing this. Or, so, yeah, you know, I had that was that was my favorite thing about my entire time at at KTXT was being the music director and being able to the guy that was picking the music that went on the air and and driving around town and hearing my songs, you know, that that I had chosen playing on the radio in the same space with stuff that’s playing on the big rock station in the same top 40 station. Yeah. That was it was awesome.
During that time on the air, I, took over for New Michael for on a show called Retro Radio, which was our, ’80s New Wave retro show. I started doing that, I think, in the fall of ‘ninety four, if I remember right, and then stuck with that. That was my my show for pretty much the rest of my time there, doing the eighties retro show. Really enjoyed that too. It was mostly requests, so I got tons of calls.
So yeah, it was a lot of fun to do that as well. After the year of, of music director, you know, you know, I never went into KTXT. It never was was a thing where I was thinking, one of these days, I’m gonna run this place. One of these days, I’m gonna be the manager. But after that year, I felt like I needed to step forward.
You know? I I I probably should have gone for another year of music director. I think that’s what I was best at, what I was really good at at the station. But to me, that was, kind of a lateral move, you know, and I feel like I felt like I needed to progress. I needed to move forward.
So I ended up throwing my hat in the room to be the next station manager, which I got and became the manager for the ’95, ’90 ‘6, school year. And I had a lot of fun as the station manager. I I really did. I like I said, in retrospect, I probably should have just gone for another year of of music director. I’m not gonna sit here and claim I was the best station manager that that place ever had, to the extent that my my time there was a success.
It was largely a success due to my exec staff, that I hired. You know, I think the best thing I ever did was hiring those guys. So I do wanna send a a quick shout out to, Diamond Rob, Sean, Stacy and Stacy, JP, Danielle, Zoltan, Dina, Erica, and Lisa, all of you guys. If it hadn’t been for you guys, I had my my time there as the station manager would not have been anywhere near as successful as it was. So I owe a lot to them.
They were the ones that that really did the heavy lifting while I was the station manager. Then we did some fun stuff too while I was their station manager. We did the eighty eight hour marathon where, Rob, Sean and I, one of the three of us was on the booth for eighty eight straight hours and the other two were, you know, out doing the remote broadcasts or in the studio as well. Our Our hero at the time was that you could, go home to take a shower, but otherwise you had to be at the station the entire time. So we slept up there, we ate our meals up there, for eighty eight straight hours.
It was just the three of us on the air. So that was probably the most fun thing we did, during my, time as the station manager. But yeah, the whole thing was great. After my year of of station manager, I kind of, you know, backed away from the station where old station managers were kind of encouraged not to be around, you know, to let the the new staff kind of do their thing. And so I I did that.
About a year later, I was taking a summer class, and I went back to the radio station and did a warm summer session, did a power lunch again, came back in and, and did that last little, little time there. And that was awesome too, just because, you know, at that point I was not in charge. I was not programming the station, not doing anything. It was a chance just to go back and just play some music. And so that was cool.
Really enjoyed that little kind of coda to my time at KTXT. But, but yeah, that’s in a nutshell my story there and, very much feel the same way as you guys both have expressed that, you know, the friendships I made there and the people I met there have lasted me for a lot of years, you know. And and really, it was a it was a life changing thing. It was, you know, both for what I would do afterwards. I wasn’t in the the radio, world too much longer after that.
But also, it really just helped me as a person, I think, to gain some confidence and to be, you know, better able to to express myself in in situations where I was working with other people and all of us working towards a similar goal and that kind of thing. And just like I said, the friendships I I gained there were are, you know, something I’ll always treasure and remember to this day. So, yeah, one of the best experiences of my life. I think you guys both said the same thing. But yeah, so much fun.
And look, here we are today, you know, thirty years later, we’re talking about it, still here, even to this day. It still, you know, weighs heavily on all my life even now. So, yeah, it was it was great. It was one of the highlights of my life for sure. That’s one of the incredible things about it is, like, people just like, it stays with you for your entire life.
I I wanted to say a little something about the music directorship that you had because it you know, and I’ll not mention names names and walk lightly here. But, when I first started at the station, we had a music director whose basic MO was if any other radio station besides this one plays it, then we’re no longer going to play it. And I think that also held true of MTV. So our our music at that time was very eclectic, very underground, very weird. And then the music director after that person was kind of the exact opposite where we were trying to play everything.
Like, you know, an album would come out and we’d add 10 songs off of it or whatever. You know? So when you became the music director, and I was gone at this point, but I remember listening to the station, you did something in that in that streamlining of it where, you know, you kind of made it sound more like a commercial radio station and that, you know, these are the songs you’re gonna hear a lot. These are the songs you’re gonna hear every once in a while. These are gonna pop up every so often.
You know, when I first started there, you could play a three hour shift and not play one song you’d ever heard before. It happened all the time. And, you know, I as I moved through there, I had enough juice to where nobody was watching my music logs. I played what I wanted for the most part, you know, or I was on a request show or I was, you know, like, Weekend to Saul, we didn’t have a format. You know, right after I left college and and KTXT, I went to work for the top 40, station there in Lubbock.
And I was trying to think of a song that we played nonstop. Like, this was the Alanis Morissette, Hootie and the Blowfish era. So let’s let’s say, Ironic by Alanis Morissette. If I did four hours on the air at that station, I would play that song five times. I’m not making that up.
It was every forty minutes they were in rotation. And then the other songs would pop up once in a while. You guys kinda brought that in at KTXT and made you know, it streamlined that to where it sounded more like a commercial radio station. And, you know, if I if I turned on KTXT for an hour, I was guaranteed to hear one red hot popular song, whatever it was at the time. You know?
And before that before you guys did that, it really wasn’t that wasn’t the case. You could listen for three hours and not hear an Nirvana song, not hear a Pearl Jam song. Not you know, it just didn’t happen. You were, again, playing all this obscure music. So it really was a nice, shift in the the the music aspect of the station.
You know, it became much more it sounded much more like a commercial radio station than it probably had any right to be, honestly, but it was it was a great training ground for us because, you know, I talked to a lot of people that worked at college radio at other places. They did not get that experience. They could not walk out of there and walk into a commercial radio station and and be on the air, and we could. We in fact, we all did, I think. But, you know, if you worked at KTXD for a year and you believed in it and you and you practiced it and you worked at it and you got good at it, you could walk out the doors at KTXD and walk over to Z 102 and get right on the air.
And that’s that’s what happened to me, and that’s what happened to a lot of people there. You know? And so it really was, a a great, great learning experience. And it and the fact that it operated like a real radio station was a a definite plus. Yeah.
Well, that was the idea is we were going to make it sound more like a commercial radio station. That was part of the what I wanted to do is I’ve you know, in in competing with the other stations, I knew that we had to tighten that up, that people had to be able to to be volunteered that they were gonna hear something that they knew and and liked when they turned us on. And then once we got them in the door with that, we could hit them with the weird eclectic stuff. And and that stuff I thought was good enough that we could keep them there. But for me, you know, when a song got played on another radio station or on MTV or something like that, it was not time to to, you know, kick it out of rotation.
That meant that, you know, one of ours made good. We need to push that. That. We need to get on that and make sure that we’re playing it and people, you know, relate it with us. You know?
That was not the time to get rid of it. That was the time to celebrate it. You know? And and I think that had a lot to do with kind of the change in music direction that you were talking about. Well, I think the interesting thing about that is, you know, during my time there, which was pre this, you know, before it got a little more streamlined, the most popular things on that station were the request shows.
You know, retro radio, power lunch, weekend assault. That’s when the phone was ringing off the hook, and that’s when people were listening because they knew that they were gonna hear those more popular songs. They were gonna hear what they were hearing on MTV. You know, the regular format was not as popular. It wasn’t as listened to because you didn’t you never knew what you were gonna get.
And once once it got streamlined a little bit, I think it really that’s when real things really started to take off. You know, I would run into people all the time that would say, you know, I listen to KTXD all the time, people that weren’t in there. You know? They did it was it was a popular radio station at that time in Lubbock. Like you said, Michael, earlier, we didn’t have an edge station or, you know, any of that.
We we were it. We were the alternative radio station. That’s the key. And that’s what I think so now I’ve at the time, like, I was at KTXT in in Lubbock. I had never talked to anyone who were who worked at any other college radio station.
I didn’t really you know, we knew from CMJ what other stations did to some degree, but what I’ve learned is that so there’s different schools of thought with college radio. Right? First of all, you have, like, the free form college radio stations, and I think KUT in in Austin is a good example of that where it’s, you know, every DJ plays whatever they want. And quite honestly, it could be unlistenable at times. You know?
It’s, it’s not something that you can just tune into and and know for sure this is what I’m gonna get. And I, I I’m speaking retrospectively, but I think some of this still applies to some stations today. But looking back at, at like the time we were there, I remember going to Austin and being excited like, oh, they have a college radio station and then being like, I don’t know. I’m not thinking this, but it was really weird. Because you and that’s and that’s fine.
But then you then you have stations like KTXT who are programming the way a radio station would normally program. We were a training station. Our mission was to train people for broadcasting, and that’s what we did, and that’s why we did it that way. But inside of that, then you still have, well, what music is in rotation? How is it rotated?
How does the rotation software work? Do you understand that, and what do you do with that? And you have people with different mindsets about that. The person you mentioned who was there, you know, before I got there and right before you got there, was very very much felt like college radio needed to be incredibly eclectic and we needed to, you know, shun the mainstream or whatever. My feeling was, and the reason I hired Keith because I felt like his feeling was, you know, we’re in Lubbock.
The people there is no outlet. If you’re in LA or you’re in New York or Chicago or even Dallas because they had the edge, as a college radio station, you can afford to be a little more eclectic because people already have people can go and find a station that’ll play Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili Peppers and these bands that were huge and listen to them in a radio format. You know? And sure there was MTV, but when you drop below that tier of bands and and still talk about, like, say Matthew Sweet, for example, is someone that I think some college radio music directors would say, well, that well, he’s too big and, you know, he already has an audience and he maybe got on one hundred and twenty minutes one time, so we don’t need to be playing him. Whereas I would, you know, obviously argue Matthew Sweet is, like, the classic person that should be on college radio.
Like, that’s a perfect college radio artist for, especially for a station like KTXT. Because if you lived in Lubbock in, say, 1993, unless you were waiting for that one time that maybe MTV might play a Matthew Sweet song, you’re not gonna hear Matthew Sweet. You’re not gonna hear anybody at that tier of and anybody below that tier in terms of popularity because there’s only so many slots available. Right? You can play maybe 12 to 14 songs an hour usually on a radio station, less than that on a on a format like MTV where you’ve got these long commercial breaks.
So, I mean, I I don’t think that it was I don’t think we were starving anybody of of all this, like, super eclectic music that very few people honestly really wanted to listen to in favor of stings that, you know, were theoretically too mainstream or whatever. I I just never felt that way. I felt like we were providing to Lubbock and the surrounding communities even more so, an outlet that they could hear this thing that was happening everywhere, this thing that was blowing up, all these bands that were getting popular, and they were some some of them getting mainstream notice, and some of them were getting just a little tiny bit of of fame on a on a show like one hundred and twenty minutes or alternative nation, but never even broke into, like, the regular MTV rotation and certainly weren’t gonna get played on z one zero two, which was the top 40 station or FMX, which was the classic rock station. So I never felt bad about that. Like, I I I do think that the people have mentioned sometimes some of the bands we talked about in the film or, you know, talked about their experience of like, oh, no.
We were, you know, we were free form, and you could go and play whatever you wanted and do whatever you wanted and say whatever you wanted. And there’s a place for that. And I’m not saying that a college radio station, especially in a bigger city, shouldn’t be that way. But we chose a different path for a couple of reasons. Again, one, we were a training station.
We were very much focused on training people to go into radio and be able to be successful right off the bat. But, you know, Keith and I in particular had just a moment and some conversations about where we wanted to take the station in that direction in terms of the way the rotation works and the terms of the way the music that you listen to or the way, like, if you listen to the station for an hour, what your experience was gonna be like. And I, you know, I still stand by that. I think that there are people that disagreed with that maybe, and, I think that’s fine. But that was that was our goal, and I think we did a pretty darn good job of it, if I’m any judge of that.
And I think it worked really well to bring, more people into our fold. And, you know, it doesn’t hurt a radio station to have listeners. Like, that’s what keeps them alive. Like, no. We’re not selling advertising, and no.
We weren’t funded strictly through underwriting or whatever. But if you are running a radio station that no one listens to, eventually, the administration is gonna have plenty of reasons to just cut that funding off, and no one’s gonna raise a stink because no one listens to it. So I do think that there’s something to be said for understanding the role that building your listenership has and playing music that people want to hear. I think that was important then, and I think it’s still important now in a different way. The, you know, the landscape has completely changed, but you do you can’t just say, well, screw it.
I’m just gonna do what I want and say what I want and play what I want and not care about who’s listening because that’s a really fantastic way to have the radio station taken away from you at some point. And we weren’t really worried about that at the time. We, you know, we just had had a vision for what we wanted to do, and and Keith’s vision really matched my vision. He he, like, took it and ran with it and executed it perfectly. And, yeah, I still kinda stand by that, but it’s not the it’s not for everybody, and it’s not the decision everybody would have made in that in that position.
But I I feel I felt good about it, and I like the direction the station went once we did that made those changes. We we also had the advantage of, you know, at this time, this music started to get really popular, which I which I’m sure helped. Yeah. But but but what you guys did as far as main you know, streamlining that format a little bit is is what exactly what needed to happen to get people to turn over to the station. You know?
You you could have with a different music director or a different attitude about it going, okay. Well, yeah, you know, Pearl Jam’s super popular, but we’re not playing that anymore. You know? Here’s another one by the Shags or one of those things. You know?
The decision to try to to sort of embrace this this type of music that was getting popular and make it sound like a more mainstream radio format was a a stroke of genius, and it and it worked really well. People loved the station back. But that’s also kind of the with college radio is that when we came in, you know, Michael and I did have that vision and and were able to execute and make it sound like that. But within a couple of years, you could have someone come in with a completely different vision of it and completely turn it on its head, you know, so that it was something else. You know, that was kind of the beauty of the of college radio is that, you know, you could play with that format a little bit.
I like I said, I wanted us to be trading punches with the big boys. I wanted us to be fighting FMX for listeners. But if that was not your goal, if you if your goal was, I want people who tune into the station to hear something they’ve never heard before And, you know, whether it’s good or not, you know, have them be experienced something that that they’re not going to experience everywhere else just as valid a way to run it and something that you could do if you wanted to do it that way. It was just kind of we chose to take it another direction. But, yeah, again, you know, that’s that’s car radio.
That’s the beauty of it is you can kinda take it in the direction you wanna go and and subsequent, you know, visuals can change things if they want to, you know, and make it their own, as as they choose to do. And I’m a believer in what you said earlier about, you know, you you give them a pearl jam, you give them a smashing pumpkins, you give them a Nirvana, but then you can slide in something else. You know, you give them the spoonful of sugar, and then you can go more eclectic. You can introduce them to music from bands they haven’t heard of, and they will stay tuned because they know, man, maybe they don’t like that song, but they know another good song is coming up in five minutes, so they’re not gonna tune away. And and, you know, that is something that we did at KTXT.
That’s something I did as a club DJ too, where you have to introduce people to music. People rarely hear a song once and fall immediately in love with it. You know, you have to, I think, sandwich those new songs that they’re unfamiliar with. And particularly if they’re challenging songs or from an artist like, say, like Bjork or, you know, someone that isn’t necessarily somebody that is is just instantly, you know, poppy catchy songs that maybe takes some time for it to grow on you. You know, to design a format where you can slide those songs in between, like, the obvious hits and the big hits and keep people listening for, an extended length of time instead of just tuning in for, like, ten or fifteen minutes, I do think you end up introducing new artists and unheard artists and sometimes even unsigned artists to people who otherwise wouldn’t have heard them.
And the only way to do that and the only way to reach the a certain type of listener like that is to to to give them that spoonful of sugar and and to sandwich those things in between songs they’re familiar with. So I you know, yeah, you could say, well, you guys didn’t play enough of this or that or the other. But had we done that, would anybody have been listening? Or would the people you know, would those people have been exposed to, as many songs as they were because of the way we did it where they knew, okay. I’m gonna stay tuned in.
And, yeah, maybe I won’t like a song or two in an hour, but I’m gonna like 80% of the music I hear, so I’m just gonna keep this radio station tuned all day long. And the next thing you know, they’re falling in love with music that they didn’t think they would like because now they’ve heard it four or five times maybe, and they’re like, ah, man. This is pretty catchy. I do like these. You know?
So I’d you know, I I think we were serving both purposes. We were playing music people liked that people wanted to hear, but we were still. And if you look at the top 30 fives from our era, there’s just as many, you know, trip master monkeys on the list as there are smash me pumpkins on the list. Like, it wasn’t like the playlist was only those bands. We were again, we had a we had a mission.
We had a plan. And, part of that was giving unsigned or unknown artists a platform by sandwiching them between two really well known artists. I think that was a perfectly good plan that, again, I think we executed pretty well. So it wasn’t that we were kinda like, you know, shirking our duty to to introduce people to new music. We just, you know, maybe we could have played a little more otherwise, but but I don’t think the listenership would have been there.
I think overall, more people heard more new music by the the approach that we took. You know? That that’s the way I looked at it anyway. I you know, I can say the same thing is true for me having worked there because I there were several, bands and songs that would pop up on my list and I would play in the first, you know, several times I heard them. I was like, blah.
What is this? You know? And then I ended up loving this. I you know? The one that popped into my head immediately was I I I remember the first time I played it.
It was a band called Medicine, which is a a noise rock band, and they’re they’re actually a really good one. And then, like, I I love those guys now. The first song I ever played from them at KDXD, it was on vinyl. And, I remember I queued it up, and I thought something was wrong with the record. It sounded like someone threw a barrel of wrenches into a large industrial machine.
And I I was, what is this? You know? And then, like, the second time I played it, I was like, okay. I kinda hear what’s going on here. And by by, you know, after after two weeks of playing it all the time, I fell in love with that song.
And I think that probably happened for a lot of people that were listening to the station as well. You know, we were giving people new music even though we were also kinda giving them what they wanted at the same time. Yeah. So you’re you’re right about that, that you have to do both. You have to you have to give them what they want, and then you can go, and, hey, if you like that, how about this?
You know? And then you you might get to expose some new bands that way. I still wanted us to play, the more eclectic stuff and the stuff nobody had ever heard of and to try to introduce new music. But you’re right. The way you do that is to make sure your listeners don’t go anywhere.
And if Arwen plays stuff they’ve never heard before, then they are gonna go somewhere else. They’re gonna get tired of it. They’re gonna wanna hear that Smashing Pumpkins song or that Pearl Jam or Beastie Boys or whoever it was. So, yeah, it’s a little bit of a tight rope act to walk, that line. But, you know, I felt like we did it well and and not only gave, you know, the listeners the stuff they wanted to hear, but also introduced them to the kind of stuff that they weren’t gonna hear anywhere else.
And and, you know, hopefully, know, Trip AstraMonkey got some new fans, you know, Hagfish, King Missile, all these weird bands that we’ve talked to about, you know, that we did play. I I can guarantee you there are people, that became fans of those bands that would never have, you know, even heard of them if it hadn’t been for us at KTXT. So it was a little bit of a tight wire act, but, but I thought we’d walked it pretty well. I think the real tight wire act and and and you guys pulled this off very well is is that, you know, this for this this style of of radio, it doesn’t really have a format. Like, there’s no there’s no there’s nothing you can’t play if you want to.
Right? So and, yeah, you know, you sent over earlier, you sent over a a music log from from back in the day, you know, and I’m looking through it. I’m going, wow. What a what a wildly eclectic batch of songs these are. You know?
Yeah. And that’s the beauty of college radio is that you can do that. And to be able to take that wide a a birth of of music and and and get it down, whittle it down to a format is is impressive, and and it’s not easy to do. And and and I really think, you know, that that era of the station was was really benefited by kind of the things you guys did and the the vision you had to to do it because it’s not an easy task. It’s not as easy as, you know, we’re gonna play classic country music.
Well, that’s a finite batch of songs, and you can you know, this was not a finite batch of songs. It pretty much encompassed everything because we were trying to play world music. We were trying to play hip hop. We were trying to play rock and old stuff too and eighties retro music. It it was a huge, huge swath of music that we had to whittle down into some sort of recognizable format.
And I think I think I think you guys did a fantastic job with that. Yeah. I think it had just grown organically, and you had, you know, a a commercial station may have just a maybe a couple hundred songs in rotation at any given time, maybe four or 500 if they’re a real deep station. We had thousands. I mean, I think there was over 2,000 songs, and most of them kinda just thrown into the recurrent category.
So once they fell out of the top category, it was just like a free for all. And, figuring out that that there was so much good music that just really wasn’t getting played because we were just almost like rolling dice and picking a song out of, you know, out of the air and and trying to kind of figure out a way to to make that, yeah, more listenable. And and, again, not to exclude music, but just knowing that that people were gonna enjoy the station more if they knew that within ten or fifteen minutes of tuning in, they were probably gonna hear a song that they liked or or, you know, a brand new song from, like, their favorite band. And maybe they hadn’t heard that song yet, but they knew that we were gonna play those bands. And I think I think there’s a point at which a certain number of listeners just kinda trust you.
Right? You’ve they’ve listened to you long enough, and now they’re like, they’re on board. So they trust you, and you can start taking more chances. And this is true if you’re, like, an individual DJ or it’s true if you’re a radio station that once you gain their trust, then you know? And I I think maybe that we did evolve through time, but it was really, yeah, that initial just, man pouring through literally a list of thousands of songs and trying to figure out what belonged where.
And it was a lot of work, but, yeah, I don’t know how we got real deep into that subject, but, it was it was fun. And, yeah, it was a big part of, I guess, me and Keith’s time there for sure. But, you know, beyond that, and I think to kind of circle around and and put a bow on this, here we are thirty years later, where the three of us are talking to each other because of KTXT, because we met in college radio. And one of the things when we were doing the film is realizing that almost everybody that we interviewed or talked to that maybe didn’t make it into the film, or maybe we just traded emails or something. They all talk about the friendships they made, the fact that they’re still friends with a lot of the, like, the friends they have now, especially, like, their old, you know, their old friends are friends from college radio just like, you know, we are still friends now.
That takeaway might be above and beyond the music, above and beyond, job training or or what your career path may have taken. And and you made a good point that college radio gives you confidence and communication abilities that can be used in almost any career. But beyond all of that, all the the many great things that came from college radio is, I think the top at everybody’s list was like the friendship, the tribe, the finding your people, whatever phrase, you know, you use. It was a it was a universal thing. I think it was true for all of us.
It was true for every single person I interviewed that was in college radio. It was like, man, I I was kinda lost in college. You know, I didn’t wanna do a frat. I didn’t wanna do a sorority. I had never you know, I wasn’t into sports or whatever, and I just was kind of flailing around.
And then I found college radio, then I found KTXT. And all of a sudden, I was, like, surrounded by instant friendships, people that loved, you know, sitting down and talking about the nuances of an album for an hour or would debate, you know, this this band versus this band or whatever. Like that experience, was happening in every city, in every state that had a college radio station. We didn’t realize it at the time because we really there was no internet. We didn’t really connect a lot with other stations, but we were a part of this thing that was happening all across the country where college kids were finding the station, finding this thing they love to do, but also finding their people, which just to me is is the coolest thing about college radio and the thing that I hope never ever gets lost.
But no matter how much the music industry change changes, no matter how much radio changes, no matter whether the station is an over the air station or an Internet streaming station, none of that matters as much as is there a place where these college kids can go and be physically around, you know, other people who love what they do and and love the same things that they do and and have this, passion to share music and get on the air and talk into a microphone because that is the essence of it. On top of everything else that’s great about college radio, that is the most important thing. And that’s, you know, why I made the film and that’s why I kinda still wanna do the podcast is just to keep reminding people how important that is and to make sure that you’re supporting and, like, trying to help out your college radio station that’s in your area. Because I I think it’s important for kids that are in college now to have that same opportunity that we did because of how important it was to us. It was it was huge.
Huge, huge, huge. And if you are interested in college radio still, and I’m assuming if you’re listening to this podcast, you most certainly are, there is a film called 35,000 Watts, the story of college radio. We’ve kinda referenced it a few times. Some of the people that we talked about are in the film. Some of the musicians we’ve talked about are in the film.
It is available right now on Amazon Prime or Google Play to rent or buy. We would super appreciate it if you went and watched that, if you told your friends to watch it, if you shared it with your family, if shared it with your old college radio, friends. And, if you’re gonna watch it and you’re there, you might as well also rate and review the movie. We would appreciate it. So 35,000 Watts Story of College Radio available now.
Thanks. This is, this is the end of season two. It was great to talk about all the all the different music we talked about. It was really fun to kinda wrap it up with the talk just about our time at cutting college radio. We will be back.
We’re gonna take a little hiatus, for the early summer, but we’ll be back soon enough. Thanks so much for tuning in. Thanks for the comments. Thanks for, supporting college radio in general. Thanks to my friends, Scott Mobley and Keith Porterfield for joining me on the podcast.
It has been, one of the joys of doing the film and then continuing on is reconnecting with people that I had not connected with in a long time. There’s a few people that I did with the film, and now getting to do this podcast, every couple weeks with my buddies has been the highlight of of this past year for me. Just really, like, getting to it’s just like old times, like, just getting to talk about it. So thanks to you guys for joining me on the podcast. I really appreciate you guys doing this.
And to all of you out there, thanks so much for listening, and we will return soon with 35,000 watts, the podcast.