Lawrence.com

Last week, another "alternative" radio station bit the dust.

Low ratings signaled the death knell for 97.3FM The Planet, which switched its name to "Max FM" and its format to "Everything That Rocks" (translation: "Everything That Doesn't Rock The Boat").

In an era when alternative radio stations come and go like the "buzz bands" they spin, it seems unlikely that one such local station would be preparing to celebrate its 30th anniversary. KJHK 90.7FM, however, is a different kind of station - one not accountable to the fickle whims of advertisers, corporate mergers and payola.

KJHK is a student-run radio station. And, according to the thousands of alumni and listeners who have sustained it for 30 years, it's a damn good one.

"When I first started at KJHK it was this exalted entity to me," says Kyle Garrison, KU student and the station's current music director. "It was like I had finally found something that was on the same level as I was."

Garrison isn't taking his newfound authority for granted. He realizes wholeheartedly that his position is essentially powerless - and that's exactly how it should be.

"You can't force DJs to play anything," Garrison says. "That's just the wrong path."

Dooces wild

Lest KJHK's loyal listeners take the station's 30th anniversary for granted, let us take a moment to reflect on all the obstacles it has overcome.

Eighties. Eight-tracks. The Federal Communications Commission. Disco. KU football. KU administrators. Tipsy DJs. Tipper Gore.

Literary types would probably trace KJHK's unbreakable spirit back to its second year of operation, when the station somehow managed to retain its license after mistakenly reporting that a nuclear meltdown had killed thousands of people in Waterloo, Iowa (a journalism student mistakenly put the fake story on-air).

"People were calling the Associated Press saying, 'I just heard this story on the news and I think my family's dead,'" recalls Steve Doocy, the station's manager at the time. "That night, the last story on the 'CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite' was about how this radio station at the University of Kansas had 'blowed up' Waterloo, Iowa."

Like most of KJHK's alumni, Doocy went on to live a perfectly productive life. He now co-hosts the national FOX morning show "Fox and Friends," and he's pretty sure he's no longer accountable for those couple occasions where he "definitely didn't" (wink, wink) drink beer on the station's roof.

Doocy also holds a unique place in KJHK history: he was the DJ on-air when the station switched from a campus-only carrier current to a big 9.9-watt broadcast on Oct. 15, 1975.

"I was terrified," Doocy recalls. "We were broadcasting in front of Flint Hall and there were lots of passersby, so it was weird to be doing that in front of people like a disco DJ."

By the time Doocy's second shift rolled around, KJHK had relocated to the comfortably secluded Sudler Annex (where it has since remained, affectionately dubbed "The Shack"). Before they could go on-air, all KJHK DJs were required to obtain a broadcasting license.

"You'd be the operator and the engineer simultaneously," Doocy recalls. "You had to know about plate voltage. What the hell is plate voltage? I was lost. I was just there to have fun."

Doocy's flagship program was "Gripe Line," a talk show where students would call in to complain about whatever irked them. His rock shows featured his favorite artists of the day - Boz Scaggs, Harry Nilsson, Moody Blues, Jethro Tull and Elton John - and often featured uninterrupted broadcasts of entire LPs.

"That's what it was all about," Doocy recalls. "You didn't want to sound like KLWN; you didn't want to be Top 40."

Rock the mic

Take a look at KJHK's recent charts and you'll see that the station's leftfield ideals have endured. Decidedly non-mainstream artists like Wolf Parade, Ladytron, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Marissa Nadler dominate the Top 10, and three Lawrence bands - Ghosty, The Harvey Girls and Kelpie - hold steady in the Top 25.

Photo Gallery

30 years of KJHK logos

KJHK's playlists are entirely at the discretion of its DJs, though "rotation" jocks are required to play at least six songs per hour from a select stack of new releases (typically around 50 titles covering a breadth of genres).

"I want to keep it diverse, but not to the point of alienating our listeners," Garrison says. "If it's a really good local release we'll play the shit of it because it's something we should be proud of it."

DJs have long cherished KJHK's open format, crying foul at the slightest suggestion of a "format change." Though KU faculty and administrators have generally allowed DJs to play what they please (within FCC guidelines), the issue came to a boiling point in 1988 when a night-shift DJ spewed profanities at Oklahoma coach Billy Tubbs following the KU men's basketball title game.

"The DJ was so excited that he was saying, 'Fuck you, Billy Tubbs!' over and over and over again," recalls Nicole Vap, a former KJHK news staffer who now works at a Denver-based TV station.

"The FCC guys had gone to the game," Vap says. "They turned it on and that's what they heard."

The incident and ensuing fines spurred a heated debate over whether KJHK should be allowed to air songs with cuss words during late-night "safe harbor" hours (during which the FCC allows stations to create their own guidelines based on "community standards").

Administrators decided to err on the side of caution by enacting a strict no-profanity policy.

Shortly thereafter, an already-unpopular station manager removed several hundred cuss-laden albums that the KJHK board of directors deemed unfit to represent the university.

Vap, who was the station manager at the time, recalls "SAVE KJHK" rallies popping up as far away as Kansas City.

"It was basically people saying that I was awful and the administration was awful and we were trying to censor free speech," Vap says. "I think there was an attitude that if you weren't alternative you were totally mainstream."

In 1992, Greg "The Janitor" Isernhagen spurred an effort to reinstate safe harbor. He lost by one vote.

"The whole definition of 'community standards' got called into question," recalls Isernhagen, the station manager at the time. "We were only 100 watts at the time so it wasn't like we were extending into markets with Mennonites."

To the Max

At the center of the storm during KJHK's controversial coming-of-age period was Max Utsler, hired as the chair of the broadcast journalism program in 1983.

Since KJHK had yet to acquire a television station, the dean of the journalism school entrusted Utsler with the task of professionalizing KJHK - a responsibility that would prove to be more difficult than he ever imagined.

"I was told that we were not allowed to have a newscast on KJHK because music people wouldn't give up any of their show time," Utsler recalls. "When I first suggested to students that we needed to crank up a news operation at KJHK, the journalism students didn't want to go near that station - they were afraid to go there."

One of Utsler's first tasks was to remove DJs who were no longer students - some of whom had been at the station for a decade or longer. This task would prove to be much easier than convincing KJHK's staff to make the station's music format more "popular."

"We found out that KJHK had stopped playing U2 music because, 'They were too popular,'" Utsler recalls. "Well, that just went completely against every principle we had in terms of what radio and TV was all about. We thought KJHK should be playing the daylights out of U2."

Utsler says that he and KJHK's governing board never went so far as to try to dictate playlists, but they did "make some moves to put student station mangers in there who shared the same professional notion that the whole purpose of KJHK was to attract an audience."

According to Utsler, those station managers "didn't get very far" with efforts to popularize the station's format.

"There were a couple of threats to slash tires and those kinds of things," he says. "Obviously I didn't think that was something that any student should have to put up with."

The brunt of the resistance was directed at Utsler himself. For more than a year, a classified ad in the University Daily Kansan read: "Max U: How do you sleep at night?"

"This thing got so ugly back then that I would get death threats on my answering machine," Utsler says. "I never, never - and to this date - don't understand how all that came about. But that did remind me of how serious those folks were about their music."

Stream dreams

One of KJHK's proudest moments arrived on Dec. 3, 1994, when the station became one of the first in the country to broadcast a live, 24-hour signal on the internet.

Though KJHK claimed it was the first, the station later discovered that WXYC at the University of North Carolina had gone online a month earlier.

"We made the claim and no one seemed to object," says Jay Berberick, KJHK's station manager at the time. "I guess if you claim that you're the first at something and no one else disagrees with you, in that sense you are the first."

KJHK's first live stream leveraged an obscure video-conferencing program called CU-SeeMe to bring popular programs like "Jazz in the Morning" and KU sportscasts to national audiences. Unfortunately, it could only reach 20 people at a time.

"It's pretty funny when you look back at it, but that's the way things start," says Berberick, who now works for an investment banking company in New York City. "It's kind of like how the people who invented the car were in shock that it could go 20mph - that was kind of the feeling that we had."

Berberick also played a role in organizing the first Farmer's Ball, a battle-of-the-bands that has endured annually ever since.

"We were really trying to pump up the local scene," says Berberick, whose favorite local bands included Kill Creek, Panel Donor and Vitreous Humor. "We pretty much required that DJs play more local music each hour."

A sound future

In January 2004, KJHK DJs and alumni breathed a sigh of relief when the university announced it would be transferring control of the station to KU Memorial Unions. After 28 years under the direction of the journalism school, J-school administrators decided to cut the station loose.

According to current KJHK General Manager Andy Dierks, that decision could potentially have ended the station's reign.

"A student radio station is expensive, and a liability," says Dierks, who was hired to oversee the transition. "So many schools are just so nervous about getting egg on their face publicly that they wouldn't want to keep a student radio station around if they opportunity presented itself to get rid of it. That's why the situation here at KU is unique - they recognized that KJHK is something important."

Dierks says the transition has gone smoothly and day-to-day operations have essentially remained the same. Despite fears that sports and news programs would be dropped, both are still an integral part of KJHK's programming.

"KU has essentially been a pioneer," Dierks says. "I think that journalism programs throughout the country are going to scale back their stations ... It would be awesome to have them model off of KJHK's success in transferring to another area of the school."

Dierks recently embarked on a tour of college radio stations in the Pacific Northwest to brainstorm ideas for building a new KJHK studio at the KU Memorial Union. He was joined by current Station Manager Courtney Ryan, who says the station needs to start designing an exit strategy from "The Shack."

"The building is falling apart - it's literally sliding down the hill," Ryan says. "We know that within the next seven years or so the university would have made us get out of our place. This way we're doing it on our own terms."

Dierks and Ryan envision a more visible broadcast studio with an accompanying "listening lounge" for students and DJs to hang out and have lunch. Ideally, however, there will still be a certain amount of isolation for DJs, Ryan says.

"We don't want people to pound on the glass to get us to play songs and that sort of thing," she says. "We don't want it to be the 'fishbowl' model with some Tori Spelling kind of person sitting in there playing whatever Tori Spelling would listen to."