DJs 30 years apart—Gary Fowler (‘77) and Matt Kiser (‘07). Photo by Thomas Del Brase.

Forever Young: The Song of KCSC Radio

The student-run radio station has endured—and thrived—for more than half a century

By Stephen Metzger

Chico State students returning to campus for the spring semester in January 1963 were met, for the first time, with their very own radio station, right on campus. Of course, the original technology, including a handmade transmitter, was rather primitive, and the sound quality of the shows, broadcast only to the Trinity Hall Student Activities Center and Dining Hall each afternoon from 3 to 7 pm, was reportedly horrendous—due in no small part to the original operating budget of $51.51. Still, it was theirs, and it offered a musical alternative to the hits of the day, including “Soldier Boy,” “Roses Are Red (My Love),” and “I Will Follow Him.”

Actually, KCSC is 12 years older than that, having first gone on the air in 1951, when, as part of the school’s speech and drama department, it broadcast old-time radio dramas over the campus public-address system. But it was not until the early 1960s that it began its long and storied history as a student-run alternative music station and home for scores of self-described misfits, many of whom went on to hugely successful careers in and out of broadcasting and entertainment. Its history includes continual haggling with the Associated Students for funding, a rivalry with the “other” campus station (KCHO), and various physical moves. More recently, the station has moved to Internet-only broadcasting, which provides reception from Memphis to Moscow. The station is also enjoying a restored relationship with the University.

The days of vinyl and roses

It’s a bright, sunny March midmorning in downtown Chico. KCSC General Manager Matt Kiser is showing Gary Fowler (BA, Information and Communication Studies and Political Science, ’77) the current studio in a small, flat-roofed cinderblock building near the corner of Fifth and Ivy, formerly the Rainbo Bread Warehouse. Fowler is co-owner of Modern Building Company, but he isn’t talking about construction. He’s talking about KCSC when the station was broadcasting from a little “closet” in the back of Laxson Auditorium—when he was general manager. It was 30 years ago.

Fowler loses himself among the 10,000 vinyl records, eventually pulling out Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe. “You would never have heard this stuff on commercial radio,” he says, then adds, “We’d get boxes and boxes of albums [as promotions] and just dig in. You never knew what you’d discover.” He turns the cover over in his hands. “We’d get 12 copies of Dark Side of the Moon, keep two, and auction the rest. Then we’d buy a new microphone for the studio.”

It’s only rock and roll, but we like it

According to the 1964–1965 Chico State College Record (yearbook), KCSC “initiated a very ambitious expansion program” that year that included broadcasting to both Lassen and Shasta dorms with live coverage of campus sports and political and cultural affairs, in addition to the inclusion of a daily news hour with local, national, and international news. By 1967, the station was broadcasting daily from noon to midnight, and in October 1968, under General Manager Brian Zink (BA, Speech, ’69), the station acquired three new transmitters and again expanded both its hours and coverage, including the new Whitney Hall.

Jeff Kragel (BA, Mass Communications, ’71), marketing coordinator for the Chico State athletics department, came to Chico State in 1967 from San Carlos as a business major but soon switched to mass communication and began working in 1969 at both campus stations. “I did my straight work as news director at KCHO,” he says, “but over at KCSC, we all pulled rock ’n’ roll shifts. Remember, this was an incredible time. The Vietnam War, Haight-Ashbury, the Fillmore, and this explosion of music, and here we were in what, at the time, was a little redneck town, and no one was playing rock ’n’ roll except for us.”

In 1974, Kragel, along with Ron Woodward (BA, Mass Communications, ’72), also a KCSC alum and current operations manager for Chico’s Results Radio, started KFMF (forerunner of KFM) Radio, transmitting from a trailer on the Skyway. Kragel stayed in radio until 1994, when he started his own ad agency, and from 1997 to 2002 co-owned the Chico Heat.

The late 1960s to the mid-’70s were the golden years of FM radio, with stations not only playing alternative and experimental music—frequently entire sides of albums—but also being overtly political and taking stands against “the man.” One story goes that KTIM Radio in Marin County was once taken to task for telling drivers listening in their cars that they should avoid a certain road, where a California Highway Patrol vehicle-inspection station was set up. Their solution? Instead of telling their listeners to “avoid” it, they said “if you’re out driving around, be sure to drive down Miracle Mile, ’cause there’s a vehicle-inspection station set up.”

Of course, KCSC was part of the movement, and, according to a 2001 Chico News & Review story by KCSC alum Craig Blamer (attended fall ’88, spring ’89, and spring ’90), the station once broadcast live from the Titan missile site north of Chico, and one April Fool’s Day reprogrammed the campus bell tower pipes to play “Louie Louie.” In 1971, its motto Music for the People and broadcasting from a tiny room in Ayres Hall, KCSC made a national name for itself by partnering with State TV Cable and converting to a cable signal. It was 95.5 FM, the “Livewire.” The botched headline in the February 1972 Journal of College Radio read, “Chino State College Pioneers FM Cable Casting in California.”

Chico was a gift

In the summer of 1972, between semesters at the University of Arizona, where Eric Bogel (BA, Mass Communications, ’74) was studying English and pitching for the baseball team, he and a friend were hitchhiking through Northern California and woke up one morning in Bidwell Park. They walked over to campus where they saw a sign for auditions for KCSC disc jockeys. Bogel auditioned, got the job, quit the University of Arizona—and playing baseball—and transferred to Chico State, signing up for as many mass communications courses as he could. Bogel has fond memories of Chico and his days at the station, including meeting his wife, Gayle (Payne) Bogel (BA, Liberal Studies, ’75), who was administrative assistant to the AS president. “Chico charmed me,” he says. “The music scene was exploding, and KCSC was totally free-form.”

From 1972 to 1974, Bogel had various roles at the station, including, he says, “general manager, trash man, and disc jockey.” In 1974, his career skyrocketed to a position at KFMF, from which he moved on to radio work in Denver and Seattle, leaving in 1995 to become head of marketing for MTV Networks. There he produced television ads for Madonna, Sting, and Sheryl Crow and did promotional work for musicians from The Who and The Rolling Stones to the Backstreet Boys. Today, Bogel, who still uses his on-air name, Beau Phillips, is president of Rainmaker Media, a radio marketing company in Westport, Connecticut, that he founded in 1999.

Like Bogel, Andy Valvur (BA, International Relations, ’76) arrived in Chico in the fall of 1972, after a summer hitchhiking through Europe, and started working at KCSC the following semester. Valvur, whose father was a naval architect, spent his young life traveling around the world and first came to the United States in sixth grade, “a little kid with an English accent” who also spoke French, Japanese, and Estonian. “High school was a terrible experience,” his test scores so low, he says, that Chico State was the only school he could get into.

“Chico was a gift,” says Valvur, a freelance writer, screenwriter, actor, and comedian who divides his time between Los Angeles and San Francisco. “It was this sweet, quiet little valley town. Just perfect.” Having done voice-overs and written scripts for commercials in the Bay Area since he was 15, Valvur quickly found his way to KCSC, where Mike Bell (attended fall ’76–spring ’77) was general manager. “I just stuck my head in there one day and said, ‘Hey, what are the chances of getting a board shift?’ ”

“We could play whatever we wanted,” he recalls. “Pink Floyd, Allman Brothers—whole sides.” Valvur and other early- and mid-’70s programmers often modeled their shows on the progressive Bay Area FM radio stations. “We’d been listening to KSAN and KMPX, and we knew what radio could be.”
Valvur remembers the rivalry between KCHO and KCSC, a rivalry historically downplayed by KCHO. “We were always the bad boys,” he says. “It’s like if KCHO was the Beatles, we were The Rolling Stones.”

Valvur emphasizes that his KCSC experience helped pave the way to his career in the media, including writing House of Blues Radio Hour for Dan Aykroyd and pieces for BBC Radio, ABC Radio, CBS Radio, The New York Times, Maxim, and Cosmopolitan.

Radio trench dogs

Billie Sharpe (BA, Information and Communication Studies, ’76) grew up in a military family and spent her youth listening to Armed Forces Radio and Radio Luxembourg in Europe, and to stations all over the United States. “Music in the ’60s and FM radio were the greatest things I’d ever heard,” she says. In 1973, studying journalism and photography at Santa Monica City College and listening to KMET/LA (KSAN affiliate), she heard a woman disc jockey for the first time. And that’s all it took. In the fall of 1974, she transferred to Chico—which a friend told her “was a beautiful place with as many trees as people”—to pursue broadcasting.

In one class, the professor told the students to get involved in the campus radio station, and afterward, “someone offered to show me the station. I’m pretty sure this was Andy Valvur. As we were walking, he said, ‘Now, you know we’re not going to the same station he was talking about, don’t you? That’s KCHO. We’re going to KCSC.’ A couple weeks later, I auditioned and got a show.”

Her first year, she says, she just did her show and left, but “a few guys kept telling me to open up the mike and say something. Start talking. So eventually I did.” One thing she said was that the station “needed some female perspective.”

Her second year, with Fowler as general manager, Sharpe applied for the position of music director. “I think Gary surprised a few male applicants when he gave me the position,” she says. Then the following year, when she interviewed with the AS board for the general manager job, she “wondered if the all-male panel full of strangers would approve me.” Once again Fowler recommended her and she got the job, and “onward we went, with more women DJs than ever before.”

In October 1975, in support of the National Organization for Women-sponsored Alice Doesn’t Day—to demonstrate how women contributed to the home front and the economy—KCSC decided to feature only women on the radio for 24 hours straight, “playing all sorts of music by women, for women,” says Sharpe. “This was going along quite nicely until the early evening, when I was ‘kidnapped’ during my show by male management, Gary Fowler included, and the music on the turntable was dumped for The Rolling Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb.’ Well, it was pretty funny.”

Sharpe says she learned how to improvise, on air and off, working at KCSC. “Everything I learned at KCSC by trial and error came around again in some mutated form or another.” Today, she is an “organizer, media archivist, and proofreader—same skills, different applications.”

Thom O’Hair (real name: Thom Gubbens; attended fall ’63–fall ’70) worked at KCSC in the mid- to late 1960s before going on to work at San Francisco’s KSAN, whose reputation for passionate liberal politics and experimental music O’Hair helped establish. O’Hair also founded Hog Ranch Radio in the 1980s, broadcasting the Strawberry Music Festival near Yosemite twice a year.

After leaving Chico, O’Hair would return periodically to help promote the station, one time wrapping the Trinity bell tower in wire, effectively turning Trinity Hall into an “antenna.” O’Hair also orchestrated a nighttime visit to a newly seeded Kendall Hall lawn, spelling out KCSC in large letters with vegetable seeds. “Since it was brand new grass,” explains Bogel, “they couldn’t go onto it, and so they had to let the zucchinis and artichokes grow out.”

“O’Hair used to call us the ‘radio trench dogs,’ ” says Sharpe. “Whatever the odds, make it happen, keep it going, and have a good time doing it.”

O’Hair died in early 2001 in Eugene, Oregon, of complications from a stroke. He was 58.

Radio Free Chico

Among the many hats that Mike Milward (BA, Political Science, ’76) wears is that of bereavement counselor, work that came about naturally in the wake of his religious studies major, his attendance at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, and his position as chaplain at Sutter Visiting Nurse Association and Hospice in Santa Rosa (2000–2001). Milward, who was KCSC general manager his junior year in 1974–1975, left Chico after graduating and went to work for Catholic Social Service in San Francisco and then to law school at Santa Clara, graduating in 1981. Today he practices civil litigation and business and estate planning in Arnold, California, where he is president of the Ebbets Pass Little League.

“KCSC was like a clubhouse,” says Milward, who came to KCSC by way of his roommate, Valvur, with whom he remains close. “It was a place to hang out between classes. If you were going out on Saturday night, you’d stop by the station first, see who was there, have a cup of coffee, make a request. Andy’s show was metal, all metal. My show was always acoustic. In fact, we took our theme, Radio Free Chico, from a Joni Mitchell song.”

It was under Milward’s management that the station finally began broadcasting 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “We had so many people who wanted shifts, even at 3 or 4 in the morning, that we could fill all the spots,” he notes.

Milward recalls the time the station was sent advance promotional copies of The Who’s Quadrophenia, and the jockeys talked it up all week, “telling people exactly what time Saturday night we were going to premiere it and to get their tape recorders ready. It was a huge deal. Everyone on campus was talking about it,” he says, then laughs. “Unfortunately, Andy started the album on side four.”

No home, no money—no problem

The 1980s and 1990s were tumultuous years for KCSC. The station won several prestigious awards, including Spin magazine’s Best College Station in 1987, and presciently sponsored local concerts by then little-known bands such as Nirvana and Primus. But it was also shut down several times by the AS for alleged financial mismanagement and “partying” by programmers. In 1999, when Chambers Cable (formerly State TV Cable) went digital, KCSC had to switch to Internet-only broadcasting. Unfortunately, most listeners had only primitive dial-up access, which provided virtually unlistenable sound quality.

By the early 2000s, the relationship with the AS, which provides the station with about 95 percent of its current $20,000 operating budget, had grown increasingly strained. Enter Kiser, a junior from Sonoma with a double major in journalism and American studies who had worked at the station as a disc jockey, programmer, and music director for three years when he took over as general manager in the fall of 2005. “It looked like funding was going to be cut so dramatically that we’d be unable to function,” he says. “None of our equipment was working, and the station’s main mixing console not only didn’t work but it was also so old that parts to repair it were no longer available.”

On top of that, the old Reynolds Warehouse on Orange Street, which housed the station, was being demolished to make room for the new Wildcat Activity Center. “Basically, we were homeless,” Kiser says, “and the AS said, ‘No home, no money.’ ”

But Kiser persisted. “For two straight weeks I pleaded with them, saying, ‘Just give us a chance. I can make this work.’ ” Among Kiser’s tactics: hauling broken equipment to the Government Affairs Council meetings “to show them how much disarray things were in” and also playing music in the Free Speech Area from “our ragtag mobile DJ unit” to expose his fellow students to the station and its difficulties. Among his supporters were Ernesto de la Torre (BA, Psychology, ’01), who advised AS programs and the Government Affairs Council, and AS Executive Director David Buckley, who suggested sharing the Rainbo Warehouse space with AS Recycling, into which they moved in 2005.

Kiser is particularly excited about an unprecedented connection to the University itself: a new communication design class, Professor David Welton’s audio production practicum, required of all disc jockeys and other staff, that combines a lecture component with hands-on work at KCSC. The station also broadcasts talk shows for the Women’s Center and the Environmental Action Resource Center and produces The Orion’s podcasts. Additionally, Kiser feels the station will be in good hands with general manager heir apparent Karla Hernandez. On the other hand, the station will have to move out of the warehouse within the next couple years, and as of now, they have nothing lined up—although both Kiser and AS Activity Fees Director Jon Slaughter hope there will be room in the new Wildcat Activity Center (scheduled for completion in spring 2008) or in the Bell Memorial Union.

The power of music

It’s a rainy Monday morning in early April in the KCSC studios. First-semester programmer Martin Svec, a 20-year-old English education major from nearby Hamilton City, turns to his personal laptop sitting on a table beside the control board, opens iTunes, and scrolls through song titles, selecting songs to play.

“My dad’s a pianist,” says Svec, who plays guitar and piano himself, “and I was always into music. I love coming in here, to escape and to hear new music and share it with other people.”

Svec hands me a CD jewel box. “Matisyahu,” he says. “It’s Hebrew for ‘Matthew.’ He kind of blends rock and reggae and talks about the power of music and religion to turn your life around.”

And with that, another song goes out to KCSC listeners around the world. Svec nods in time. “Hasidic reggae,” he says.

To listen to KCSC Radio online, go to kcscradio.com.

About the author

Stephen Metzger (BA, English, ‘78; MA, English, ’81) teaches in the English, journalism, and American studies departments at CSU, Chico. He has been on the air on KCSC, KCHO, and KZFR. He regrets that he was never a patient of Dr. Johnny Fever.