Back in the 1980s, KIKK was the top-rated overall station in Houston and the unofficial flagship country station for the entire nation, much as Los Angeles's KROQ has long been for rock. The call letters were more than just a means for station identification -- they signified the dominant lifestyle of Anglo Houston. KIKKers drove their KIKK-up trucks to the honky-tonk. There were KIKK clothes, KIKK marriages and KIKK divorces. KIKK was Gilley's, the Luv Ya Blue era and the Urban Cowboy movement.
How the mighty have fallen. The latest ratings had KIKK ranked 20th, sandwiched between KPRC and KSEV -- Houston's dueling rabid-right talk/rant stations. And now it's gone, replaced by the sugary effluent of smooth jazz. It's almost as bad as J.R. Richard living under a bridge, Kiddie Wonderland being bulldozed to make way for an Eckerd, or the Oilers leaving town. Oh, wait, those things happened too
KIKK suffered a mortal wound back in 1993 when Westinghouse bought the station, and it's been bleeding out ever since. KIKK was second in the ratings in the early '90s, playing the neo-traditionalist country of Dwight Yoakam, George Strait and Randy Travis. But the new owners had a cunning plan to keep it at the top of the heap: Fire all the DJs everybody loved and bring in the line-dance-crazed Young Country of such hunky nonentities as Neal McCoy, Bryan White, Little Texas and Sawyer Brown.
When that pseudo-movement fizzled, KIKK flipped to a Texas country format. While the station's recent "Houston's Country Alternative" and "Sounds Like Texas" playlists were never all they were cracked up to be, the station was one of the only places on the dial where you could find anything outside the dreary corporate norm. While most recently that was only a little Jack Ingram and Robert Earl Keen at best -- and Cory Morrow and Pat Green ad nauseam at worst -- it was still something.
No more. The Wave will be taking no chances in its bid to bring waiting room/porno soundtrack music to the masses. The press release tells us that the formula for the station has been tried and tested in markets like Dallas, Los Angeles and Detroit. Surely Houston will be just as susceptible as those cities to the siren song of Kenny G.'s tooting sax.
The news release also hints at another reason for the switch: "format overlaps." In other words, there were simply too many country stations in Houston. KIKK was getting hammered in the ratings by its Infinity sister station KILT-FM and its Cox Communications competitor 93Q Country. Until the January putsch of general manager Garland Ganter, even KPFT, a noncommercial station that doesn't report its ratings, was probably giving KIKK a run for its money.
One former KIKK listener who agrees with the format overlap view is Joe Parsons, a.k.a. The River Oaks Redneck. The retired, grandly mustachioed Parsons, a fixture at Blanco's and on the statewide honky-tonk circuit, sends out a weekly e-mail newsletter about "O.K.O.M.," which is his acronym for "Our Kind of Music," by which he means Texas (and Oklahoma) country.
"Well, I expected it to go," he says, citing the fact that former program director Darren Davis had recently moved on to Detroit and some of the KIKK jocks were known to have been in résumé update mode the last few weeks. "And it deserved to go, quite frankly," Parsons adds. "I can't see how Infinity was so stupid as to have two of their stations competing with each other in a market that has been dwindling for years. And of course, it's been dwindling because of the quality of the music." Parsons hopes that KIKK's void will be filled by a real Texas country/bluegrass/Americana station.
Cactus Records general manager Quinn Bishop doesn't believe there were too many country stations, but he does agree with Parsons about the quality of the music. "The answer is not changing to a new format," he says. "It's the music they're playing within their format. There's nothing creative happening ever with most stations. I'm sorry, but if you're a Clear Channel or Infinity station, odds are you're not doing anything too creative."
People like Davis will tell you that KIKK tried the vision thing. Last year the station flipped from the dreadful Young Country format to Houston's Country Alternative, a flawed but promising blend of Texas country, classic rock and Nashville schlock. The ratings took off like a bottle rocket and fell back to earth just as fast. Since KIKK was never really the Texas country station it purported to be, it's hard to say now if its doom was sealed by introducing Billy Joe Shaver and Charlie Robison in the mix, or the fact that they would sprinkle Shania Twain, Tim McGraw and CSN's "Love the One You're With" in between. (The station's waning Sounds Like Texas months found it playing much less Texas music, but still more than the competition.)