Despite the fact that The Who’s “I’m Free,” was the first song played (by Fant) on KLOL in 1970, freedom ultimately proved to be ephemeral for the legendary station. To quote “Slip Kid,” another Who song, “There’s no easy way to be free.”
Freedom is a theme that comes up frequently in Runaway Radio, a film produced and directed by Houston media blogger Mike McGuff. KLOL broke damn near every rule that had previously governed FM radio, raising a middle finger to local blue noses and keepers of decency for over thirty years. Meantime, KLOL was generating huge ratings and even bigger profits as one of the most successful rock and roll stations in the country. We’re talking powerhouse. The Big Kahuna. King Kong. As Levi Booker, an overnight jock at KLOL during the ‘70s, says, “It was the shit.”
But significant changes in radio ownership rules resulting from the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 eventually brought the halcyon days of hippies and hard rock to a close in 2004, when KLOL’s new owners flipped the station to a Spanish-language format.
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“I tuned in to Outlaw Radio, and I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard a radio show like this before.’ And at Lamar High School, they were talking about KLOL in the hallways. ‘Did you hear what they did the other day? That was crazy!’”
McGuff began production of Runaway Radio in 2010. Progress was initially slow, due to other work responsibilities and a growing family. But some of the delays had to do with locating the materials that needed to be included in the film. “We were waiting for people to find stuff,” McGuff says. “People knew that they had boxes of pictures and videos, and sometimes, four years later, it was, ‘Hey, do you still want this? I just found it in my closet.’”
Considering that KLOL has now been off the air for almost 20 years, a bit of history is in order. KLOL (or KTRH-FM, as it was originally known) had been owned since 1947 by the Jones family (officially the Rusk Corporation). The company also held the license for KTRH, a full-service AM station which broadcast from the Rice Hotel, hence the call letters. Much later, some radio insiders claimed that KTRH stood for “Keep the Resume Handy,” but that’s another story.
Initially, KLOL simulcast programming from its AM sister station, but by the mid-‘60s, Federal Communications Commission rules mandated that FM stations in larger markets (like Houston) had to generate some of their own programming. After experimenting for a while with rock and roll during the evening hours, the Rusk Corporation decided to go all in and launched a 24-hour underground rock format in 1970. Jocks could play whatever music they wanted, and a hippie ethos prevailed.
An early logo featured a marijuana leaf rising out of the “O” in KLOL. Houston businessman John T. Jones, who was running the Rusk Corporation at the time, was in on the joke. In the documentary, his son Jay Jones (who later helmed the company) recalls asking his father what was going on with the new station bumper stickers. “My dad absolutely knew what it was. There is no doubt about it. I saw the logo and said, ‘Dad! Wow! What is that?’ I was in college. He said, ‘Oh, it’s merely an ecology fern.’ He had a twinkle in his eye. He knew exactly what it was.”
McGuff does an admirable job of tracing KLOL’s history from its underground era to its glory days to the station’s demise. Several of the more prominent disc jockeys are interviewed, including Jim Pruett, Crash, Dayna Steele, Colonel St. James, Outlaw Dave, Grego and Keith Miles (aka the Night Watchman). Newsman Brian Hill shows up, as does Lanny (“Traffic in Bondage”) Griffith.
A number of musician types recruited by McGuff are more than happy to sing the praises of KLOL in the doc, among them Lyle Lovett, Melissa Etheridge, Sammy Hagar and Dusty Hill from ZZ Top. Back then, even major rock stars took notice and thought the station was cool as hell.“The public we were living with had seen everything but live sex and human sacrifice. And we were pushing the envelope to get them just as close as we could to that.”
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McGuff spends most of his time in Runaway Radio telling the story of how KLOL reached its apex in the years between 1983, when original Program Director Pat Fant returned as General Manager, and 1993, when the Rusk Corporation sold the station. This was the era when Houston drivers might spot KLOL billboards with a 40-foot-wide brassiere hanging below it or an actual Corvette bursting through the station’s logo.
Distinctive promotions played a large role in KLOL’s success, blazing trails down which few have dared to tread since. “The public we were living with had seen everything but live sex and human sacrifice,” Promotions Director Doug Harris recalls in the film. “And we were pushing the envelope to get them just as close as we could to that.”
How important were the station’s promotions? “Oh, that was huge. I don’t know that, without that, they could have been as big as they were, with Doug Harris and Pat Fant working together in the ‘80s, coming up with these super over the top promotions. I guess everything was big and flashy in the ‘80s, so it perfectly met with what people were expecting at that time, and they overdelivered. And if they did it big one time, they had to do it bigger the next time,” McGuff says.
The saga of KLOL could not be properly told without attending to the phenomenon that was Stevens and Pruett. Radio veterans Mark Stevens and Jim Pruett first teamed up in the mid ‘70s for the morning show at KILT-AM as the latest in a series of Hudsons and Harrigans. After working in Dallas for several years, Fant lured the duo back to Houston with the promise of, well, lots of money.
It would be an understatement to say that the semi-filthy S&P took Houston by storm. Fant’s investment paid off quickly, but along with success came plenty of controversy, which KLOL capitalized on, launching an “I admit it! I listen to Stevens and Pruett!” promotional campaign.
It should be noted that Stevens and Pruett didn’t always get away with it, as KLOL was dinged with FCC fines after community complaints regarding the show’s content. Stevens viewed the fines as a badge of honor, displaying a canceled check from KLOL to the FCC in a frame in his guest bathroom.
Could the station have pulled all this off without resolute support from the Jones family? John T. Jones with the aforementioned marijuana leaf and later Jay Jones with S&P’s “Sex Survey” hour during morning drive?
“I think it was very important,” McGuff says. “From what the dj’s and staff members say themselves in the film, that that really made all the difference. Now there would be times that they did not have the fanciest studios, but at the same times, they said that they could go into the owner’s office and say, ‘Hey, we have this idea. Can we do this?’ There weren’t layers of management – or management at a corporate level in another city – so they could be very nimble."
McGuff managed to corral an impressive number of major players in the KLOL story for his film. Crash and Jim Pruett are gone now, but interviews were recorded before their passings. The biggest hole in Runaway Radio is the absence of Mark Stevens, who died in 2010, before McGuff began work on the documentary. Melissa Stevens, Mark’s wife, appears in the film in his stead.
After a bit of conversation, McGuff begins to discuss an additional motivation which caused him to begin production on Runaway Radio. As it turns out, a film about wacky radio shenanigans ended up bringing together three people whose lives have been similarly affected in a most serious way.
McGuff’s mother died from Alzheimer’s disease in 2005. “One of the main reasons I started this documentary is because of Alzheimer’s. Because I was so angry and upset. So it was a great outlet to deal with that. I had to have something positive to focus on, that was like a creative outlet. People probably think I’m crazy for doing this, but I think in some ways it really helped me in the long run. I don’t know that, if my mom didn’t die from Alzheimer’s, I would have done this movie.”
When McGuff began interviewing Melissa Stevens, he found that Mark Stevens died from Alzheimer’s disease. “Just talking to her about what she went through with Mark. She was a caregiver and I was a caregiver," McGuff says. "That actually, in a lot of ways, helped me, because I hadn’t talked to anyone about that. And then Dayna [Steele] went through it [with her mother]. Dayna and I still talk about it. Dayna and I actually started a team for the Alzheimer’s Association walk, called ‘The Steele Workers’ of course.
With appearances by so many KLOL veterans in Runaway Radio, I wondered if McGuff could perhaps mention some unsung heroes that didn’t make it into the film. “The sales department,” McGuff says. “They had to figure out how to sell this. And they did figure out how to sell it. Because if they hadn’t made money, they would have changed formats.”
Runaway Radio: The Rise and Fall of KLOL-FM is available on multiple streaming platforms. The film will be screened at the Alamo Drafthouse in LaCenterra at Cinco Ranch on Saturday, March 2, at 6 p.m., 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m., and on Sunday, March 3, at 1 p.m. For more information, visit drafthouse.com/Houston or call 281-492-6900.
