Statesman Journal from Salem, Oregon • Page 55

Sfatesmon-Journol, Salem, Friday, April 10, 1981, 3F 333T i- Happy birthday, baby Mighty 91 airs again Statesman-Journal pholo by Gerry Lrwui KKSN program director Bob Simmons By HOWARD GOODMAN Slalean as-Journal Reporter PORTLAND Maybe you were driving one of those notoriously boring stretches of 1-5 on your way to Portland. And the car radio was AM only. And you were sure that if you heard one more minute of Top 40 radio, your brain would melt like a bruised banana. So you diddled with the knob. And there, somewhere in the middle of the dial, in between the ubiquitous Mickey Gilley and Debbie Boone, you heard Canned Heat doing "Going up the Country." As you wondered what you'd done to deserve such such a good old blues tune, along came the nearly forgotten "Ballad of Easy Rider" by Roger McGuinn.

THEN A MINUTE OF comedian Rodney Dangerfield. A brand-new slasher from the Rolling Stones. A Tex-Mex tune from Joe King Caru-sco. "Woolly Boolly" from Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs. You had stumbled onto the radio station of a rock 'n' roller's dreams.

"This is Kissin' Radio, the Mighty 91. That was the Beatles, with 'One After 909' from the 'Let it Be' album. Then we heard Chubby Checker with a version of 'Twist and Then Phoebe Snow, from her new album, Jackson Browne singing along with her. Now here's Taj Old hits, obscure gems, just-breaking favorites. This is programming with a spin on it, music radio that isn't supposed to exist any more intelligent, irventive, good-natured, even (dare we say it?) progressive.

MORE SURPRISING, it showers Portland over AM, a wave band normally so torpid the initials ought to stand for "absolutely moribund." KKSN.910 on the dial, breaks the usual rules. After one year on the air, broadcasting on moxie, instinct and a canny understanding of music and audience, it's proving that creativity can some times make a profit. But don't reach for the controls just yet. If you live in Salem, chances are you can't hear KKSN. The station cuts out just north of Woodburn.

The 5.000-watt transmitters beam to the west, over Portland and Vancouver, out to sea. You can catch KKSN in McMinnville, folks at the station say. Lincoln City hears it loud and clear. But in Salem? With luck and a good antenna you can catch it after dark. So try to picture a radio station you've never heard.

Picture the best record collection you can. Now imagine that a buddy of yours with a great sense of humor is set loose on it, impelled by no other idea than to keep you surprised and grinning. YOU AREN'T GOING to hear Barry Manilow and John Denver. It's going to be quick dashes of Janis Joplin, Commander Cody and Lost Planet Airmen, the Everty Brothers, Question Mark and the Mysterians, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Mariey, Buddy Holly. "Twenty-five years of rock and roll," music award for the state's best metropolitan radio news, it is the station's most highly rated program, Failing said.

THE STATION AIRS a poetry show. It has put on plays. It has Portland's only New Wave music show and some of the city's few soul offerings. It's got gospel music on Sunday mornings. Yet it's commmercial.

After a year the station celebrated its birthday this week with a dance at the Euphoria Tavern here KKSN is nearly in the black, Failing said. During the day, it captures the third largest audience among Portland's 25- to 34-year-olds, he said, and that's the big-spending baby-boom population whom advertisers love. KKSN is the descendant of the old KISN, Portland's first rock radio when it started in 1959 and a leader until 1976, when it went off the air after the ownership fell into disfavor with the Federal Communications Commission. "Most people grew up listening to KISN," Kehoe said. "For years the offices downtown were a Portland fixture.

You could see the disc jockey through a window. Stopping by there was a real highlight of going downtown when you were a teen-ager." THREE COMPANIES BID for the license after the station went dark. Three years of litigation later, the companies merged with the locally owned Fort Vancouver Broadcasting Co. in control. Last April the Mighty 91 was back on the air.

It offered the same jingles, the same invaluable library of singles. But there was a difference. The difference was mostly program director Bob Simmons. Simmons, a witty man with a dulated Texas accent, is a veteran of San Francisco's KSAN, the sainted free-form radio station that became synonomous with progressive Sixties music. The station declined with the death of its guiding personality, disc jockey Tom Donohue, in 1975.

Finally a conglomerate bought it. Last November, in epitaph to the San Francisco Sound, KSAN went country. SIMMONS DOESN'T mourn the lack of discipline that was free-form radio's downfall. But he can't stand the shallowness and predictability of so much modern radio. "Radio programming doesn't have room for personality anymore," he said.

"It doesn't 'research' well. Young listeners don't know what a great radio personality can be. They've never heard Jack Benny or Fred Allen or Dan Sorkin in Chicago or Don Imus in New York or Terry McGovem in San Francisco." Simmons does KKSN's morning show and keeps his ear on what the other disc jockeys are playing, letting them know when they're getting too extravagantly experimental or too dull "like a sheepdog, nipping at their heels." A gray-haired man of 40, given to blue jeans and a comfortable sweater, Simmons' own musical epiphany came with Bob Dylan's early albums. They and a slew of jazz records established Simmons' taste for strong melody, lyrics that say something about the world, and interesting twists. AND SO THE TYPICAL KKSN segment: The Beatles rarely-heard version of "A Taste of Honey" followed by the Mamas and the Papas' 1967 "Monday Monday." Then a brand-new Eric Clapton version of a long slow blues by Sleepy-John Estes.

Jump to to "My Boyfriend's Back" from the Angels (1963) and "Why Must I Be a Teen-ager in Love?" by Dion and the Belmonts (1959). Fast-forward to a new one by the still-vita" Rick Nelson, "Back to School Days." Little Feat with the recent "Oh, Atlanta." Talking Heads. Roxy Music. Jefferson Starship. Fifteen years ago Simmons was putting on dances at San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom.

Today he's reading a market research report. "This shows us that we're on the right track," he said. The survey says listeners like the minimum of talk from the deejays, like the oldies, like the wide-open play list. It shows that the main audience is just who the station wants: those 25- to 34-year-olds. THEY BUY HALF OF the nation's record albums and a tot of the nation's blue jeans and drive a lot of the nation's cars.

When younger, they were the protest generation and the country's most influential trend-setters. Now they're buying a lot of the nation's homes and insurance policies. "If anything," Simmons said, "they're telling us just don't jive us. Don't be dishonest. Don't be cute.

That's what we try to give them." director Corey Kehoe said proudly. "We're giving you musical history." She sits at two turntables, record albums stacked around her, piled at her feet. She's screening new releases for possible airplay. We're in a trailer in the almost-farm country east of Portland, next to a lumber mill and the station's transmitters. KKSN, officially licensed to Vancouver, doesn't have a real office yet.

The place looks just right. Posters of The Who and San Francisco Examiner clippings about a recent Bay Area earthquake pepper the walls. People in sports coats, high heels and surplus Army jackets waft in and out. Phones ring. KEHOE, SAMPLING another Elvis Presley reissue, is at work.

She's paid to listen to the releases mailed in by record companies. She scours record bins in second-hand stores. In the current world of radio, these are practically revolutionary acts. Formats today are so strictly regulated by market research that many stations refuse to play music that hasn't been tested on model audiences in Akron. That's why so much radio sounds fit for elevators and not much else.

Stations are typically owned by out-of-town outfits and programmed by equation. If the format isn't AOR (album-oriented rock), it's MOR (middle-of-the-road). If it isn't all-talk all-news, it's Top 40, Golden Oldie, Contemporary Country or Easy Listening. It played in Atlanta; it can play in Oregon. THE ROCK LEADERS in Portland are easily defined.

KGON is heavy, man. KGW is hit singles. KINK is music to grow your houseplants by. No such luck summing up KKSN. "We get people who are willing to take a chance with radio," said Bill Failing, general manager.

"The trouble is, people are so conditioned that they either like it or they don't understand it." The differences extend beyond music. Each weekday morning at 7, the station halts everything to present a 91-minute local newscast based on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," put together by a five-person news team and a traffic reporter who rides around in a sidecar motorcycle. The winner of last year's Associated Press.