The year was 1980. I had been a dedicated KFAT junky for years, but lived in Mill Valley where the signal was weak and intermittent. I was preparing to sail to Kauai by myself and really wanted to have KFAT for company. I called the station and explained to the manager that I wanted some tapes for the trip but couldn't record them myself because of the signal problem. He generously offered to tape some shows and sent me 8 cassettes that I still have.
The first 3 days of the sail were horrendous â 30 knot winds, 12 foot seas and fog. The boat's electrical system packed it in. I didn't even have enough juice to power my running lights at night so never got to hear the tapes. I made it to Hanalai Bay and several months after returning to the Bay, was on the boat finally listening to my KFAT tapes when in the middle of one I heard, ". . . . and the following medley of Hawaiian music is dedicated to Mike Herz who is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on his way to Hawaii." Even though I didn't get to hear them on the high seas, I was really touched by this KFAT moment!
Where are you when we really need you, KFAT?
From: Bob Simmons
Date: Jan. 20, 2000
Looking at the KFAT pages puts me in a reverie of those moments when we thought the building might float away. Nothing like a little ecstasy on a Monday night. I had the enormous privlege to produce the first two year's of Fat Fries at the Keystone in Palo Alto..... in fact I can still do my opening rap...
"THE SMELL OF BURNING FAT THOSE LOOKS OF LOST CONFUSION AND DISMAY.... THE SOUNDS OF STATIC AND DEAD AIR.... CAN ONLY MEAN ONE THING
THE SHOW THAT KNOWS THE WAY TO SAN JOSE FAR TOO WELL IS ON THE AIR
TONIGHT ...LIVE FROM THE STAGE AT THE KEYSTONE PALO ALTO
THE FAT FRY IS ON THE AIR TONIGHT FEATURING: (Name goes here)
DAN HICKS AND THE (this week's band)
THE CRAMPS
COWBOY FEE AND THE PRAIRIE PASTRIES
THE FABULOUS THUNDERBIRDS
TIM HARDIN
HARDIN AND RUSSELL
CARL PERKINS
KATE WOLF
JILL CROSSTON
CHUCKWAGON AND THE WHEELS
LEO KOTTKE
THE HOODOO RHYTHM DEVILS
THE KLEZMORIM
BOB BROZMAN
WITH COMEDIANS:
BOB SARLATTE
DANA CARVEY
BOBBY SLAYTON
DARYL HENRIQUES
And so Minnie Moore...'ALL BROUGHT TO YOU BY JACK LEWIS VOLKSWAGEN IN SANTA CRUZ WHERE LESS IS MORE..more or less."
It is something I will never forget, nor will I forget all the wonderful people I met and worked with. For those of you who still survive and carry on, I wish you only the best. All things pass...sadly enough...would that god (or some damn thing) grant us the sense to recognize how good it is when it is happening all around us. Bye bye to Jeremy, Gary, Bobby, Freddy, Laura Ellen, and all the hundreds of people who were involved and made for some of those bright moments in what we call our lives....
From Bob Simmons in San Jose, Costa Rica
Wild Bill remembers KFAT - Part 1
(c)1995 by William Goldsmith
I was tuning around the FM dial one evening in 1975 and happened to land on 94.3 - the frequency of KSND, the little Class A (low-powered) FM station from my old home town of Gilroy. I don't remember what they were playing - some kind of spacy, jazzy instrumental, I think - but whatever it was it didn't fit in with the country/western format that the station had at the time, so I waited until the end of the song. It was followed by something even less likely, so now I was intruiged. At the time I was working for KLRB, the hippie rock station in Carmel, where we figured we had the 'cool' audience locked up - and the idea of someone trying to do hip radio from Gilroy of all places was, well, laughable. So I called a couple of the other jocks in the room and we laughed - especially when the jock segued into a country song. Country music - in 1975 - was about as unhip as you could get. This was about the time when Merle Haggard was singing "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee", after all. But here was this dinky little radio station that was obviously trying hard to be hip - playing country music. I didn't get it. Then the D.J. came on and, after rambling through an hour-long set list, announced that we were listening to the first day of programming by a new radio station called KFAT. K-FAT?. Huh? Now I really didn't get it.
But the next day I tuned in again, and the next day too. So finally my curiousity got the better of me and I called over there to see what the hell was going on and I ended up talking to Larry Yurdin - the program director - whose manic, sputtering style of speech and general semi-incoherence led me to believe that he was someone I might enjoy working with. We talked for a while and he invited me down that Saturday to check out the station and do an airshift during the afternoon. I was particularly interested in the new owners' plans to move the frequency to 94.5 - a Class B (high powered) frequency - and to relocate the transmitter to Mt. Loma Prieta, overlooking San Jose, San Francisco, and much of the rest of northern California. So, armed with a big bag of weed and a six-pack, I headed off to Gilroy to show those yokels what hip radio was really all about.
After I did the show, Larry took me aside and told me that I sounded OK, but that I was too, ah, normal, for what he had in mind at KFAT. Normal? Normal? Me? I'd been called a lot of things during my (at that time) brief tenure in the radio biz, but normal? Boy. He really knew how to hurt a guy. A few months later I left the area to live and work in Honolulu and, later, Boston - and I didn't set foot in KFAT until years later when the death of John Lennon shoved me back in that direction. But that's Part 2 of my personal KFAT saga.
Wow. You read this all the way to the end. As you can see from the dates, it's been a while since any of this was updated or added to. Maybe someday...
More great stories from the great story master.
It must have been a great trip cross country with a renegade cat. Wow. November '76... Debbie and I were married for a whole 5 months by then.
Music is definitely the tie that binds.
Thanks brother. I think I had a romantic notion there for a moment but I always leave room for Jell-O. And goodbye. In fact it's incumbent upon us. How we spend it is a uniquely individual choice. Says it all, plus plus plus. Music still on. Drone goes on and on and eventually all but gone.
And KFAT? It's all in the epic flame in that strangely relevant candle. I'm barely a flicker. But hey, long live the cacophony!
Congrats on almost 49 years! Wow. Way beautiful.
Location: Really deep in the heart of South California Gender:
Posted:
Mar 8, 2025 - 9:16pm
oldviolin wrote:
Like, affirmative, or heck yeah. either one.
I remember I was a KLRB listener which was where William was at that time I think. Distinctive timbre in speaking voices stick. I never got to hear him work KFAT. On to Germany by then. Different radio worlds from that angle. I have a gold mine of samples misplaced somewhere inc KFAT and some KLRB, KSAN, numerous others. Quality won't be that good of course but now they're almost artful. I have an AFN syndicated radio program current at the time @'75 of a Keith Moon interview where he talks about, among other things, his love of beach music, etc. He was so much more that the façade of a lunatic. A true artist, like so very many others. But I digress...
I was turned onto KFAT either by some hippie folk I made friends with in Pacific Grove where I holed up off duty, or a soldier friend, Oscar. This Tennessee Oscar and his wife got transferred from Ft Ord before I did. Sadly when they had to leave their kitty had gotten scared of the hub bub and they couldn't find her. Mrs. Oscar pleaded with me to find her and bring with me across the country and drop her off, as I was to pass that way myself on the way to NC a month later. So I did.
It's mid November of 1976. 21 year old me, my Army world, early style boom box and radio recordings from all over in that time, 300 vinyl LPs, a '74 Kawasaki H2 triple, and a renegade cat, all in a borrowed van with a giant graphic AFRO/Power To The People decal on the side, married to I 40 for 3000 miles. It's ok. I had Thai-sticks. Spent that first night or part of it by an overlook in Albuquerque, NM.
There is another Oscar, Oscar Meyers aka "The Wiener King" who was originally from Ohio and was a pal later in Germany. I think it was a name thing but he liked to tout otherwise, hence his legendary if mythic self rendering lol.
He was a witness to a separate and second incident of the smashing of my nose to my face while stumbling drunk off a high dive and doing a jacknorf. You think an elbow to the face hurts, try a knee, especially your own. Cold water kept me conscious but my sinuses were a mess lol. The first occurred with the snowball encased 2lb. chunk of concrete to the forehead caper. Boys playing rough. BTW exhibit A is currently painted gold and sitting on a shelf sans bloody snow having melted long ago...lol
I realize I have told those stories one way or another numerous times in the past almost 19 years but I suppose I'm weaving them around and through because maybe they eventually connect if for no reason than to point me somewhere. Here perhaps. Here I can flesh out other tones or bits of shadow. Plus music of my soul. I make a far better friend than I do an enemy. I strive to be there and then.
Wait. What were we talking about? Oh. KFAT. Might be too much man. I'm not sure. Am I linear thinking it too much possibly?
More great stories from the great story master.
It must have been a great trip cross country with a renegade cat.
Wow. November '76... Debbie and I were married for a whole 5 months by then.
Music is definitely the tie that binds.
I love the story behind the making of that station I.D. from the KFAT story book.
I even have a copy on my playlist of it.
It always seems to segue well into my random next song.
Man. I should have been a DJ.
But as JohnErle (past listener, turned DJ, turned world traveler) once said... "I have the face for radio. But not the voice."
Besides, I love music to much to make a job out of it. And I like to get paid for my work.
Like, affirmative, or heck yeah. either one.
I remember I was a KLRB listener which was where William was at that time I think. Distinctive timbre in speaking voices stick. I never got to hear him work KFAT. On to Germany by then. Different radio worlds from that angle. I have a gold mine of samples misplaced somewhere inc KFAT and some KLRB, KSAN, numerous others. Quality won't be that good of course but now they're almost artful. I have an AFN syndicated radio program current at the time @'75 of a Keith Moon interview where he talks about, among other things, his love of beach music, etc. He was so much more that the façade of a lunatic. A true artist, like so very many others. But I digress...
I was turned onto KFAT either by some hippie folk I made friends with in Pacific Grove where I holed up off duty, or a soldier friend, Oscar. This Tennessee Oscar and his wife got transferred from Ft Ord before I did. Sadly when they had to leave their kitty had gotten scared of the hub bub and they couldn't find her. Mrs. Oscar pleaded with me to find her and bring with me across the country and drop her off, as I was to pass that way myself on the way to NC a month later. So I did.
It's mid November of 1976. 21 year old me, my Army world, early style boom box and radio recordings from all over in that time, 300 vinyl LPs, a '74 Kawasaki H2 triple, and a renegade cat, all in a borrowed van with a giant graphic AFRO/Power To The People decal on the side, married to I 40 for 3000 miles. It's ok. I had Thai-sticks. Spent that first night or part of it by an overlook in Albuquerque, NM.
There is another Oscar, Oscar Meyers aka "The Wiener King" who was originally from Ohio and was a pal later in Germany. I think it was a name thing but he liked to tout otherwise, hence his legendary if mythic self rendering lol.
He was a witness to a separate and second incident of the smashing of my nose to my face while stumbling drunk off a high dive and doing a jacknorf. You think an elbow to the face hurts, try a knee, especially your own. Cold water kept me conscious but my sinuses were a mess lol. The first occurred with the snowball encased 2lb. chunk of concrete to the forehead caper. Boys playing rough. BTW exhibit A is currently painted gold and sitting on a shelf sans bloody snow having melted long ago...lol
I realize I have told those stories one way or another numerous times in the past almost 19 years but I suppose I'm weaving them around and through because maybe they eventually connect if for no reason than to point me somewhere. Here perhaps. Here I can flesh out other tones or bits of shadow. Plus music of my soul. I make a far better friend than I do an enemy. I strive to be there and then.
Wait. What were we talking about? Oh. KFAT. Might be too much man. I'm not sure. Am I linear thinking it too much possibly?
I love the story behind the making of that station I.D. from the KFAT story book.
I even have a copy on my playlist of it.
It always seems to segue well into my random next song.
Man. I should have been a DJ.
But as JohnErle (past listener, turned DJ, turned world traveler) once said... "I have the face for radio. But not the voice."
Besides, I love music to much to make a job out of it. And I like to get paid for my work.
It's like going somewhere to get hurt on purpose and not being disappointed. Gotta love self fulfillment. Damn I love being alive!
edit...ugh... my eyes just crossed reading my own freaking thoughts! lol
anyway shut up
Location: Really deep in the heart of South California Gender:
Posted:
Mar 4, 2025 - 4:44pm
oldviolin wrote:
Yes. Avid listener in '75-'76 here. The world still doesn't know the true ramifications. Part two might be loaded with dice.
Anyhow, one thing ends so another can begin. Tune up your flux capacitor and get ready. If it's anything like those and subsequent years of yore...lol...
Things could get different...
I love the story behind the making of that station I.D. from the KFAT story book.
I even have a copy on my playlist of it.
It always seems to segue well into my random next song.
Man. I should have been a DJ.
But as JohnErle (past listener, turned DJ, turned world traveler) once said... "I have the face for radio. But not the voice."
Besides, I love music to much to make a job out of it. And I like to get paid for my work.
Would you please tell me more detail about whatâs in store with KFAT radio. William made mention recently of it after a classic (unknown to me) track that had the rough edges of early rockâs experimentation. I cannot find info in the various articles based on titles. Makes me think fondly of KUOW (Seattle) evening university DJs opening avenues into styles of music that changed my world. Hope this message gets throughâ¦
Yes. Avid listener in '75-'76 here. The world still doesn't know the true ramifications. Part two might be loaded with dice.
Anyhow, one thing ends so another can begin. Tune up your flux capacitor and get ready. If it's anything like those and subsequent years of yore...lol...
Things could get different...
Would you please tell me more detail about whatâs in store with KFAT radio. William made mention recently of it after a classic (unknown to me) track that had the rough edges of early rockâs experimentation. I cannot find info in the various articles based on titles. Makes me think fondly of KUOW (Seattle) evening university DJs opening avenues into styles of music that changed my world. Hope this message gets throughâ¦
