September 1993 - Sundance Broadcasting purchased KOY-AM/FM from Edens. KOY-FM was a CHR format; in the doldrums of the format in the early 90s, it had drifted down to a 1.9 share.
Sundance owner Mike Jorgenson owned crosstown AAA station KZON. While Sundance did a high billing country format in Milwaukee (which gave him the ability to pay cash for KZON) and news/talk and oldies in Boise, Jorgy was set on unconventional ways for his Phoenix stations. He moved to the Valley and KZON was basically his personal jukebox. In KOY-FM he saw the potential to create an entirely new rock format and hired several AOR people and engaged consultants like Lee Abrams, Dave Logan, and Guy Zapoleon to dispense advise.
Edens had been tagged with an EEO recruiting violation by the FCC. Before the matter could be resolved, the commissioners began to argue among themselves what actually constituted a violation and how to fairly handle them. This delayed the closing of the sale for about 6 months. In the meantime, the staff was doing dry runs for a rock format in the KZON production room.
Meanwhile, Jorgenson went to a Phoenix Suns game with Edens and watched people dancing in the aisles to upbeat rock and R&B oldies. This led to a eureka moment for Jorgy, who decided that his new KYOT-FM (the calls he had purchased the rights to from somewhere and parked on his Urban AC station at 1230 AM) would become a new format he called Rhythm and Rock. The Coyote would be a mood service kind of radio station, where you would always hear a song that made you feel good - songs that would make people dance in the aisles.
I loved working for this man, but he drove me crazy with this station. First, despite the fact that he'd already hired a PD and the beginnings of an airstaff (including the late M. Dung from San Francisco) he wanted the station to be jockless. Instead he would hire voice talents to perform oddball vignettes to place between the songs. The people he had hired to be on the air would now help write and produce the bits. One of the voice actors was the man who played Mr. Haney on Green Acres. I'm sure he had no idea what the hell we were doing when he read the scripts, but then again, neither did any of us. The PD and most of the staff were gone about 2 weeks after the launch. Me, a college kid who knew automation, was handed the controls. I could never schedule more than a day ahead because our direction changed daily.
We had no research. All we had was a directive to play songs that had tempo, and since this was a Jorgy station, we were frequently told to pick the more obscure. Jorgenson wanted to launch with Ike & Tina Turner. You might have expected a familiar song like Proud Mary would be the pick, but Mike's handpicked launch tune was Nutbush City Limits. No worries, when it came time to launch, the terrified media buyer who won the charity raffle to play the first song (being televised live on the noon news no less) hit the wrong box on the touchscreen and we rolled Todd Rundgren "Bang The Drum All Day" instead.
So every morning I would check my email to find out what songs the owner liked and didn't like, while the creative director would try to figure out what wacky crap we could put between the songs and call it a radio station. The first Arbitron had come in: Y-95's last numbers were a 1.9 and we had a 0.9. Sales could only sign an annual contract with an adult bookstore, The Castle Boutique. The format was a tough sell and nobody got it.
At one point, KCBS in LA had success with its ARROw format and somebody got their hands on a printout of the library... but the owner red-lined most of the songs because he didn't like them. One day we would go more new wave. Another day more classic rock. And the soul category was filled with clunkers that killed every set.
So meetings were held and decisions made. A NAC station in Seattle had flipped format, so Jorgy called them and arranged to purchase the CD library and hired its PD. We went out and bought Sony portable DAT recorders and hired NAC talents like Talaya Trigueros, Barbara Blake, and Blake Lawrence to record voice tracks to DAT and overnight them to us. Cliff Smith, who used to be at WJJZ in Philly moved to Phoenix to do mornings.
We had about a month to put this all together from the time we decided to blow up Rhythm and Rock to go smooth jazz - in Jorgenson's words, "let the programming people program and let (him) focus on revenue." Around the same time, John Sebastian was hired as PD at classic rock KSLX. So I was directed to monitor KSLX and put Sebastian's library on KYOT, but with tighter rotations to basically mess with him while still working on the mechanics of doing a remotely voice tracked Smooth Jazz station before any of the technology we have to remotely voice track existed. All of us had screwed up KYOT so badly that this next one had to be perfect.
As I said, Mike drove me crazy. But looking back, had he paid for music research and not been so opposed to mainstream pop/rock music, there's a lot of The Coyote in the Variety Hits formats like Jack and Bob-FM. They just did everything correctly and we were pretty much flipping poop at the walls playing songs that nobody wanted to hear. This could have been a great radio station... I mean, we had Abrams and Zapoleon on retainer - but we never did an auditorium test and we ignored much of what they were telling us because that was "too radio."
For everyone who says that consultants and research are bad and more stations should just be creative and do something different... I have lived through that nightmare. Listen to your research. Listen to your advisors. Flinging poop at the walls is not a strategy.
So in March 1994, I had a board op come in and midnight and start tracking albums and went to bed for a little bit. At 6 AM I returned and began emptying the CD jukeboxes of the old format and loading in the new one while tracking discs like The Wall. By 6 PM, Rhythm and Rock was dead and Smooth Rhythms was born.
(Yeah, there was a bit of anti-radio going on with The Coyote, too... It wasn't until Broadcast Architecture came in to do a music test and Frank Cody decided to use that opportunity to have the audience tell the owner to his face that we should call the station Smooth Jazz and use a sax in the logo so people would get it that we stopped trying to be un-radio and start acting like a radio station. You can also thank Jorgy for Geoffery Holder becoming the station voice of so many Smooth Jazz stations after we launched.)
KYOT was a mess unit it stopped being a mess. Then it thrived. What a time to learn how to do radio.
And now, thanks to former PD Nick Francis's archives, here's what it sounded like at the Desert Botanical Garden launch party in March 2014:
https://soundcloud.com/quietmusic/kyot-opening-night-festivities?in=quietmusic/sets/kyot-archives
