KERN Bakersfield a portrait of the #1 station in town 1970's

KERN, the #1 station most years in Bakersfield California back in the 70's. Home to Truck-Ken Stevens (Ken Levine) in 1971. Ken wrote about his first radio job, weekends at KERN, earlier this week on his blog http://www.kenlevine.blogspot.com/2010/07/my-first-radio-job.html ...about the shack surrounded by 3 towers..

But some of his memories have faded a bit over the years (just like the front sign at KERN as you can see above). The KERN building back then was a bit bigger than a "shack" - probably the size of a typical 3-bedroom house in Bakersfield..As you can see, KERN spared no expense in maintaining the lavish KERN building and the "grounds" out front.

KERN/1410 was a non-directional station, and they had only the one tower you see in the above pictures.

That's KERN 3-7PM DJ-Program Director-Chief Engineer Johnny Mitchell in the luxury KERN studio in the picture up top. Photos courtesy http://www.bakersfieldtop40.com/

KDES Palm Springs 1977 music survey 6-4-77

KDES was the big Top 40 station for Palm Springs back in the 60's and 70's. Here's a KDES music survey from 1977. 147KXOA's Program Director, Greg Mitchell, started off his radio career at KDES in 1973 doing weekends (from 1973-1975); and in 1976 returned to KDES as a fulltime jock and Music Director for about 4 months. KDES had very unique music rotations, with two different clocks. One was used on even-numbered days of the month, and the other on odd-numbered days. A typical card-file was used to rotate the current music. But the oldies...that was a whole different thing...each jock shift was assigned a small box of oldies (what was in each "box" remained the same each time that group of Oldies was assigned to a jock, unless some of them got changed out with new selections that remained with that "group"). There were a few more than would be needed for your shift, and the jock was allowed to arrange them however he wanted during his shift. The only "musts" were that if this was a day that had the music clock with an Oldie at the top of the hour, you needed to run an uptempo Oldie out of the legal ID and out of the news. Other than that, you could mix them however you wanted on your show. At that time there was no such thing as a recurrent on KDES. The songs rested after they left the chart, and the bigger hits eventually made it to one of the oldie "boxes" later on. In 1976 KDES added a Recurrent catagory and those rotated independantly of the "box" oldies for a bit more variety. This wasn't your typical cardfile Oldies rotations that most Top 40 stations were doing at that time, but it seemed to work for the station.

13-K KGB San Diego 1979 year-end music survey

The original Boss Radio 136/KGB consulted by Bill Drake was gone in 1972 but Top 40 radio returned to KGB in 1979 as "13-K" programmed by John Lander. Here's the 1979 year-end survey from 13-K that also includes the Top 50 songs of the decade (wow!). Images courtesy California Aircheck www.californiaaircheck.com

Roy Rogers Visits 147KXOA's Geoff Richards

If Roy Rogers were still around, the only radio station he'd listen to would be The Giant X - 147 KXOA. That's because his close personal friend Geoff Richards is the 2-6PM (Pacific time zone) DJ there. So be like Roy - check out Geoff Richards this afternoon. Live streaming 24/7 at www.147kxoa.com