Radio XYZ of San Diego Radio Past (April 1, 2011)

Angelo Fernando was the owner of XYZ-FM, 98.5 FM which was once blasting 100,000 watts of power from a really high mountain north of Ensenada into several nooks and crannies of San Diego county during the 60s through the 90s. For a brief time in the 70s, Coyoteman Jake, a ripoff of Wolfman Jack, was one of the top deejays broadcasting from a studio near Rosarito Beach where XYZ's satellite offices were for the benefit of Tijuana's advertisers.

The station was broadcasting so many watts that it often was picked up clearly in Orange County and Ventura County.

In the 60s, XYZ-FM played mostly R&B and soul songs whether they were hits or not with Coyoteman Jake, at least in pre-recorded form, talking over the beginnings and endings of songs 24 hours a day.

In late 1975, when the old format took a dive, XYZ switched to Lady 98.5, playing easy pop adult contemporary songs for women. That station didn't do too well. It was dead last in the ratings.

In the mid 1970s while many radio stations were playing mostly mainstream pop and rock music, XYZ-FM had to do something to break out and decided to break through the music barriers and take chances that other Top 40 stations wouldn't dare to try.

It was March 15, 1977 (the day Three's Company and Eight is Enough premiered), and 98.5 FM was foundering in its final hours as a poorly-rated easy pop radio station. It was 4:59pm when we heard Barbra Streisand's hit "Evergreen" played on 98.5 for the last time ever. Then, right in the middle of the song, we heard the sound of a needle scratching the record, then a loud crash. After that, a deep echoing voice came on "If you want to hear Barbra Streisand sing ever again, please tune in to Magic 91, KCBQ, or B100. For those who want to come with us to escape the mainstream scene, we salute you!"

Then, at 5pm sharp, the first song we heard on 98.5, was "Anarchy in the UK" by the Sex Pistols, followed by Boston's "More Than a Feeling," then KC and the Sunshine Band's "I'm Your Boogie Man", followed by a Mary McGregor song getting "blown up" in a bumper spot before we hear AC/DC playing "Dream On", then the Ramones' "Beat on the Brat", then Thelma Houston's "Don't Leave Me This Way", then the Eagles' "Life in the Fast Lane", followed by Devo's "Mongoloid",...you get the idea!

An alternative to KCBQ, B100, and Magic 91 was born for residents of San Diego and beyond as Radio XYZ signs on becoming an influential pop, rock, and disco dance station that also played novelty music, punk, and in a few years, new wave, avant garde, reggae (it was the first station to play Bob Marley when he was still alive), glam, funk, old school, hard rock, heavy metal, synth pop, ska, British romantica, MTV hair bands, dancable sides of modern, punk, and R&B, and many many more.

"Nowhere on XYZ would you ever hear Debby Boone sing 'You Light Up My Life,' ever," says founder Brian Robinson, who was the programmer and marketer of his San Diego-based company, America's Programming Radio In Liking Fun Openness Of Love, which made no sense, but it worked. Robinson paid owner Fernando a monthly rental fee for the rights to use Ferando's Mexican-owned radio station for Robinson's format.

Robinson invented the "Radio XYZ" brand after being fed up with switching around the dial.

"I keep hearing some good songs, but then they play some wimp songs I do not have the patience to sit through," says Robinson. "I designed this station so you can hear all the great rocking pop songs whether you like rock or funk or underground."

Where else could you hear Brick's "Dazz" followed by Manfred Mann's "Blinded By The Light", then some British punk band, then the Sylvers' "Hot Line", and recent hits that matter.

"We wouldn't play s--- like Chicago, Firefall, that lispy guy who sang about some f---ing year of the cat, and Barry Manilow," Robinson continues. "Why Top 40's programmers program that ultimate ear torture is beyond reason and I'm here to give the listeners a one-stop solution to hearing all the hits without the misses."

By September of 1978, XYZ-FM was the #1-rated radio station serving the San Diego county area, giving KCBQ and B100 a run for their money, and even siphoning off listeners from KPRI and KGB.

"We got the balls to rock and groove you in one place," says former XYZ morning man Rick The Rocketman. "We also got the teens to listen by playing the rockier teenybopper hits such as Shaun Cassidy, Bay City Rollers, KISS, and even The Sylvers, and the older folks still listened to them because they sounded good in the first place, unlike today's teenage singers who just look good but don't deliver the goods."

"Funny music was a regular staple of XYZ," says comic jock Chester the Jester (not the same man as the KFMB-8 kid show clown). "I came down here to San Diego in 1977 to share in some ideas, and aside of British punk, I also got the programmer to include tracks from Steve Martin, Cheech and Chong, Barnes and Barnes, Frank Zappa, and many other so-called novelty songs mixed in with all that other stuff we were playing."

By the end of 1978, XYZ-FM begen their regular "Saturday Night Live Parties" at different locations throughout the county. The station would host early live SNL feeds at 8:30pm for the bar patrons, then some comedy acts, then repeat SNL at 11:30.

"The partygoers ate the nights up," says nightman Nightowl John. "We couldn't find a bar that was big enough to hold all the patrons, so we had to set up TV's outside and the patrons could at least watch Samaurai Hotel Clerk or Roseanne Roseannadanna even if they couldn't get inside the bar."

In the beginning of 1978, XYZ-FM started doing contests tied to TV shows including "Who Was on the Love Boat" or "What Happened to The Bradfords" among other quizzes.

In 1980, the TV contests were replaced with "Name That New Waver" featuring clips of new wave records and listeners could claim the album wence it came from if they named that song.

In 1981, they brought back some TV tie-in contests because many people who were working afternoons and didn't have a VCR wanted to know "What Happened on General Hospital?"

"That daytime soap with Luke, Laura, Scorpio, and some Cassadine storyline ripped from a Batman comic was so big in 1981 that we had quizzes about the soap for about three years," says Russ Sniff, former contest conductor of XYZ-FM. "So we decided to do daily GH updates while people were driving to work and again when people were at home, as well as doing updates on some prime-time shows that were popular such as Dallas, Magnum P.I., and we even reran some Johnny Carson monologues from the previous weeknight in the mornings on our morning show, and even quizzed the listeners on how much they remembered from hearing the updates and they won prizes."

In the early 80's after disco died so to speak, XYZ-FM concentrated on the alternative and hard rock, as well as funky R&B, new wave, and other odd rock imports that not even their competeting San Diego radio stations would touch.

"In 1981, San Diego radio was toast," said Brian. "K105 was a dog and was gone by that fall. B100 played wimp pop. Even KGB and KPRI were relatively dinosaurs still playing the mainstream even though some were playing some forms of new wave, as well as funk punk like Rick James and R&B dance."

Also in mid 1981, XYZ-FM picked up "The Dr. Demento Show" Sunday nights to air after a now-defunct competeting rock station formerly on 107.7 FM in San Diego picked up the live four-hour KMET-FM feed from Los Angeles when it signed on in 1980.

"We were #1 in odd music and Demento was a perfect fit," Brian says. "We also played the hits from Dickie Goodman, Weird Al, and too many novelty acts to mention during our history."

XYZ-FM also played remixes of popular songs, which would be the basis of the format of Power 106 in Los Angeles when it debuted in 1986 featuring pop remixes.

"Bring on the dance mixes," says Brian. "They've targeted the dance genre perfectly in the late 80's, beating out the Top 40 mainstream KIIS."

XYZ-FM also had on-location TV watching parties, involving contests designed for fun, community drives, bad record blowup parties, MTV balls, and beach parties centered around Radio XYZ's brand of music."

While many Top 40 stations came and went, XYZ-FM thrived by not playing the boring soft songs, but keeping the music as exciting as their jocks.

"We killed 13K, Mighty 690, KS-103, and Q106," says Brian. "But we couldn't get 91X, which played about 1/3 of what we were playing, but they played a lot more songs even we weren't playing ourselves and I salute them for that in the early 80's."

The 1990's brought many changes in XYZ-FM. Gone were the older hits and changes included a darker mix of hits from the genres of grunge, heavy metal, alternatve R&B, and techno.

"The 90's weren't friendly for upbeat songs due to a recession around the time, so we reflected it," says Brian. "But we still played the remixes of pop and alternative music."

XYZ-FM's techno songs spawned MARS-FM in Santa Monica to specialize in the genre in 1991, then L.A.'s Power 106 began playing some techno to counter that. "We were influential in electronic music before anyone else in the nation," says Brian.

The mid 90's were beginning to take a toll on XYZ-FM's popularity as other stations caught on some of their genres and readjusted their formats accordingly.

Says Brian, "91X played the grunge, Flash played the Euro alternative, MORE-FM played the techno, and house music was dying in the mid 90's. Flash's FlashZone played the kind of dance modern rock we were playing, but other stations originating from San Diego were also creating other offshoots of our format with numerous knockoffs of us in 1995-96."

In 1999, Radio XYZ's ratings took a nosedive as the number of quality songs that filled their wide range of rocking genres dwindled to few and far between.

"We got nothing but s--- teen bands, cookie-cutter rock, and electronica that just made noise," says Brian. "The other stations ripped us off and we've paid the price!"

In February 2000, the death toll began to sound for Radio XYZ as all the live jocks were fired, and they went to a hard drive programming. In early April through mid May 2000, the last 45 days of its existance, Radio XYZ played a chronology of American Pop Music from 1955 through 1999 by playing almost every pop record ever recorded so to speak during the last 1080 hours of Radio XYZ's existance.

Each day focused on playing about 300 songs from each of the years until they got to 1999, then on Wednesday, May 17, there was a farewell Radio XYZ party as the jocks reminisented on the last 23 years of Radio XYZ's existance.

"It was odd that the last day of Radio XYZ would coincide with the last episode of Beverly Hills 90210," says Brian. "We used to do TV parties on 90210, Melrose Place, Friends, and Seinfeld on a weekly basis like we did on the old SNL."

The final songs that Radio XYZ played that night before Midnight included "The End," by The Doors, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," by Elton John, "Goodbye" by Oingo Boingo, "Goodbye Stranger," by Supertramp, "Rock and Roll Never Forgets," by Bob Seger, "Carry That Weight/Oh Yea/The End," by The Beatles, "Happy Trails," by Van Halen, and finally, "Her Majesty," by The Beatles. Then the station went dark.

When it signed on the next morning, 98.5 began playing endless versions of "Macarena" over and over again for several days, with instructions for listeners to tune in another station. On Tuesday, May 30th, 98.5 went dark for good as Fernando folded up his radio station and sold the license and the studios to another Ensenada broadcaster.

Some more trivia: Radio XYZ had its own version of "The Last Contest" in the mid 1990's, but it was a tie-in to a Seinfeld episode. Enough said. Also, XYZ used to have a weekly "Homegrown" program featuring upcoming local bands, as well as a weekly countdown program where they counted down the entire Billboard Hot 100 starting at 4am Sunday mornings from 1978 through 1993. Radio XYZ signed on just four months after the old Thunderbolt 90.7 FM debuted in November of 1976, which played just the Top 40 mainstream rock and disco hits; the bolt went out like a thud in 1979.

Radio XYZ's bumper spots made fun of the artists they DON'T play.

"We're not heard on XYZ because we can't sing a decent song!", fakes a band of people imitating groups like Firefall and Debby Boone.

And finally, Radio XYZ was once simulcasting Video Rock San Diego's cable TV signal channel 27 in a cooperative effort to combine stereo with TV back in 1983 during the early evenings from 6-8pm; the effort lasted less than three months and was dropped the month that the station picked up the stereo simulcast of Friday Night Videos in August 1983.

Radio XYZ did an Aeroworkout (a ripoff of Aerobicise seen on Showtime) at 6:30am weekday mornings playing new wave and disco songs during 1981-1982.

XYZ had a Saturday night remix show featuring dance remixes of alternative rock and pop songs for 10 hours from 6pm until 4am from 1984-1993.

Radio XYZ never streamed on the Internet.

Radio XYZ had a nightly Top 10 at 10 show from 1978-97. The longest #1 hit ever on the survey... "Bette Davis Eyes", by Kim Carnes, May 4, 1981 through July 29, 1981!

Radio XYZ's morning show featured comedy cuts daily from 7:10-7:25.

A brief cheap knockoff called The Bug 104.1 ran a taped-version of XYZ in 1979...it was gone by October.

Radio XYZ and its' predecessors on XYZ-FM 98.5 had some interesting pranks over their history.

1964: The Beatles are coming to this radio station! That caused many people to jam the San Diego-Tijuana border for hours until an hour later when the deejay announced that it was a joke!

1966: Time Change Effective Immediately by Presidental Order! It happened some four weeks before it really was the start of Daylight Saving Time.

1969: The Archies Play Live at San Diego Stadium! They're cartoons!

1970: Astronauts from a Gemini Moon Mission land in Montgomery Field.

1972: Daylight Saving Time Returns Immediately!

1973: An All Brady Bunch Episode Format. Nothing but soundtracks of the first four seasons of that TV show.

1974: Energy Crisis Over...set your clocks BACK one hour! (in 1974, the nation went on emergency year-round Daylight Saving Time)

1975: The Beatles Were Reuniting!

1976: Peter Frampton Got Married Today! Women were crying on the phone lines.

1977: Filming For The New Shaun Cassidy Movie Begins at Parkway Plaza Mall. The El Cajon police had a hard time controlling traffic.

1978: All Eight is Enough Episode Format. The station played audio of the first 20 episodes of the series for 24 hours.

1979: Early Daylight Saving Time Trick.

1980: Radio XYZ switches to Disco.

1981: All the top 40 hits backwards...so are the deejays!

1982: Time change to daylight time weeks early.

1983: Rumor: The Padres move to Phoenix!

1984: The Olympics Move to San Diego

1985: All speeded-up songs and jocks on Radio XYZ

1986: the AM and FM combos swap positions with each other in San Diego. Radio XYZ-AM at 710 AM (now defunct) once broadcasted a Regional Mexican format. Also rumor: The Chicago Bears' Refrigerator joining the Chargers defensive line.

1987: switched to Daylight Time early. That year, it began on April 5.

1988: slowed-down Top 40 hits

1989: Former President Ronald Reagan (impressionist) is a new radio jock

1990: Radio sounded dirty...jocks ask the listeners to get a towel and wash every radio in town!

1991: switches to Disco 98.5 for 12 hours from 6am-6pm, and announces that a super Disco party would happen at Jack Murphy Stadium.

1992: Radio XYZ switches to all-polka format featuring Weird Al Yankovic and Lawrence Welk

1993: All freeways closed to traffic with even-numbered license plates.

1994: The XYZ-FM news department announced that Susan Lucci (who wasn't nominated this year) quits All My Children...Shannen Doherty set to replace her! Doherty, who was quitting 90210, would vacate the Brenda role to be given to Valerie Bertinelli. Phone lines jammed the switchboards. AT&T was furious!

1995: Baywatch cancelled!

1996: An all Microsoft format. The deejays read the complete instructions of Windows 95 and Word over the air!

1997: XYZ goes Spanish playing Spanish versions of Top 40 hits performed by local bands and plays every version of Macarena ever recorded!

1998: Classic Punk format.

1999: Freeways closed for sweeping!

2000: no joking this time.

And that was the history of Radio XYZ, a station that broke new ground for other stations to follow. Long live the old XYZ!

And what happened to the San Diego-based company called America's Programming Radio In Liking Fun Openness Of Love

America's
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In
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Fun
Openness
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Love

April Fools!