I’m in Missoula a couple days out from the official 20th anniversary celebration of the Trail 103.3 and getting nostalgic about some of the long-surviving stations that I was present in the studio at the moment they signed on.

WROV-FM February 14, 1989.

WROV-AM had existed for decades at 15th and Cleveland in Roanoke. It once ruled the market, but like most AM stations it came upon hard times in the ’80s. I actually worked there (my first commercial radio job!) briefly in 1985. In 1988 new owners bought WROV-AM and an FM station licensed to Martinsville, VA (an hour away) with plans to move the Martinsville signal and operation to Roanoke and run it all from the modest existing facilities. I’ve worked in all sorts of buildings, but none as funky as WROV. Initially a Quonset hut that was dressed up with a false front. Later a small cinder-block “building” was attached to the hut followed later by a small prefab “home” that was constructed adjacent and attached by a small reception area. Finally, when the FM was added so was a double-wide trailer tacked on. Now, that’s funky. WROV-AM already had two perfect people for a new Album-oriented FM station; morning guy Sam Giles and PD Mike Bell. WROV-FM was going to be Roanoke-Lynchburg’s first true rock FM. The rest of the staff was hired and I was set to do middays and be the Music Director. The station signed on the afternoon of Valentine’s Day, 1989. Sam was at the board and I peered in from the hallway because there were TV stations shooting as Sam pushed the start button on the CD cued to Led Zep’s “Rock and Roll.” It really had been a long time waiting for FM rock.

While we were celebrating at the sign-on party that night at the Sheraton Hotel the station went off air due to a technical issue exacerbated by the generator not functioning. We were back on the air by the morning and though the funky home was mercifully razed in 2004 the station is still going strong as Roanoke-Lynchburg’s leading rock radio station 36 years after its debut.

KMMS-FM June 7, 1991

In 1991 Bozeman, MT had two commercial FM stations. One decent top-40 station and one crappy top-40 station. The crappy top-40 station was KUUB, a copycat of Seattle’s KUBE down to the logo, albeit it with a fraction of the talent and promotional budget. In from Denver came Kip and Joan Gilbert who moved to Bozeman to buy their first radio station. Obviously the format would be changed. The call letters were changed to KMMS and “The Moose” was chosen as the slogan and mascot. Bozeman’s first commercial Country format FM was set to debut. Wait, what? Yeah, it was going to be country, but it was gnawing at Kip, who was a huge fan of Denver’s adult-alternative KBCO. Could a similar station succeed in little Bozeman, MT?

Kip flew in consultant Charlie West who was best known as the Program Director who plucked Mark and Brian out of Alabama and put them on KLOS in L.A. Charlie set up in Bozeman’s Main Mall with a clipboard and asked locals what radio format they’d like to hear. Enough expressed interest in some sort of rock format to nudge a very willing Kip to scrap his country music plans. Now he needed a Program Director – in a hurry. Kip hired me over the phone from Roanoke and I was in town in two weeks, leaving behind anything I couldn’t fit into my Mustang. Oh, I shipped out a couple hundred of my CDs just before I left. I arrived Saturday June 1st and we changed the format at 6am on Friday the 7th with the very cliched Rolling Stones “Start Me Up” (not my finest moment) following 24 hours of construction noises interrupted occasionally by an announcer informing that we were busy building a new radio station. KUUB played only carts, they never had a CD player. We grabbed a couple retail CD decks and the engineer wired them into the board. Out of phase. Meaning? Meaning that for roughly 45 minutes we signed on a 100,000-watt karaoke machine. We swapped the cables and the vocals reappeared. We were off and stumbling! I stayed longer this time…14 years in all, bouncing between middays, afternoons, and mornings not to mention a couple of ownership changes and the addition of several other stations to the cluster. I was the General Manager when I left. 34 years later, the Moose is still bringing a very unique blend of adult rock to Bozeman from the very same studio where it all began in 1991.

KDTR Missoula July 2nd 2005

No one plans on signing on a radio station at 9:13 pm on a Saturday, but that’s what we did. More on that a bit later. In 1994 the FCC began to allocate new FM radio licenses through an auction process. Every year or two dozens of new FM allocations would come up for auction. Eventually you could track the bidding online. It was fascinating. There was a time when an FM license was more than just permission to broadcast…it was a license to print money. By 2003 things had cooled a bit and the 2003 FCC auction may have been the last frenzied affair.

My friend Kevin, seen here sorting receipts for stuff purchased towards our build out, had boldly prevailed in the 2003 auction picking up three allocations that would serve Missoula. Never mind that Missoula was approaching radio saturation. We had the (over)confidence of a small python swallowing a large pig.

I left Bozeman to be the manager of the three new Missoula signals that were going to be built from the ground up. I don’t think that anyone, before or since, has signed on three brand new radio stations at once. Well, not exactly at once, but almost exactly two weeks between them. Kevin found office space that would be built out from scratch. We went to the NAB convention in Vegas and spent Kevin’s money like drunken sailors on fancy, digital consoles and transmitters for all three stations. We would be Montana’s first all-digital (HD) operation. I set out to hire sales, office and on-air staff. To say we disrupted the market would be an understatement. We did steal several folks from our established competitors prompting a tense lunch invite a couple months later from two of those managers who reamed me for taking their employees. I told them (in so many words) that it was easy because they had been treated poorly.

There was an incredible amount of speculation and rumor about our pending formats as we were preparing to launch. The stuff I was hearing was either dead on or wildly incorrect and we tried our best to hire people while being vague on exactly what the stations would be. We had long planned our formats – an Adult Album Alternative similar to the Moose in Bozeman, a Soft Adult Contemporary Station and a News/Talk station with primarily Air America programming. Another market competitor was then owned by Clear Channel, who also now owned the Bozeman stations I had just left. They assumed correctly that we’d launch a station similar to the Moose and they also assumed correctly that it would be successful in Missoula. We knew that they knew, and we hurried as fast as possible to build the Trail 103.3 and sign it on first. (in one of my finest creative moments the idea of “The Trail” as a nickname and the Forest Service emblem as a logo came to me months earlier at 1am and I’d gotten out of bed to scribble it down before I forgot)

Clear Channel Missoula had gotten the master song list from The Moose in Bozeman and hired a guy from Ohio to format-flip one of their Missoula stations and beat us to the punch. We were waiting for one final piece of transmitting equipment to arrive and they beat us by two days. I was beside myself. However my disappointment quickly turned to joy as I listened and realized how poorly they had botched their attempt at the AAA format. Good God, they signed on a soulless, horribly programmed station and I knew we were going to clean their clock. Our final piece of equipment arrived and Kevin went to the mountain to install it. Scott Hawk (pictured above one minute after sign on) and I were in the still unfinished studio waiting for his signal. Shortly after 9pm Kevin called and said he was turning on the transmitter and we could soon hit the music. I had not even planned what the first song would be. I sorted the available tunes by artist and scrolled the mouse through the list. John Lennon’s “Mind Games” jumped out. There had been so many rumors and so much commotion in the market leading up to this moment. And yes, I even believe there were spies (!!) who “applied” for jobs with us but who were really fishing for info for their employers. “Mind Games” seemed like a perfect last minute choice. I moved the mouse and clicked “play” at 9:13pm. I wish I could say that it was “happy ever after.” In a sense it was, but there were clouds on the horizon. That’s a subject for a future blog. The Trail survived that storm and others and remains strong, and truthfully, beloved 20 years later. It’s THE station with the most of my DNA.