Any radio station is full of stories, and Live 105 (KITS-FM) air personality and music director Steve Masters has more than his share to tell.
As Live 105 received the Bay Area Radio Museum and Hall of Fame’s “Legendary Station” honor in January 2026, Masters played back the audio recorded the night he decided to help demolish the station’s studio in advance of a move to new facilities.
For the first five years of its existence (and for several years before that under previous formats), Live 105 had been based at the Merchandise Mart on San Francisco’s Market Street. In 1991, the station was scheduled to vacate its increasingly run-down premises and move to new studios at 730 Harrison Street in the city’s South of Market area. Masters held down a nighttime air shift at Live 105.
As Masters recalled, “It was the very last night and we’re kind of leading up to it and I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to take this giant 70-pound studio chair and I’m going to throw it through the double-paned window at the end of my show tonight. We’re not going to be here anyway, nobody needs this double-paned window in an office suite’. So I start talking about it on the air. Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs was there in the studio, [Live 105 personality] Roland [West] came in, [Live 105 operations manager] Spud, a bunch of people started coming in to witness the all-exciting chair through the window.”
And then he did it. Click play arrow to listen
The damage was done. But the story didn’t end with the broken glass.
Masters said he was a regular recipient of memos from program director Richard Sands and general manager Ed Krampf. “I did end up getting a memo, of course. The memo for this was kind of funny because it said, ‘Steve, you weren’t supposed to really smash that glass. We thought that was a sound effect.’ And I find out the next day, there’s glass everywhere, they send a glass guy in. The glass guy does the job, they gave me the receipt and it says on the receipt, ‘Hey Steve, great show! [signed] The Glass Guy. (I gave you a hundred bucks off)’.”