KBLX traces its roots to Valentine’s Day 1949, when pioneering Berkeley station KRE added an FM signal. The station would be known as KRE-FM and KPAT-FM until 1979, when Percy Sutton’s Inner City Broadcasting bought the station.
Sutton’s WBLS call letters were legendary in New York City and KBLS would have been the logical new call letters for his Bay Area property, but they already belonged to a station in the Midwest. KBLX was chosen.
At its outset, the station played what then-general manager Frank Haye called “fusion” music: a blend of disco, rock, and jazz.
It wasn’t long before the station began branding itself as “The Quiet Storm”, blending a mix of mix of R&B, smooth jazz and soft pop music with laid-back announcers and the memorable tag line, “Soft and Warm–The Quiet Storm”.
By the mid-1980s, KBLX had firmly established itself as a contender in the Bay Area radio ratings battles. It often finished ahead of legacy stations such as KSFO, KNBR, and KFRC. There wasn’t another station that sounded like it.
In a 1987 interview, program director Tony Kilbert said, “We’re totally mellow and we want to be the soundtrack for whatever you’re doing: working, driving, making love…” His boss, general manager Harvey Stone, added, “It’s simply a unique radio station in a unique market.” Oakland Tribune columnist Bill Mann summed it up thusly: “KBLX is the perfect station for the Bay Area.”
As other stations came and went, KBLX was able to offer something that wasn’t exactly for everyone but clearly was for someone. In 1997, the station took out a newspaper ad in which general manager Stone (he would run the station for more than 30 years) took aim on listeners who couldn’t find their favorite music. “If your favorite radio station has stopped playing the music you like to hear or has left the airwaves altogether…I’d like to invite you to tune to KBLX…I know you’ll like what you find.”
Noted talent like Kevin Brown, Brenda Ross, Leslie Stoval, Jack Friday, Kevin Nash and Timothy Alexander White supplied the mortar that held the musical mix together.
From the late ’80s into the ’90s, KBLX had competition for the mellow sound. KKSF’s “Smooth Jazz” found a solid audience and the two stations jockeyed back and forth in the ratings, virtually always in the top ten among adult listeners. KBLX’s longtime (and rather worn-down) Berkeley home near Ashby Avenue was abandoned in 1993 in favor of new facilities in San Francisco.
By 2004, a San Francisco Chronicle roundup of Bay Area radio saluted KBLX for being one of the rare stations to stick with essentially the same format for 25 years. The newspaper also pointed out another fact: KBLX was one of the few Black-owned stations in the market.
Remarkably for the radio industry, time just kept clicking along for KBLX until 2012. That’s when Inner City Broadcasting, facing bankruptcy, sold KBLX to Entercom for a reported $25 million.
Entercom wasted little time in blowing up “The Quiet Storm”. Within weeks of closing the deal, longtime morning host Kevin Brown and others had been dismissed, and the station was now branding itself “R&B 102.9”. Syndicated host Steve Harvey became the morning-drive talent.
In 2015, Harvey’s syndicated show was removed in favor of a local morning show hosted by Mark Curry, Kimmie Taylor, and Victor Zaragoza.
Entercom’s 2017 merger with CBS Radio led to new management. Bonneville began operating KBLX, KOIT, KUFX and KMVQ to allow Entercom to comply with Federal Communications Commission ownership limits. In 2018, Bonneville purchased the stations for $141 million.
In 2025, the station (now calling itself “102.9 KBLX”) was part of the $10 million dollar purchase of the same group of stations Bonneville had paid $141 million for just seven years earlier. The new owner was Jeff Warshaw’s Connecticut-based Connoisseur Media.
RELATED EXHIBITS:
KBLX “Soft and Warm” Jingle Package
