When Laura Ellen Hopper and her then-husband Jeremy Lansman put KFAT on the air in 1975, they were well ahead of the “Americana” musical curve. Yet the eclectic music mix programmed by Hopper found an immediate audience in the Bay Area.
Lansman had paid $57,000 to buy KSND, a tiny country-western station with a weak signal. He’d already been involved with a number of community-focused radio stations, including Seattle’s legendary KRAB. Another community radio legend, Lorenzo Milam (who would later run Los Gatos station KTAO and help launch San Francisco’s KPOO), got involved.
Lansman and Milam were able to obtain FCC approval for an increase in power and a shift to a transmitter location atop 3,790 foot Loma Prieta. Suddenly, KFAT had a signal that covered a good portion of the Bay Area. One description of the format called it a mix of “…old-time rock and roll, bluegrass, Tex-Mex, blues, rockabilly, Western swing, and even a little Hawaiian music.”
In November 1980, Lansman and Milam sold KFAT to a young radio veteran named Harvey Levin, who had been general manager at KNEW when the Oakland station switched to country music.
Levin set out to professionalize what had been a decidedly haphazard operation. He invested in new studio equipment and paid for research aimed at helping the station better focus on its audience. General manager Russ Martineau claimed the station’s audience was more upscale than the programming might have suggested. He told trade journal Radio & Records, “Our saying is that they either drive Porsches or pickup trucks.”
Shortly after taking over the station, Harvey Levin was diagnosed with cancer. Within months, he was dead at the age of 38 and his family sold KFAT in the fall of 1982 to Las Vegas-based Western Cities Broadcasting for $3,000,000.
Western Cities announced plans to change the call letters to KWSS and blow up the free-form KFAT format. Writer John LaTorre described the January, 1983 KFAT farewell broadcast: “For over three hours, Amy Airheart and Dallas Dobro played their fans’s favorite music, from Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys to Utah Phillips’s ‘Moose Turd Pie’, with mock commercials for Tree Frog Beer and the Idi Amin Hot Tub. Euphoria and desperation created a giddiness that could be felt by listeners all over the Bay Area and by the dozens of fans who crowded the studio to say goodbye.”
I loved listening to KFAT. It was Jeremy Lansman’s version of Mel Brooks “Springtime for Hitler” (The Producers). Put on something so bad it would be sure to flop and make your money from the eventual sale. In this case it was buy a small local Gilroy station, move the transmitter to Mt. Loma Prieta where it would cover most of the Bay Area and then sell the expanded signal at a profit. FCC rules at the time said he had to hold onto the station for 3 years before he could sell it so Lansman decided to create a format so bad that no one would object to the future sale. Underground progressive country imported from Texas, put on by a bunch of stoned hippies. But Laura Hopper didn’t get that memo and she evolved the station into a local phenomenon, later called the Americana format. When it came time to sell community pressure prevented a sale until they found someone who would continue the format.
Loved KFAT. Could pick it up in SF. Was a wonderful time.
Greetings, I discovered KFAT in about 1980 just after moving to Oakland. I worked in a graphic design studio with an eclectic group of folks with varied musical tastes, but the only station we could agree on was KFAT. I was a loyal listener right to the end, and I just now realized that I still have several cassette tapes of the very last hours the station was on the air! I don’t have a cassette player any more, but a friend just got one to hear and digitize some old tapes, so if my tapes are in decent shape I may digitize them and make them available somehow to all you FAT fans! I’ll let you know.