KHQT came to life on January 15, 1988 when the San Jose Broadcasting, the new owners of KLZE, dumped the “beautiful music” format and went with a CHR (contemporary hit radio) sound. By the fall of 1988, the station was number one among teenagers in the San Jose Arbitron ratings and challenging CHR competitor KWSS for #5 overall in the market.
San Jose Broadcasting was controlled by Brion Applegate, whose Anaheim Broadcasting owned KEZY AM and FM in Orange County. After taking over as program director of KHQT, Steve Smith said the company would move the station’s offices and studios out of Mountain View’s Old Mill Shopping Center and set up shop in North San Jose’s then-new Metro Plaza office park.
Smith said KHQT would have a full news department and offer news, sports, and traffic reports during drive-time hours. He also said the station would use live announcers for its 24-hour format rather than employing automation.
The station was soon branding itself as “Hot 97.7” and triggered a burst of media attention in early 1989 by offering Jessica Hahn an on-air tryout. Hahn, who’d posed for Playboy magazine, had become headline news a few years earlier when her tryst with televangelist Jim Bakker became public. Program director Smith told the Peninsula Times Tribune, “I think we had the whole town listening. It’s a program director’s dream to have that kind of coverage.”
By the spring of 1991, KHQT had taken over the top spot in the San Jose Arbitron ratings and had cracked the top 20 in the San Francisco ratings.
Despite its continued ratings success, the days were numbered for “Hot 97.7”. In the summer of 1995, Susquehanna Radio Corp. announced plans to purchase KHQT for $8.25 million and essentially turn it into a translator for its San Francisco station KFOG. KFOG’s signal didn’t reach the booming Santa Clara Valley. Soon, the familiar “104-point-5 KFOG” was being heard in the South Bay as “97-dot-7 KFOG”, a clever nod to the dot-com culture.
On November 1, 1995, the station’s call letters were officially changed to KFFG.
