KLOK-FM 103.7 FM San Francisco, CA

Previously known as KGO-FM and KSFX, KLOK-FM came into being in 1984 when ABC sold the station to Davis-Weaver Broadcasting, whose stable of stations included signals in Fresno, Orange County and San Jose’s KLOK. The “Weaver” of Davis-Weaver was Bill Weaver, and once he took control of his new San Francisco station, he went beyond the “Yes/No Radio” concept he’d pioneered at KLOK. “Yes/No” radio was a listener-participation gimmick in which the audience was invited to call in to keep a song in rotation or vote to dump it.

At KLOK-FM, the format was “Build Your Own Radio Station”. KLOK-FM programmed Adult Contemporary music, inviting listeners to suggest songs to add to the mix. Extended on-air jingles said “KLOK Is You”. It all started with a full day of Neil Diamond music, with Kenny Rogers added next. Oakland Tribune columnist Bill Mann wrote, “If you’ve never heard a radio station that played only Neil Diamond records, you haven’t missed much! Weaver says he’ll add new artists as requests ‘pour in’. Here’s one: No more Neil Diamond. Please!”

A few months later, Mann would report a noticeable uptick in the Bay Area ratings for KLOK-FM. 

Weaver would copyright “Yes/No Radio” and “You Pick the Hits”.  By mid-1986, KLOK-FM was among the nation’s top 25 AC stations, measured by “cume” (the total number of weekly listeners). It trailed KYUU, KOIT, and K-101 in a heated AC battle for average quarter-hour listener share, but not by much.  Program director/morning host Mark Lennartz told industry journal Radio & Records, “This is interactive radio, in the sense that one listener can make a difference.”

By late 1986, the station mocked by some in the media as “the Barry Manilow station” was playing noticeably hipper music. Air talent and assistant music director Cammy Blackstone told the San Francisco Examiner, “The people calling in are younger and so is the music. Our listeners really affect what we play.”

And then it was all over.

In the spring of 1987, just as KLOK-FM was coming off of one of its best ratings “books”, Davis-Weaver sold the station to Brown Broadcasting, headed by Willet Brown. He was a link to radio’s California roots as assistant general manager of Hollywood-based Don Lee Inc., the nation’s largest regional network of radio stations in the 1930s. Brown had also been a founding executive of the Mutual Broadcasting System. Brown paid a reported $15 million for KLOK-FM and changed the call letters to KKSF, which installed a “Smooth Jazz” format that would become a major force in the Bay Area for several years.