KNGY, known as “Energy 92.7”, came into being in late 2004 when Joe Bayliss’ Flying Bear Media paid $33 million to acquire KBTB, the station that 3 Point Media had bought for $30 million only months earlier. Bayliss had been involved in broadcast and outdoor advertising sales in Northern California for a number of years.
Flying Bear spent $250,000 on audience research and Bayliss would tell the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Ben Fong-Torres that they identified a demand for dance music on the radio. Moreover, they found what Bayliss and Program Director Don Parker saw as a market opportunity: gay people didn’t feel they had a radio home.
KNGY homed in on that community. Within a year, Bayliss would say that half the station’s on-air staff was out and open about it, including morning team Fernando Ventura and Greg Sherrell, aka “Greg The Gay Sportscaster”. The duo would later simply be known as Fernando and Greg.
The connection to the gay community appeared instant and genuine. By Halloween 2005, San Francisco officials hoping to reclaim the gay-friendly vibe in the City’s Castro District for Halloween festivities brought in Fernando and Greg to MC the evening’s festivities, figuring they’d restore positive energy to a scene that had gotten ugly in previous years.
At around that time, Wells Fargo Bank took out an ad in a trade journal, touting an $18 million dollar senior credit facility it had extended to Flying Bear Media. It’s a fact worth remembering.
“Energy 92.7” may have been giving off good vibes, but it wasn’t doing much in the ratings race. The Spring 2006 ratings report didn’t show KNGY among the San Francisco market’s top 25 stations.
Things weren’t any better two years later and the writing was soon on the wall. Facing little hope of getting out from under its debt load, Flying Bear Media unloaded KNGY in September 2009.
The buyer was Ed Stolz’s Golden State Broadcasting and the selling price was reportedly less than a quarter of what Bayliss and his investors had paid for the station five years earlier.
On September 10, 2009 the staff was dismissed, the music shifted to Top 40, the call letters were changed to KREV and the station was re-branded “The Rev FM”.
A unique chapter in Bay Area radio history was over. “When we started, we had nothing,” Bayliss would say after the sale of what his group claimed was the last independently-owned single radio station in the Bay Area. “My team built a phenomenal local brand. Maybe it didn’t show in the ratings, but we had a tremendous following.”
