When KQAK replaced big band-formatted KMPX at 98.9 on the FM dial on August 23, 1982, it joined a crowded field of AOR (album-oriented rock) stations battling for Bay Area supremacy. By the time KFOG flipped to AOR in the fall of ’82, there were six stations battling for the rock audience.
The station had been purchased by New Jersey-based Broadcast Associates, Inc. and under the guidance of general manager Les Elias and station manager Bob Heymann billed itself “The Quake, FM99”. Alex Bennett, who’d departed KMEL a few months earlier, became the morning host. Bennett brought along his former KMEL sidekick Joe Regelski. Bennett had a “creative freedom” clause in his contract, and program director Heymann promised it would be “Alex Bennett unleashed.”
Bennett’s iconoclastic style would get KQAK in hot water with the Arbitron ratings service, which repeatedly admonished the station for Bennett’s on-air comments about the ratings process. It didn’t matter much, because the station never managed to find real traction in the ratings battle, despite veering away from the AOR sound to a new music mix billed as “Rock of the ’80s”.
By the end of 1984, Broadcast Associates had cut a deal to sell the station to a group headed by veteran broadcast investor Ivan Braiker and investment banker James Ireland III. The new ownership brought in new programmers, and in the spring of 1985, KQAK was gone, replaced by KKCY.
