“Young Country” KYCY came into being in 1994 when station owner Alliance Broadcasting ended the oldies format on KYA-FM and discarded the legendary KYA call letters (the AM calls had vanished more than 10 years earlier). Buddy Baron was installed as morning host, and his wife Pat created and wrote a series of “Patrick Doyle” mystery segments that could earn a cash prize for listeners who solved the crime of the day.
The new format did little to change things. KYCY continued to dwell near the bottom of the ratings (KYA-FM had long been a laggard but, when twinned with KSFO, managed respectable ratings for a time).
The station changed hands in the fall of 1995 when Infinity Broadcasting Corporation, already the nation’s largest radio company, bought Alliance Broadcasting for $275 million. The deal put KYCY, KFRC, and KFRC-AM into the hands of Infinity and face the company a presence in the only major market where it hasn’t previously owned stations.
The station picked up Oakland Raiders games for the 1996 season, which kicked off a few months after another ownership change for KYCY. The blockbuster $4.9 billion deal ($3.9 billion in stock and $1 billion in debt) with Westinghouse created a major-market behemoth with more than 80 stations in its portfolio.The deal was made possible by newly-relaxed federal regulations governing the number of stations an operator could own in any given market.
In mid-1997, KYCY gained a partial AM simulcast signal when Westinghouse jettisoned the news-talk format it had been airing on KPIX-AM (1550) and KPIX-FM (95.7); the AM station continue to carry the syndicated Imus in the Morning before twinning with Young Country for the rest of the day. The July 1, 1997 move meant KPIX had become KYCY on the AM band, while on the FM side, KYCY legally became KYCY-FM.
The corporate name on the station’s letterhead changed again in 1997 when Westinghouse renamed itself CBS Corporation (Westinghouse Electric Corporation had acquired CBS Inc. in 1995). The ownership changes weren’t over: In September 1999, Viacom announced its plans to acquire CBS Corporation for $35.6 billion.
By the end of the 90s, KYCY-FM was still outside the market’s top 20 stations in the Arbitron ratings. The station was now being marketed as “Y93”, but sound was still country music.
The epitaph for KYCY was provided by San Francisco Chronicle pop music editor Joel Selvin in January, 2002. “It took Infinity Broadcasting, owners of former ‘Young Country’ radio station KYCY, more than eight years to learn what Nashville has known since the Blackjack Wayne Show went off the air in the ’50s: San Francisco is the worst market in the United States for country music. Yee-haw.”
The station’s call letters were changed to KKWV, branded as “The Wave”, and the country music vanished in favor of what was described as a “rhythmic adult contemporary” format.
