The Post Where I Talk About ktru

There’s no way this will come out as well as I want it to, but I feel like I should write something here about ktru because it’s pretty likely that if it weren’t for the seventeen years that I was a DJ, Ramon wouldn’t have thought of me when he was shopping around for people to dupe into a long-term writing commitment. Because, with the possible exception of Alley, I wouldn’t know most of you if it weren’t for ktru. Which makes sense, I guess. When you spend a long time in one place, most of the people you know are going to be associated with that place. If you spend seventeen years, those people become like family. True, I should probably get out more, but when Rice announced that it had decided to sell off part of my family, I was speechless.

I wasn’t a Rice student, but one of my college roommates was and one of his former roommates was the general manager of ktru in 1990. In the summer it’s hard for them to find DJs to fill their schedule because so many students leave town, so I found myself with a midday radio show on the 650 watt radio station that I couldn’t really pick up very well until I got right next to Rice campus.

I was so nervous that I couldn’t sit down for my first several shifts. I would have little panic attacks and walk around the console or look through the stacks of records to calm myself down. Fortunately, there were always people at the station and they were always friendly and helpful, so nothing ever went terribly wrong and my fears were mostly unfounded. I gradually started feeling more confortable with being on the air. Even the nausea went away. Mostly.

I was there when the transmitter power was increased to 50,000 watts. The station manager told us not to talk about it with anybody. If people called in to ask about ktru’s suddenly clearer signal, we were instructed to tell the caller that it was probably just the weather–or possibly sunspots. I fielded lots of phone calls from surprised listeners for the first few weeks before ktru finally made the official announcement. Houston Press ran an article about the transition and the photographer they sent to get pictures of the station happened to show up during my shift, resulting in a full page photo of me in the Press. People I hadn’t spoken to in years called me to ask me about it, as if I knew anything more than what they read in that article.

“Where did they get the resources for a 50,000 watt transmitter?”
“Won’t that make them a target?”
“Whose idea was the deal?”

“I don’t know. Sunspots, probably.”

I overcompensated for not being a student by doing more work at ktru than necessary. I helped plan concerts. I ran sound at those concerts. I had live bands on my radio show every week. I designed and maintained the application the DJs use to input their setlists into the computer. All for free. All because I wanted ktru to succeed. All because I wanted more people to have more access to see and hear how awesome ktru is.

Now when Rice’s president goes on about how the $9.5 million they are getting from the sale of ktru is going to benefit students with a new cafeteria, I want to send him an invoice for my years of work. Because, while the value of that FM license is really just an accident of being in a tight radio market where there is a shortage of radio frequencies to go around, you can’t just sit on the frequency doing nothing with it while hoping its value appreciates. The FCC requires that you serve the community where you are broadcasting and you have to produce content to do that. And that’s what DJs of all stripes did at ktru did for forty years.

Ktru is many things to many people, but importantly, as a DJ it is whatever you want it to be. This is also why so many people complain about not liking what they hear on ktru. Most people’s tastes don’t jibe. That’s okay. I don’t have to like everything I hear on ktru to like ktru. It’s worth it for the things I do like and sometimes I come around on the ones I don’t.

Won’t ktru be the same on the internet? In the short run, yes. In the long run, though, interest in the station will decline as it fights to compete with tens of thousands of other internet “radio” options, many with better access to resources than ktru has. It will lose its connection to the community because its primary focus will no longer be the few miles that it broadcasts to. And its music library will stagnate as fewer music labels send ktru promotional albums in the hope that they can get their music played over the airwaves in a major market. It will be a slow death, but death nonetheless.

That’s disappointing. It’s not disappointing because I won’t be able to hear ktru anymore–that is a sad thought, but I live in another city, so I don’t get a chance to listen much anyway–it’s disappointing because people won’t be able to get the kind of ktru experience that so many have gotten over the years. It’s the experience of having the autonomy to be able to create something valuable from nothing. That’s not the sort of thing you can get just anywhere and it makes you want to defend the place you got that experience when somebody threatens it.

When news of ktru’s sale got out, suddenly people from several generations of ktru, living all over the world materialized to speak out against it. Why is that? Put simply: ktru changes lives. How do you put a price on that?