Radio Daze

KCOH And so we enter the wee hours. One of the things I always loved about radio long ago was how it was an antidote to post-midnight loneliness. It was cool to have that voice nearby, one that came from somewhere in town, not some Big Radio nerve center. Today, that's almost gone. On the AM dial, KCOH is alone. Right now, as it does every weeknight at this time, it's playing the slow-burning R&B/funk jam "Return of the Mack," which normally segues into Paris "The Prophet" Eley's overnight show, easily the best local commercial overnight radio. Tonight, Eley's away, and the song fades into a soul-blues number.

12:22 a.m.

KTRU Scott Walcott signs off his excellent underground rock show with a tune by the Riverboat Gamblers. News programs follow from the national news services of every country from Australia to Germany to Africa.

1:35 a.m.

KPFT Rad Rich informs his listeners about upcoming shows and even house parties. They follow with Iggy and the Stooges. At last, some dangerous rock.

2:04 a.m.

KTSU/90.9 FM One of the station's many excellent specialty shows -- this one playing modern reggae and soca -- brings a little Caribbean sunshine to the long, black night ahead.

3 a.m.

All over the dial Save for the music on KCOH, KPFT and KTSU, there is no locally based nonreligious English-language programming on the dial. It's a wasteland of preselected music and syndicated yakkers of the sports, conservative and, in George Noory's case (KTRH), raving-monster-loony varieties. Outside my window, a heavy fog envelops South Main, much like the one in my head.

4:34 a.m.

SportsRadio 610 The Outdoors Show fires up, and I love it. Hosted by a gruff good ol' boy, the emphasis is on fishing. Various Hank Hill sound-alikes call in to say that the specks are biting in Port Lavaca and there's a good redfish run going in Matagorda. Occasionally a bait-camp woman phones up, her vocal chords stained by decades of Virginia Slims, and waxes poetic about the wind conditions in Palacios. It's reassuring, infinitely so. The Texas coast is waking up, the fish are biting, and I've got just six more hours to go.

5:45 a.m.

The Arrow I bust them cheating on their alphabetical thing: Lynyrd Skynyrd's "The Ballad of Curtis Loew" plays, just as it did at about 6:15 the night before. Liars!

6:38 a.m.

Mega 101 A new crisis! Between airings of Tilly, James Dobson of Focus on the Family has determined that SpongeBob is gay! Mega's hosts -- Chico and Rascal -- play it down. They say that only homophobes think that way. Chico and Rascal go on to call the FCC "devils" and "the evil empire." Who woulda thought a Clear Channel station would sound so much like KPFT?

7:22 a.m.

The Voice Newish morning host Edd Hendee is evidently a Savage Nation fan. He too plays the Berg sound bites and then calls Berg "a pathetic, broken man."

7:31 a.m.

KCOH Ever the contrarian, where other stations have a morning zoo, KCOH has this, a talk show segment about death sponsored by a mortuary.

7:46 a.m.

The Arrow Dean and Rog are discussing the bizarre story of the pregnant woman who hopped in the back of her truck just as it was being repossessed, and then went into labor. They throw open the phones -- the first caller says that you have the right to shoot a repo man if you catch him taking your car. Thankfully, the second caller sets him -- and all of Houston -- straight.

8:14 a.m.

KRBE Urgent Paris Hilton updates! Paris got on a fire station's radio and cussed! Paris stole a copy of her sex tape from some guy! Paris's e-mail was hacked, and boy is she pissed! "She cares more about her e-mail being hacked than about the whole world seeing her do the nasty!" a host marvels.

8:20 a.m.

KTSU The usual Friday fare: excellent soul and funk oldies. Though I'd rather hear Hugh Masekela's original of "Grazin' in the Grass" and not the inferior vocal version they spin, they follow it with some deep-catalog Curtis Mayfield. Fridays on KTSU are some of the best programming on the dial all week.

8:27 a.m.

KTRU As a service for the blind, a stern-voiced man reads the Houston Chronicle aloud.

8:39 a.m.

SportsRadio 610 Texans General Manager Charley Casserly is engaging in rapier-sharp repartee with morning hosts John Granato and Lance Zierlein. Casserly says the Texans are looking to fill some holes in the defense in the upcoming NFL draft. "If you play good defense, you'll be a better team," Granato says. "Yep," Casserly agrees. "If the other guys don't score, they can't win…There's some real wisdom for you this morning." Maybe I'm just delirious, but this strikes me as the funniest thing I've heard in the last 22-and-a-half hours.

8:42 a.m.

KIKK-A** Talk Stern divulges that James Brown plans to have his dream ass surgically installed on his wife. Every time he says "ass," a producer plays a fart noise.

8:45 a.m.

KPRC Local host Pat Gray is talking to a correspondent embedded with the marines in Iraq. The correspondent says the bad Iraq news is coming from a sensationalist media. Mayhem sells, he says, even on Fox News. The truth, he says, is that "We are winning, there will be an election, and the roads are passable." Grievously wounded Sugar Land marine corporal Casey Owens is put on the line. He sounds awkward and tongue-tied, and as Gray and the correspondent fawn over him, he sounds like he'd rather be talking to his fellow marines.

9:27 a.m.

The Voice Rock-ribbed conservative pundit Laura Ingraham -- possessor of perhaps the unloveliest voice in radio -- plays a tape of a shrill liberal woman organizing fellow lefties at the inaugural. "Boy, she really has that warmth you look for," Ingraham says. Pot, meet kettle.

9:33 a.m.

KCOH Morning host Michael Harris is playfully engaged in a KCOH perennial: the division of light- and dark-skinned blacks. "If you take a look at a big ol' hunk o' chocolate like me and say, 'Yeah," he tells a female caller, "I'll say, 'Wassup, baby!' "

9:50 a.m.

KPFT On Democracy Now!, Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, is at a rally tearing into the Bush administration. "While these people party, there will be more bloodshed," she says. "Millions of people are in harm's way." Just another example of Savage's pathetic, broken human refuse, I guess.

10:02 a.m.

Oldies 107.5 At last, Oldies is spinning something I like: the Captain and Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together." I will! I will! I wiii-iilllll be done with this in 15 minutes!

10:09 a.m.

The Mix "Save me from this prison, Lord help me get away." So runs the first line of Los Lonely Boys' "Heaven." What better broadcast to end on than this? I quit. So it was eight minutes early. Sue me.

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So Houston radio -- does it suck or what? Well, yes and no. The Anglo-oriented rock stations -- the Arrow when it's not in a promotion, the Buzz, Oldies 107.5 and the Point -- are all terrible, it's true. And so are Q Country and KILT.

One reason why is that our city is so huge and so scattered. If you own a radio station, where do you put your transmitter? Unless yours is one of the precious few powerful blowtorch signals, you can't cover the city. Put it on the far northwest side and you lose Clear Lake; put it down south and you lose the northern suburbs. And if you cater too much to the burbs, you lose the sophisticates inside the Loop.

And make no mistake, Houston radio is all about the burbs. National radio consultants come down here, host their focus groups and determine that we are a bunch of rustic SUV-driving simpletons begging to hear more Sting, more Sade, more Chesney, more Yes and more Nickleback clones. We don't want to be challenged by new music -- leave that to the cool kids in Austin and L.A. We don't want to hear rap and rock side by side. What we want is radio that looks like our neighborhood: a deed-restricted, master-planned, cul-de-sac'd purgatory where nothing bad happens but nothing much else does either. Meanwhile, satellite radios positively fly off the shelves back here as people walk away from the whole mess.

Focus groups don't work for radio. People don't know what they like until they hear it a few times. Sure, you can test new music on them in a focus group, but that's no way to hear new stuff. You need to hear it at home, in your car or in a club. And relying on focus groups over a period of years -- as big radio has done recently -- is going to ensure that fewer and fewer new artists get on the air.

So, yeah, most big Houston radio sucks. I think KRBE does a decent job, with pop, and the Party, Mega and the Box are exciting to listen to, mainly because mainstream hip-hop is in a far better place right now than mainstream rock, if such can even be said to exist right now.

But if you look elsewhere, there's plenty of stuff on there that doesn't suck. There's lots of good ethnic stuff: In the afternoons, not one but two AM stations (1180 and 1560) play East Indian music, and the Spanish-language AM 850 has a fun tropical feel, not to mention the ranchera on 1230 AM and the Spanish Top 40 on XO FM 107.9. As for rock, Alvin Community College's Gulf Coast Rocker is a better mix of classic and new rock than KLOL ever was, KTRU spins the edgy modern stuff, and KPFT's overnight shows are dynamite. KCOH is one of the last real community-oriented stations in America, not to mention of the last black-run blues stations around, and KTSU's mix of hard and smooth jazz and specialty shows is a winner. Gospel 1360 plays wonderful gospel and stirring sermons, one of which comes back to me now as I write this. "The essence of freedom is choice -- we are free so that we can choose. To be a slave is to have the ultimate lack of choice. We are free people so we can choose, so as free people we must choose."

So choose. Give some of these small and ethnic stations a chance. Reprogram your presets. And if you still think it sucks, there's always satellite radio.