No Control Radio celebrates 12 years of heavy metal, new life on HD
Chuck Loesch didn’t get much of a chance to enjoy the 12th anniversary of No Control Radio, his threehour ode to all things heavy metal every Friday night on KROX FM.
Just after passing the dozen-years mark of mixing classic and new metal on the otherwise modern rock station, he got word from station management that the April 28 show would be his last.
“I’m not sure about the motivation, and I’m kind of a Luddite as far as how these kinds of decisions are made,” said Loesch, who works full time as the facilities manager for KROX’s parent company Emmis Austin Radio Broadcasting Company. “I had just gotten done celebrating the 12-year anniversary when I go the news.”
There is something of a twist on the news, however. While this Friday marks the last time Loesch will get to play Slayer, Motorhead or Iron Maiden on local FM radio waves, he’ll expand the show into a round-theclock HD radio station on sister station KGSR’s HD3 signal. Those channels are available on HD radios and digital radio apps such as TuneIn that are becoming increasingly popular with younger listeners.
“I’ve heard stories from people of car dealers accidentally blasting the HD station when they were showing off the HD radio in a new car,” Loesch said of the allmusic station he began programming three years ago. “A friend suggested I take the hours I’d spend preparing and doing the Friday show and add my persona to the HD channel to help it grow.”
It’s no surprise that Loesch will continue to champion heavy music going forward since he’s been a constant presence at local shows since before he joined KROX doing promotions and overnight shifts in 1998. His red mantle of a beard makes him easily recognizable for area metal fans, who appreciate his loyalty and work to promote local metal bands the Sword, At All Cost, Pack Of Wolves and Dead Earth Politics.
“It was important to me to do something not just for the music that I love but to support the metal community that didn’t really have a voice,” he said. “Locals knew that every single Friday night that’s where they could find me, that’s a thing you do when you love the music.”
The move was made for a pair of business reasons by Lynn Barstow, the program director for KROX who first gave Loesch the go-ahead for the local metal show in 2005.
While No Control has a vocal and dedicated fan base, the extreme switch from the station’s core modern rock artists such as Imagine Dragons, Cage the Elephant and Twenty One Pilots typically sends the station’s rankings into the mid-20s for its Friday night block, a drop of about