Volunteers bring free-form spirit to new station KXSF.
KUSF volunteers almost ready to go live with station KXSF
When KUSF was abruptly yanked off the air in 2011, San Francisco lost a critical outlet for locally sourced music and community programming.
But thanks to the hard work of a handful of former DJs and staff members who founded San Francisco Community Radio in its wake, the free-form spirit of the old KUSF will return to the city’s airwaves in a few weeks as a low-power FM radio station with a new frequency and call letters, KXSF 102.5.
Damin Esper, part of a core group of people who led the effort to get the new station up and running, said the plan to switch on the transmitter after several delays is the culmination of seven years of negotiations, fundraising campaigns and sheer determination.
“It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done,” he said, taking a break from preparations at KXSF’s head-
quarters at Light Rail Studio in San Francisco’s Bayview district. “It also destroyed me.”
There is still plenty to do: lock down the station’s insurance policy, organize a series of launch parties, sign the lease for the transmitter on Sutro Tower and, most urgently, decipher the manual for the emergency alert system.
An anticipated on-air date of Tuesday, July 10, was scrapped at the last minute due to technical problems.
But, with true college radio resolve, Esper didn’t seem all that concerned about getting there.
“We’re not like iHeartRadio or Clear Channel, where everything is planned to the second and things are tested and ready to go,” he said. “We’re flying by the seat of our pants.”
Carolyn Keddy, who for 20 years introduced Bay Area listeners to underground acts like the Mummies and the Trashwomen from the station’s former home at the University of San Francisco, vividly recalls the day she was locked out of that studio.
“I showed up at the station to do my show, and the guards wouldn’t let me in,” she said.
University officials had sold KUSF’s 90.3 FM frequency to classical music station KDFC without warning, pulling the station off the dial for the first time since 1977 without giving the dedicated staff of volunteers a chance to bid listeners farewell.
While a number of personalities from the old KUSF days stuck around to run the streaming station KUSF-inExile (the university retained the KUSF call letters for its online version of the studentrun radio station), most moved on while the fate of station was held up in red tape.
The new station, Esper said, will not be KUSF 2.0.
“This isn’t the San Francisco that existed seven years ago, let alone 10 or 20 years ago,” he said. “It’s not the same music scene. The underserved communities are different. It should only sound the same in how different it sounds.”
Which is to say that KXSF will continue to offer programs listeners would never hear on commercial radio. The current programming offers punk rock, Americana, death metal, Brazilian music and everything in between.
Fans can hear a preview on the live online stream at http:// kxsf.fm
Alongside KUSF veterans including Irwin Swirnoff and Henry Wimmer, the station’s youngest hosts are brothers Lucas “DJ Panda” Cecil, 8, and Colin “DJ Flying Japan” Cecil, 11, who produce back-to-back alternative rock shows on Saturday mornings.
Their mother, Fari Aghaorabi, presents three programs each week, one featuring new music from France, another dedicated to instrumental guitar music and the third showcasing classical works.
“With everything that’s happening in San Francisco, I think our community needs this kind of diverse programming,” she said. “We’re part of that identity that should not be erased.”
The effort to get back on broadcast radio edged closer to reality in 2016, after the organizers formed their own nonprofit and teamed up with San Francisco Public Press, who will eventually share the 102.5 FM frequency with KXSF using the call letters KSFP.
Untethered to the university, the station will no longer face the risk of having the plug pulled unexpectedly. But that also means that the nonprofit will have to keep itself sustainable.
Of the initial fundraising goal of $80,000, the San Francisco Community Radio crew managed to raise $60,000 to get back on the air with the help of underwriters, local businesses and private donors.
The plan is to launch an on-air drive to help raise enough money to carry the station through the first three years of operation while exploring options for more longterm financial support.
“It won’t be worth it just getting on the air,” Esper said. “It will only be worth it if a couple years down the road it’s thriving, and we build it into something people think is the coolest thing in San Francisco, which is what KUSF was.”
Esper said he hopes to restore the station to the days when you could hear punk rock blasting out of every window in Chinatown at 5:45 p.m. because people were tuning in to hear Chinese Star Radio at 6 p.m.
“This is an opportunity to once again to reach a lot of people who weren’t listening to us on a computer,” Aghaorabi said.
Fittingly, the first show when KXSF goes live will be Keddy’s.
“I didn’t get to do that last show, and now I get to do the first one,” she said.