‘Runaway Radio’ is labor of love for director
For the first time in some time, Mike McGuff sees the light at the end of a very long, very loud, rock ’n’ roll tunnel.
The blogger and former producer at KTRK-TV and reporter at The CW39, whose self-titled blog has become a go-to source for shuffles and kerfuffles in the Houston mediasphere, has just directed his first film, “Runaway Radio,” a documentary celebrating the wild and woozy heyday of the pioneering local rock radio station KLOL-FM. On the air from 1970 to 2004, KLOL transformed over its life from shaggy, free-form anarchy to loudmouth, shock-jock insanity, all the while providing the guitar-heavy soundtrack for a couple of generations of head-banging Houstonians.
And it only took McGuff 14 years to be able to bring the story to the screen.
Not only did he have to track down seemingly long-lost footage and corral surviving members of the KLOL crew — including Dayna Steele, Greg “Grego” Onofrio, Colonel St. James, Levi Booker and more — but he also had to wrangle interviews with musicians who were fans of the station. They include the late Dusty Hill of ZZ Top, Melissa Etheridge, Lyle Lovett, Sammy Hagar, Carmine Appice and King’s X’s Doug Pinnick. Then came COVID-19.
“It’s like this big weight is being lifted off,” McGuff, 46, says now as the film is finally being released Feb. 27 on various streaming platforms before playing at the Alamo Drafthouse LaCenterra in Katy for two Q&A screenings on March 2.
“It really took blood, sweat and tears to do what he did,” says Onofrio, the former KLOL deejay known for his Outlaw Radio persona, who for the last five years has been a weekday air personality at adult-hits KKHH-FM, The Spot 95.7. “The commitment that he made and never walked away from. It was a monumental lift.”
Sex and trash cans
That lift began in 2010 when McGuff began toying with the idea of putting together a documentary about KLOL, a station that had been so important to him as a kid growing up in Houston.
“It was like a rite of passage,” he recalls. “I had been listening to (Top 40) 93Q and I flipped on KLOL and I was like, ‘Whoa! This is totally different.’ I was into rock music anyway, and it just opened my horizons, musically. … When you’re 14 years old and there’s no internet, you listened to KLOL, and that is going to give you this insight into things you have never heard about. … The personalities were telling you about the latest trends. And you couldn’t find information about bands back then either, except in a magazine, which would have been outdated. But they knew what was going on.”
McGuff didn’t let the fact that he had never made so much as a short subject stop him.
“I was a reporter and producer where you’re doing — I wouldn’t call those mini-documentaries — but it kind of gives you an idea of how to do things,” he explains. “I did produce some 30-minute TV shows.”
Yet at first, he wasn’t sure if a film about an aural medium could work, but then he remembered that a lot of what KLOL did — from the crazy promotions to the colorful personalities — was meant to be seen. “For a radio station, it was extremely visual,” he says.
“They shot a lot of TV commercials. They were always in the news.”
“It was about doing everything bigger,” Onofrio says. “And anything KLOL did was huge. They were big promotions that captivated the city, whether we would be giving away money or Corvettes. And people loved the station and the personalities so much that they would do things that other people in their normal lives wouldn’t do. … We had a pajama party in Pasadena, and we had to have people thrown out because the first thing they wanted to do was take their clothes off. … In our morning show, we had trash-can car bowling, with people running their vehicles into steel trash cans for the sound of it on the air.”
According to “Runaway Radio,” KLOL’s fervent fans had such a wild reputation that some area cops would pull over drivers whose cars boasted KLOL bumper stickers.
Then, of course, there were the shock antics of Mark Stevens and Jim Pruett that earned high ratings, national attention and a guest spot on “The Morton Downey Show,” the talk show that paved the way for the likes of Jerry Springer. As Texas Monthly wrote in 1992, “These two aging teenagers have figured out what’s on the minds of Houstonians — Sex, with a capital S.”
All things must pass
But stunts and sex couldn’t keep KLOL on top forever.
There was competition from the likes of 97Rock, KILT-FM and KTBZ-FM (The Buzz) and, finally, shifting musical and cultural tastes. Could Stevens and Pruett survive in today’s climate?
“There are a lot of things that fly today on social media that are outrageous,” says Onofrio. “However, the radio climate isn’t (like that) any longer. Shock radio had its day.”
Ownership changes ultimately led to the station’s demise as a rock ’n’ roll powerhouse in the region. After Clear Channel purchased the station in 2000, the format was flipped to Latin pop in 2004. Today, the frequency is Spanishlanguage Mega 101 — “Tocando la mejor música en español” — and is owned by Audacy.
But that couldn’t erase what made KLOL unique, says McGuff. Sure, every major market had a rock station — such as KMET in Los Angeles and WNEW in New York — that started off with one foot in the hippie underground, found wider success and ended up wedged uncomfortably between rock and a corporate hard place. But KLOL was “a larger than life radio station” thanks to such personalities as the late Dennis “Crash” Collins. And its legacy still has enough of an allure to inspire an online version of the station that began in 2012 and is still running.
“I mean, it was just a wild time in the ’70s and ’80s around here,” McGuff says. “The city was booming.”
“A lot of those album-oriented rock stations … I used to hate them because they were so perfectly spoken. They never made any mistakes. Everything was perfect. KLOL wasn’t like that,” sums up Onofrio. “The inmates were running the asylum.”