Tuning in to the voice of reason.
As a rock radio personality, Richmond-bred Big Rick Stuart has skillfully navigated the genre’s different formats. Starting in the 1980s as a young jock fresh out of the KUSF radio boot camp, he landed on the indie/alternative Live 105 as an afternoon antidote to Alex Bennett’s morning mayhem, then migrated to the mainstream rocker KFOG, where they claim to play a mix of new and old rock. (One caveat: the new stuff must sound exactly like the old stuff.) But when Stuart’s contract ran out last fall, the Fogheads offered him a lame deal. After powwowing with his agent (that’s right, this guy has an agent), the unflappable host jumped ship earlier this year for the afternoon shift at the decidedly classic-rock KFOX.
Paul Kilduff: Are you an all grown-up radio personality now that you’re on a full-on classic rock station?
Big Rick: Well, you know the thing that’s interesting to me is that when I run into people or an email correspondence or whatever, and since I’ve been in the same city so long, the same area, people have like checked in with me over various points. [They say] “I’ve been listening to you forever.” Then my next question is, “Well, define forever.” You know, like, really? Since 1979? In college? “Oh no. You know, I remember you back, way back. I’ve been listening to you forever. You know, I’ve been listening to you since like ’98.” And to me, the interesting thing about playing classic rock is that I’ve done a lot of different radio but I haven’t done this. So for some people, it’s like, “Wow, these are older songs.” And the majority are ’60s, ’70s, and a little bit of the ’80s, but I haven’t played them. I was kind of a new wave alternative guy for a long time and then I was kind of a laid-back singer-songwriter guy with some classic rock mixed in. But you know, there’s a million Aerosmith songs that I have never played, so for me it’s kind of like, “Wow, this is really great.”
PK: Not to take a dig at your former station, but I will.
BR: Freedom of speech.
PK: Yeah, exactly. KFOG, a lot of their promotional stuff on the air, it’ll say, “Hey, we play a lot of the classic stuff but we play a lot of new stuff, too.” And I’m always like, yeah, when am I ever going to hear that new stuff? Because every time I listen at KFOG, it’s always Tom Petty and Bob Dylan or whatever. Did you find that to be the case?
BR: We did play new artists. We played a lot of Jack Johnson and stuff like that. I think it could have been a larger field of view, if you will.
PK: Does Jack Johnson put you to sleep?
BR: He’s the Jimmy Buffett of today.
PK: That’s exactly what my wife says.
BR: Except maybe without as much of a sense of humor. You know, KFOG had a real sound to it. If it fit that sound then that was kind of what worked. So there were certain songs by Aerosmith or bands like that, that we would play but if they were too rowdy or getting loud or too long or too whatever, it was kind of, stay away from that. I thought we did play some newer bands there but they also sounded like Tom Petty.
PK: We’ve got KFOX, KFOG, the Bone, Oldies 103.7. And if you listen on AM we even have KFRC 1550. They all don’t fit into one definition, but let’s just say they’re all kind of classic rock-ish. Can you get enough classic rock? I mean, is that too much?
BR: Well, the market will decide. If you don’t have likable people presenting it and you’re too aggressive or super annoying to listen to it at work or with kids in your car, the market’s going to decide that there’s just too many of these. There’s variations among all those stations trying to find the right little slice of the pie. I think that the current music scene, the current new bands, the interest is there but it’s really super scattered. A band will have a new album that’s number one on the billboard but they don’t even sell that many units across the country. They don’t move that many copies of an album. The music scene is so scattered whether it’s indie or aggressive alternative or whatever. If you talk to people who are into the classic rock programming the thing that they’ll talk about is a shared experience of everyone. Now there’s Internet, there’s podcasting, there’s radio, there’s streaming radio, there’s 500 channels on your cable TV system and you don’t even like 400 of them or whatever.
PK: Right, yeah.
BR: There’s so much out there that to get a group of people to have a shared experience in the media, it’s really, really tough. I mean, even the number one movie opens and it’s gone in a month and it’s on DVD in two months. And then the next thing is in your face and the next thing. And they’ll talk of things like the last episode of the TV show M*A*S*H*. That’s for us old guys. Now that was a real shared experience. I mean, there were three networks on your TV. Most of the stations signed off at midnight. There might have been a couple of independent TV stations here and there but there were three choices you had for major well-produced network TV shows. And you might have had three or four pop stations in your town on the radio for Top 40 or Rock ’N’ Roll or whatever. A band would put out an album and it would be a real big deal. And now, everything is so scattered. There’s just so many ways out there for people to experience things. So, if you turn the clock backwards, you find Tom Petty, bands like the Cars and then you start getting into the Eagles and Boston and Steve Miller band. Then you realize, wow, 60,000 people went to Day on The Green and they saw the Steve Miller band and that was a really big concert, a big deal.
PK: We recently resurrected our record player from the garage and dug out all these old albums and my 10-year-old daughter is fascinated by this whole process of putting the needle down and then the scratchy sound and all that. Have any of you guys thought about maybe actually playing records so that we could hear the little scratchy noises?
BR: That would be kind of cool. Unfortunately, the warmth of vinyl is probably somewhat lost in the digital transmission line to the transmitter but maybe we could play scratchy record sound effects. I don’t know if you noticed, too, but you’ll find something in your vinyl connection and you kind of have fun memories and then you put the needle on it and you’re like, “Wow, this is terrible.” Maybe it’s just me.
PK: I know you were not involved in this, but let’s face it, you’re on a station now that then moved another station over to where you cut your teeth at 90.3 KUSF and which then, of course, became KDFC and knocked KUSF off the air and now online. How important is it for a radio station to be on the air? Because a lot of people would argue, “Well, who cares? You can listen to it online.” How did you feel about KUSF losing that frequency?
BR: Well, there’s no doubt, I went to USF and I worked at KUSF and we’re still in touch with people there and you know, it wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about them forever.
PK: You must be on the KUSF Hall of Fame, right? This guy actually got a job in radio, look.
BR: Like I said, I didn’t just walk away. I was stunned that the school gave up the radio station. I was maybe beyond stunned. I mean to me, a broadcast signal is exactly that. It broadcasts and it can serve the community. It can blanket the airwaves. It can help in a time of a crisis. It can be a fundraiser. It can expose people to arts and theater and new things and ideas and, if you’re a Catholic university, I would think exposing people to ideas is really part of what you should do. They can use it to run all kinds of great programs. And when the school sold it for such a small amount of money, I was stunned by that. I couldn’t believe that they would do that. I know the support was there from the volunteers and the people. I just think the school didn’t want to deal with it anymore. They didn’t really market it. They just kind of took an offer and when they said there wasn’t school involvement, it was the community, that’s not a bad thing, really. That’s kind of a compliment in a way that you have something that the community likes enough that they’re involved in and if you want to get really snotty about it, you could go, “Well geez, the basketball team, they’re like 11 students on the whole basketball team and a lot of school resources and money that supports that.” I mean, that’s a ridiculous argument, too. Can you do what the radio station did online? I think you can. If you’re going to create programming as far as the hands-on part of radio, the production part, the editing, the interviewing, the condensing of an interview, the hosting of a show, I mean that’s all skills that are the same as a radio station or broadcast would have. I know that they’re trying to keep that alive with KUSF in Exile online and I think you can possibly do it better and have more freedom. In other words, in broadcast radio, every hour is 60 minutes long. In streaming radio, you could throw up another stream. You could make something available as a download. In 60 minutes, you could have hundreds of hours of content available for someone. You’re not just locked into what the clock says.
PK: Well, getting back to USF’s argument about the lack of student involvement. I sort of experienced the same thing at the first place I ever did anything, KALX. You would walk in there and it was community guys and there’s nothing wrong with it—I did that in the mid-‘80s—but a lot of those guys are still there. Frankly, I don’t really care one way or the other but I can understand the argument of the university that says, “We’re not really serving our students. We’re serving the community. It’s not that big of a resource for our students. Why should we spend money on this?” Do you know what I mean?
BR: I can definitely understand that. Part of what I think is, well, then do something about it. Don’t just throw away our signal. It’s hard to get a broadcast signal, right? Change the operational system around it.
PK: We just got a new car and it came with satellite radio and it’s pretty exciting. But, clearly satellite radio is not a success at this point and a lot of people say the reason for that is that it’s not local. But let’s face it, a lot of radio stations today are just really a little box that gets satellite feeds and broadcasts them, right? So I guess the question is how important is local content to the listener? Do you think the listener really cares? You don’t watch TV and say to yourself, “Well, instead of watching prime-time network television, I wish I could watch a talent show from the Warfield Theater.” Nobody cares about that but we’re supposed to have local radio.
BR: That’s a good question. There is community TV, right? It’s a great outlet but it doesn’t beat American Idol in the rating. I don’t think a delivery method affects how good a radio station is or can be. You can have great satellite radio. There’s a Bluegrass satellite radio station and it’s really good. They play a lot of great stuff. They have people who really know the music and they have musicians themselves that host the shows. The great thing about that is that would never work in 199 out of the top 200 radio markets in the country. It just wouldn’t get enough audience to stay alive but you can put it on this delivery system and it’s part of a package of other things that are similar. There’s an all–Elvis Presley radio station on satellite.
PK: And it’s only $15 a month. Who can’t afford that?
BR: I think that radio with a local host can be terrible. It can be awful and annoying and unlistenable. And radio with a national syndicated host who never mentions your hometown and never does anything local as far as an appearance or anything, it can be pretty good. To me, I mean, I’m a local radio guy and so I think the best is when there’s a local guy. He knows where you live, he knows where 280 is, and 580, and you can kind of depend on, “Oh, I’m going to trust Big Rick in case something crazy in the world happens. I know he’s kind of watching stuff but he’s also going to play some music that I like and you know, maybe he’ll make me laugh a little bit.” Wolfman Jack, someone gave him this big introduction and compliment about how great he was. Wolfman had this really great line. He said, “You know, it’s not really the Wolfman Jack Show, it’s Wolfman Jack playing music that people like. My job is to make it fun to listen to music you like.”
PK: I am so sick of traffic reports on any radio station that I would think a format that you could promote would be, “We have got no traffic reports.” Do you think that that would work, Big Rick?
BR: I have no traffic reports on my show at KFOX.
PK: Wow.
BR: You know, we talked about it and it kind of was decided that unless there’s like a bridge closed or a freeway shut down, or something huge, traffic is just so—it’s just what it is.
PK: So my thing is you go to other markets and there’s other stuff on FM. There’s information, there’s talk programming, and what I’ve always heard about people in the Bay Area is that we have this hippy dippy, oh yeah, the summer of love, blah, blah, blah legacy. But when it comes to our media, we want it really straight-laced, man. It’s really uptight. I can never really understand that. I don’t understand why FM talk radio stations have been tried in the Bay Area and they’ve all failed.
BR: You’ve got to have the right talent and the right people to generate the listeners to do that, whether it’s a nationally syndicated show or locally hosted.
PK: I am available. Have you ever thought of doing talk radio?
BR: I don’t listen to talk radio very much or at all. It sounds like somebody’s stomping his feet in the dirt, and firing his guns in the air, and throwing his hat on the ground, and then taking phone calls. Whether it’s a right-wing talk show host or a left-wing talk show host, the job just seems to be to incite people. And that’s just so not appealing to me. It’s not what I am or what I like or what I do. The people who do it are pretty good at it. They stomp their feet really good and they throw their hat in the dusty ground really well and say tarnation and all that stuff but I don’t know, it’s just not really my style. Plus I would run out of things to say and now when I run out of things to say, I press a button and it’s Eric Clapton.
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Age: Adult
Birthplace: San Francisco
Astrological Sign: “Over 60 Million Served”
American Idol: Billy Idols
What I want to be when I grow up: BMX World Champion
Website: bigrick.com
