It was a sound that Kakie Urch thought she had forgotten, or at least had escaped. But as she drove back into Lexington last weekend, there it was again.
“As I got closer, I started switching the radio to Lexington stations,” she said. “I hit the classic-rock station, and there was Pyromania. I mean, it was as though I hadn’t left.”
The broadcast of a 1983 Def Leppard album wasn’t exactly the homecoming music she was expecting, so Urch turned the radio dial all the way to the left, to a station she knew well — and to music she had never heard.
“When I finally got the WRFL signal, The Black Fist, which is a hip-hop program, was on. I knew none of the tunes, but they were absolutely fascinating. The DJ came on and told me about the music, who played on what track and the tradition the music came out of.
“These days, I mostly listen to KCRW out of Los Angeles, which is a world-renowned station with a similar format,” said Urch, a journalist now working in Palm Springs, Calif. “The music I was hearing on WRFL was just as sophisticated, varied and interesting. And the double-cool fact was that all the announcers on WRFL had Kentucky accents instead of L.A. attitudes.”
Urch knew she could count on WRFL-88.1 FM to whistle a different tune. That, in fact, was the only element of predictability she wanted out of the primarily student-run station at the University of Kentucky when she helped found it in the spring of 1988.
This weekend, along with reuniting with some 60 or so alumni WRFL staff members, Urch will team with the station’s current student staff to celebrate its 20th anniversary. The main party is a free and public bash called the FreeKY Fest that will be atop the Downtown Transit Center on Saturday.
“This event is for everyone,” WRFL general manager Chuck Clenney said. “We’ve always wanted to educate people about awesome music that homogenous, corporate radio stations can’t provide. So we have been given a rare opportunity not only to educate people about music that would otherwise fall under the radar but to celebrate the fact that we’ve been on the air since 1988 for 365 days a year, 24/7. That’s a huge feat in itself.”
Those freaks
WRFL went on the air March 7, 1988, to the strains of Big Audio Dynamite’s Come on Every Beatbox. The broadcast booth was built largely out of donated lumber from a stage used during a pair of Pink Floyd concerts the previous fall at Rupp Arena.
The studio was (and still is) at the UK Student Center, but the station’s call letters in no way reference UK. They instead encapsulate WRFL’s sense of artistic independence.
It stands for Radio Free Lexington.
That means there are programs dedicated to almost every form of music imaginable: Latin music, jazz, hip-hop, bluegrass, prog, psychedelia, metal, reggae, world, Indian and more. It also means that DJs with non-genre-specific shows get to play essentially what they want. If they feel like playing Pubic Enemy and then Frank Sinatra, fine. If they favor Johnny Cash alongside Vampire Weekend, that’s cool, too.
Hence the name FreeKY Fest. The event is free, sure. But the fact that WRFL has a certain, well, freakish charm wasn’t lost on some of the listeners who all but grew up with the station.
“I was in high school around ’98 and ’99,” WRFL promotions director Trevor Tremaine said. “Those were the years of RFL where you tuned in and you would hear the most psychotic stuff you could imagine. I wanted to be involved so bad and meet all those freaks that were playing all those crazy records and starting all these cool bands.
“Programming-wise, though, what you were hearing was very close to free-form radio.”
“I grew up in Knoxville,” said WRFL public relations director John Crowell. “The college station there used to be like WRFL. By the time I left, though, it was all formatted. It was singer-songwriters 24 hours a day. When I got to UK and found out about WRFL, I was excited there was a station still young enough in spirit to play any form of music it wants to.”
Guitarist, composer and vocalist Robert Schneider — who will kick off FreeKY Fest under the children’s-artist pseudonym Robbert Bobbert and close it as leader of The Apples in Stereo — was familiar with WRFL long before he moved to Lexington in 2002.
“In my adult life, I’ve probably played every college town in this country multiple times and I’ve heard almost every college radio station,” he said. “A lot of them are great, but only a few really stand out like WRFL. It’s exceptionally creative, sort of free-form and has both an interesting variety of different shows and an interesting batch of DJs who seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the things that they play.”
Knowledge? Absolutely. But some of the current WRFL staffers brush off the notion that, as DJs, they are in effect teachers of the independent and often uncommercial music they air.
“Not me,” Tremaine said. “I think of myself more as a party planner.”
The tower for power
Past and present WRFL staffers will celebrate with its audience on Saturday, but a very big future for the station is already under way. Having received approval from the Federal Communications Commission, the station plans to upgrade its broadcast transmitter tower from 250 watts to “substantially greater’ than 7,900 watts.
That means WRFL’s broadcast range could extend as far as Stamping Ground. The station’s signal currently begins to fade outside New Circle Road.
“We’re getting our application together to apply for a telecommunications grant for this coming year,” Clenney said. “But it’s a matching grant. That means if the tower costs $150,000, we will need $75,000.
“The grant has never been given to a college radio station, so one of the things we’re stressing is that while student fees legitimately fund the station, we exist to educate students about music and how to operate a telecommunications facility. And yet we have always been intertwined with the community, especially the arts community. We have 84 DJs. Only 34 of them are students. The rest come from the community. So we’re more than just a student-run station.”
Clenney is also open to drumming up any new community support for WRFL that he can. It’s not lost on him that FreeKY Fest falls on the same day as a concert by Keith Urban and Carrie Underwood at Rupp Arena.
“Who knows? Maybe some fans coming in town to see Carrie Underwood will see us up on the Transit Center and go, ‘What in tarnation is that?’”
