Company News · July 31, 2008

The Mark Of The Wolf At Country Radio

By sross

Perhaps the best way to look at the effect of KPLX (99.5 the Wolf) Dallas on Country radio is to look at the format as it existed when the station rebranded itself on July 24, 1998 under then GM Dan Halyburton and director of programming Brian Philips:
By 1998, the format that had been an alternate universe Top 40 in the early ’90s was more in the orbit of Soft AC. The transition started around 1994 when Country stations began worrying about possible upper-end fragmentation, just as pop radio was finding artists like Hootie & the Blowfish and Sheryl Crow with the same ’70s-flavored acoustic appeal that artists like Garth Brooks had offered. Then consolidation ended the Country battles in many markets and the survivors often ended up as the 35-54 female offering in their cluster.
Country’s “Class of ’89” was still hanging in there, but few of those artists were making their best records. As the format skewed older and more female, the acts who could sell to all ages just from Country airplay were whittled down to a handful — Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, and Shania Twain. And the latter two had just been discovered by pop radio, leading Music Row to gear much of its music even softer for the next few years.
On this week in 1998, the Dixie Chicks had just managed their first Country No. 1 with “There’s Your Trouble.” Toby Keith’s reinvention with “How Do You Like Me Now” was more than a year away. Keith Urban was still “that Australian guy from The Ranch.” Taylor Swift was not yet nine years old, but even as a teenager, she would have received only the grudging acceptance that went to LeAnn Rimes at the time.
Only a handful of songs from the late ’90s would make the cut in future Country gold libraries. There was always a legitimate hit or two with tempo (this week ten years ago it was Jo Dee Messina’s “I’m Alright”) but never more. And without a lot of galvanizing new or recurrent product, Country radio was relying on gold titles from the early ’90s that, by this point, had been in heavy rotation for nearly a decade. The notion of two currents in a row, or even a recurrent and a new song, was in direct violation of Country programming law of that time.
By 1998, the Country community – usually optimistic to the point of boosterism – had finally started to allow that something might be wrong, although it was often couched as a “leveling out,” rarely a slump. There was a realization that 18-to-34-year-olds (never directly targeted by the format in the first place) had drifted back to Top 40, while men had been driven away. And while there was talk that year about the possibility of a “male country” niche, most in the industry felt that getting the men or under-35s back would dilute whatever base the format had left.
You can’t credit the Wolf with single-handedly reversing the state of Country radio. Programmers who should have perked up during its peak years of 1999-2002 were often quick to dismiss it as only making sense in its own market (and, as a totality, it did – like any great station). You also have to take into account the impact of KEEY (K102) Minneapolis, the other major-market Country station that failed to get the memo about being soft-and-library-driven.
But the Wolf (and K102) would stand out in those doldrums years as an example of Country’s ongoing ability to be a mass-appeal, all-the-marbles format. In doing so, they were a bridge between the mass-appeal energy of early ’90s Country and the post-Gretchen Wilson format powered by Swift, Sugarland, and Rascal Flatts. Eventually, The Wolf would spawn a generation of pups who took the name but weren’t always successful in duplicating its stationality.
Part of what made the Wolf hard to duplicate was its complexity. Geography gave it the opportunity to position as “Texas Country” and that gave it the ability to play anything from Waylon & Willie to George Strait to the local heroes that hadn’t yet achieved national stardom (Pat Green, Jack Ingram) or never would (Charlie Robison, Robert Earl Keen). The Wolf was always a yesterday-and-today station (at the outset, its library went back to at least the late ’60s), but Philips’ emphasis on active records (and willingness to sit out some more passive national hits) made the station feel a lot more Top 40.
So did the presentation. The Wolf had the advantage of competing with KSCS, a station conceived two decades earlier to sound and feel like an AC station. Country had been spawning a menagerie for more than a decade by 1998, between KMLE (Camel Country) Phoenix, a pond full of stations called Froggy Country and others. But the Wolf’s oft-cited energy and attitude came at a time when Country was increasingly describing itself in terms that allegedly came from listeners but never sounded like something real people would say.
The Wolf had a Top 40 morning man (Bobby Mitchell), another Top 40 vet in Hollywood Henderson, and, in John “Mr. Leonard” Rio, the ultimate morning show character of Top 40’s mid-’80s heyday. It had high-profile personality and heavy phones in every daypart, including Amy B., perhaps the best phone jock in any format, but it never reached the point of being “all about the phone calls” in the way that then-rival KYNG (Young Country) was. It also had actor Barry Corbin as its station voice, back at a time when radio stations weren’t yet dealing with the William Morris Agency for their voice talent. And it had “the Code of the Wolf,” a declaration of station principles that put it beyond the reach of such petty considerations as “18-in-a-row” or “familiar favorites.”
Wolf wasn’t a male country station – few of those ever actually materialized – but it didn’t specifically exclude guys, as many stations did in their research at that time. It wasn’t Top 40 Country, but it eventually overtook KHKS (Kiss FM), until then, the showplace station for Top 40’s mid-’90s comeback. The Wolf grew steadily between spring ’99 and spring ’00. But in April 2000, Young Country went away, Kiss became a less well-oiled-machine and the Wolf went into overdrive with a team that also included Smokey Rivers, Cody Alan, and Paul Williams.
Finally, the Wolf was one of the last Country stations that regularly found its own hits. In 1999, its two most-played records were “Horse To Mexico” by Trini Triggs and “Barlight” by Charlie Robison, neither of which made the Top 30 most played on KSCS that year. In 2000, its No. 3 record was “I’m Diggin’ It” by 17-year-old Alecia Elliott, at a time when Country radio viewed 17-year-old artists with borderline hostility. The following year, KPLX would find Mark McGuinn’s “Mrs. Steven Rudy” on an advance of an indie-label album. That song, little remembered now, would nevertheless foreshadow an era of sonic change in Country (“Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” “Holler Back”) and new viability for Country’s indie labels.
It’s ironic (or perhaps inevitable) that the Wolf begins to trail off just as Country got its energy back – it last cracked a five share in late 2003, just as the format was on the verge of being Big & Rich again. By the following year, Kiss would reinvent itself as well, working more pop/rock into its once mostly-rhythmic template. KSCS also became more aggressive and tempo-driven musically. When eventual new owner Cumulus brought new PD John Sebastian in to overhaul the Wolf, you might not have agreed with the 180-degree-turn the station took, but it was, as he pointed out, hard to argue at that moment for changing nothing.
Under current Cumulus group/in-house PD Jan Jeffries, there’s more of a nod to the original Wolf’s legacy. The Classic Hits crossovers of the Sebastian era are gone, the Web banner proclaims “Welcome Home to Texas Country” and you can still hear an occasional Kevin Fowler title that you wouldn’t hear on Country radio outside Texas. But the Wolf at its peak had a multi-dimensionality that isn’t easily or quickly re-created.
Country radio is still trying to figure out what to make of the Wolf as well. Many of the new Wolf-packers were able to create a stationality that was hard for competitors to ignore, but there were also those stations who found out the hard way that the name and the wolf howl was not enough. More globally, some Country programmers are looking askance at all the tempo and new artists of recent years in a way that makes a complete mid-’90s-style retrenchment seem entirely possible. Country in that era was a compromise that pleased few; the Wolf was a balance – not the same thing, and something any format needs to maintain moving forward.
Here’s a music monitor of The Wolf from August, 1998:
George Strait, “True”
Clint Black, “Killin’ Time”
Shania Twain, “From This Moment On”
Brooks & Dunn, “Neon Moon”
Dixie Chicks, “There’s Your Trouble”
Waylon Jennings, “Luckenbach, Texas”
Dwight Yoakam, “Things Change”
LeAnn Rimes, “Blue”
Charlie Daniels & Leroy Parnell, “Texas”
Mark Chesnutt, “Goin’ Through The Big D”
Jo Dee Messina, “I’m Alright”
Robert Earl Kean, “Road Goes On Forever”
Garth Brooks, “The Thunder Rolls”

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