The Beginning Of The End -- Alternative Rock Station Kndd Is Almost One Year Old And Going Strong

When The End burst onto the air last Aug. 23 with R.E.M.'s "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," on the old KMGI frequency, it was hard to predict how fine the station would be feeling in a couple of months. Commercial alternative rock has had a checkered history in Seattle, with the gravestones of past attempts heavy in everyone's mind: KZAM. KYYX. KJET. All slipped through the cracks between album-oriented rock and contemporary hit radio.

But almost a year after its debut, The End is defying history. This spring's Arbitron ratings show KNDD in the top three stations among listeners aged 18-34, after country station KMPS and rock station KXRX. The station has become profitable and has become one of the most active sponsors of concerts and club nights around the area.

Before The End, there was little in the way of alternative rock radio in Seattle. After KJET's collapse, such music was left either to college station KCMU, which gives equal time to such styles as Australian didjeridoo music and reggae, or C-89, the Nathan Hale High School station that mixed "modern," or alternative, rock mainstays such as the Smiths and R.E.M. with electronic dance-club material.

KNDD must be the most paradoxical station in Seattle. The DJ will cheerfully announce that this is "the cutting edge of rock," then pop into the cutting edge of 1983, with Spandau Ballet's "True." An ad for the Cramp boutique on Broadway flaunts Doc Martens for the flannel-rat crowd, followed by one of many Shane Company ads for diamonds. DJ Kris Walton's local music show is open to anyone with a decent-sounding demo, but the three-day "Northwest Music Weekend" last March was largely devoted to local bands that had already released something on a major label.

But those mystified by The End should note that the station is a paradox, not a contradiction. It can be a lot of things to a lot of people.

NO PASSING FANCY

The End is a relative of San Diego's 91X, a 9-year-old commercial alternative station. Both are owned by the Noble Broadcasting Corp., which has radio stations in 10 major markets. KNDD general manager Anna Shreeve said that the time was especially ripe for a "modern rock" station in Seattle last year, given the rise of the local music scene and the fact that Seattle is the fourth largest market for modern rock in the country, after Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.

"It's not a passing fancy; it's what's happening in rock 'n' roll today," Shreeve said. "There's a huge body of people - the MTV generation - that's extremely familiar with modern rock. We're in a lot of respects the MTV of rock radio."

Shreeve was sales manager at KMGI prior to its transformation. Of that, she said, "The only way (The End) could be profitable and successful was to focus on a target audience. The adult contemporary audience is not loyal to a format. Advertising today isn't about wanting everybody - products are specialized."

Programming director Rick Lambert says that The End's half-and-half blend of new music with "nostalgia music for twentysomethings" is deliberate. "Familiarity is the reason we tend to play '80s and '90s music," he said. "We're trying to make it comfortable for the listener and that means going with some of the bands that were popular back then. The letters we get say they love it; it sparks a lot of memories from college."

Focusing on the college element plays a major role in the station's overall programming. Shreeve and promotions director Keri Lee describe the bulk of KNDD listeners in the same terms: white-collar professionals, at least some college education, politically aware, on-the-town and passionate about music.

"We get tons of faxes from Microsoft and Boeing," Lee said. Of course, some listeners may never have set foot in these economic giants, may still be in high school, or may not care a whit about the bozos in office, but the one constant is the passion for music.

Lambert says that it all comes down to gut feeling when he and DJ Marco Collins choose the week's programming. They program 24 hours of music in advance, leaving certain times open for the morning and afternoon request shows. DJ Norman B's "Radio Anarchy" afternoon request series consists of song blocks suggested by listener letters.

Harder-edged material is reserved for nighttime and weekend listeners, Lambert said. Songs by local bands can receive regular airplay if they get good listener feedback first on Walton's local music show, "The Young And The Restless," Sundays at 10 p.m., then on Collins' weeknight shows.

Bill Reid, a mid-day DJ, was previously with KJET. The broader appeal of KNDD's programming aside, he says that the station's success is largely a matter of wattage.

"It's nice to have 100,000 watts of FM power, not 5,000 watts of AM," Reid said. Like The End, KJET "had what I call a rock-'n'-roll heart. That's something that comes from the top down - everyone's into the music.

"Cutting edge music takes what was there and adds its own twist," Reid said, citing the Southern blues-influenced rock band Black Crowes as an example. "Cutting edge is where you can hear a really great song from the Beatles and a really great song from Ride in the same set."

While cutting-edge radio may be a lot of things, Reid emphatically states what it is not: "A lot of people are getting tired of listening to corporate, '70s-style, album-oriented rock. I mean, the music is good, but enough is enough!"

CLUB 107

One KNDD listener is Rick Guype, 27, a graduate student at Washington State University who is in Seattle for summer work. Describing his tastes as running from classic rock to jazz to alternative and grunge, he says "I like their diverse format. There's a little bit of everything, and it's all basically good music."

Michael Bonk, 21, works for the Navy in aviation maintenance and administration. He listens to KNDD whenever his ship is docked in Bremerton. He has also relied mainly on prerecorded music, but one day while in port, "I was flipping through the radio stations, and The End was playing good music, so I stayed. Kind of alternative-like - different."

The End encourages going out on the town with its "Club 107" nights held weekly at clubs from Edmonds to Tacoma.

Cheers West, in the Tacoma suburb of Fircrest, transforms itself from a rather glitzy sports bar into a 107 mecca each Tuesday. One recent Tuesday, the music was typical KNDD, with a Cure favorite coming on the heels of 1985-vintage INXS. The decor was similarly incongruent, with a Nagel print coolly facing a big-screen TV showing monster tractors and a number of blondes writhing around in a Hawaiian Tropic tanning-oil frenzy.

Davy Beck, 22, owner of a hair salon in Gig Harbor, said that "the DJ runs with the crowd real well. He lets us know what the mood is, and knows what to play for what the mood is."

Marra Carissimo, 21, of Tacoma, has been coming to Cheers West's Tuesday nights for about a month. "I like it; it's not just top-40," she said.

BANDS ON THE RISE

"Hi. This is Kris Walton and you're listening to `The Young And The Restless.' "

With that, The End becomes one of two commercial stations (KXRX is the other) to feature solid blocks of local music. Although The End's attention to local music still concentrates overwhelmingly on commercially successful acts such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, other bands such as Sky Cries Mary, Seaweed and Flop are finding their way onto regular playlists. Walton's Sunday night program disproves the myth of an all-grunge Seattle scene.

Walton hosted the original "Young and Restless" on Bellingham's college station KUGS and was hired by KNDD on those credentials. Her current show typically features a band interview interspersed with local tapes. "To me, it signifies that we have a great deal of respect for music in this city," she said. "It's not only the luck of being the initiator of an all-new format but to do it in a city that is the center of that format."

Still Falling is one local band Walton profiled on her show. Although their atmospheric pop is miles away from Seattle's famous grunge, Walton was sufficiently intrigued to see them several times over the past couple years. "If I wanted anyone on my side, it would be Kris," said the band's bassist, Dan Harper. "That's why they're cutting-edge, I guess."

Scotty Vanderpool, a KXRX DJ who hosts that station's "Hometown Heros" local music show throughout the week, said there's a certain disparity between The End's overall programming and its focus on local music: "A band like AC/DC would have a lot more in common with what's going on in Seattle than A-ha or Depeche Mode."

The End has also ventured into live local music with its co-sponsorship of Monday night concerts at the Romper Room dance club in Seattle. This series, featuring acoustic performances, is jointly sponsored by KNDD, the club and Rainier beer. "It was a natural tie-in with Kris Walton's show," club manager Keith Robbins said, explaining that he had originally approached the brewery with the idea, which then approached The End.

The station also is sponsoring a series of free outdoor concerts featuring local bands at Seattle Center's Mural Amphitheater this summer and has included local bands Mudhoney and the Posies in its Aug. 8 "End Fest," a massive modern-rock festival at the King County Fairgrounds featuring such acts as Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys, Sarah McLachlan and the Charlatans UK.

LISTENER LOYALTY

While "End Fest" is certainly the largest event the station has held, it's hardly unusual. When it comes to promotions, KNDD hit the ground running, with a constant stream of concert ticket give-aways, cash prizes, "cutting edge" nights at clubs around the Puget Sound area, concert sponsorship and even a van driving around with station personnel giving away T-shirts and other prizes.

"All our promotions are thought out for the listener's benefit, not because we're cool, but whether they'll understand it," promotions director Kari Lee said. She said that community outreach and mainstream accessibility are crucial to The End's operations, which is why station personnel hand out free lattes and promote record sales through such definitely non-cutting-edge outlets as Fred Meyer.

"There's a huge market for (modern rock), although two years ago I wouldn't have said that," Lee said. "We love our core audience and always want to do things for them, but we have to be as mainstream . . . as possible. We're making alternative music an important part of everyone's musical taste. `Alternative' can be a scary word - we like to use `modern' or `cutting edge.' "

Loyalty and broad appeal are important to any radio station, but The End's listening audience is particularly attractive to advertisers. According to advertising manager Dick Loughney, "it's not true that people (in the audience) are young with blue hair and 100 earrings."

"It offers a different niche than advertisers have ever been able to reach before," said Kelly Evans, media buyer for the Kraft/Evans advertising agency, which buys spots for the Alpac soft drink bottling company. The audience is "smaller but more exclusive. In the past they read The Rocket, but now they're more accessible to advertisers."

One notable campaign was Nordstrom's series of ads for its Brass Rail department, which targets young adults. While it used all media, The End was the first radio station to sell its T-shirts through Nordstrom, and the store saw an upsurge of women customers in the normally men-only department. While sales attributed to exposure on The End can't be broken down, Nordstrom has had strong positive feedback from its KNDD campaign and had to reorder its stock of The End T-shirts.

"That gives us a very clear indication that they're doing very well," said Susan McDonald, Washington media relations coordinator for Nordstrom.

McDonald said that the store was introduced to The End through its hiring of temporary holiday employees. "If our people are listening to it, then our customers must be listening," she said. "The age group that the radio station targets parallels the age group that the department targets."

Tracy Cartwright, who handles Nordstrom's account at the Elgin/ Syferd agency, said, "It's a real active audience. They consider it almost a music companion, more of a foreground format. (The End) has a niche format; people who listen to The End only listen to The End."

RADIO RIVALRY

The End's domination of a particular audience would ordinarily cause concern for competing stations. But in Seattle, no one seems particularly concerned. The consensus among other popular commercial stations is that The End has an audience unique to itself.

KXRX has run neck and neck with KNDD in recent ratings of the 18-to-34-year-old demographic group. But according to KXRX general manager Steve West, "I just think they have a format and they're going to attract people who like that format. Most of them came from cassette decks. They haven't had a lot of impact on other radio stations in the market - we know who we are, and we want to continue that format and continue to improve and attract the people who like what we do."

Vanderpool, the KXRX DJ, says that The End serves different needs at different times. "I think we share a fair amount of audience," he said. "A lot of people punch out of their station when they kick in their dance mix, and hopefully we aren't giving them a 15-year-old Foreigner song that made them punch over to that station."

Shellie Hart, a KUBE DJ who programmed a lot of modern rock while with Nathan Hale High School station KNHC (C-89), said, "What The End can actually do for a station like KUBE is warm up a record - not that we will play it, but it's nice to have a format that can concentrate on that genre. I personally would welcome anything different that The End would want to do on the air."

Hart said that while alternative stations like KNDD have a very devoted audience, that does not exclude their occasional turn to Top 40 stations like KUBE or KPLZ.

Nevertheless, "we and they serve such different music preferences," said KUBE general manager Michael O'Shea. He said that his station's audience research showed that most of The End's audience did indeed come from outside the present radio audience. "A lot of the people that are passionate about The End had given up on radio before and were into cassette tapes, CDs, or bootleg tapes. We have a tremendous amount of respect for them as operators - it takes a lot of guts to invent a new wheel."

Noncommercial alternative stations welcome the newcomer as well. "I'm very glad The End is around, actually," said Don Yates, program director at the University of Washington's KCMU. "In the end, it's only going to help Seattle that there's another outlet for alternative music in this area."

Yates said that KCMU experienced a dip in listener funding when The End first began broadcasting, but since has returned to pre-End levels. "I think we provide more of a full spectrum of what alternative rock is and beyond that, what other music scenes there are. Our programming is definitely more multicultural."

While The End sticks mainly to "upbeat, poppy white rock bands," Yates said, KCMU mixes in world music and not-quite-upbeat alternative rock and hence has a less mainstream audience.

THE END

This Aug. 23, KNDD celebrates its first anniversary by hosting Nirvana at the Coliseum. Not only does that band perhaps best symbolize a station like The End - alternative music finding a mass audience - but to get a band of that magnitude exactly when it wants it shows what kind of pull The End has developed.

"A lot of people doubted our ability to stay here with a format like this," said music director Marco Collins. "We've got news for them - we're going to be here for a while. We want to continue what we're doing, exposing new stuff."

And as long as Doc Martens and diamonds continue to exist side by side, things should be OK.