‘THE WAVE’ ROLLS IN WITH SWELL RATINGS

KTWV-FM(94.7), a.k.a. “The Wave,” has been breaking its soothing, automated sounds all over Southern California since Valentine’s Day and it won’t be ebbing soon, judging by the latest Arbitron listener ratings.

Conceived from the ashes of KMET-FM, the rock station that a generation swears it grew up with, the Wave’s blend of New Age music, light jazz and soft rock finished its first Arbitron Ratings survey this week in 18th place among Los Angeles stations.

KTWV-FM had a respectable 1.9% share of the Los Angeles radio audience, up .3% from its previous 12-week survey as “The Mighty Met.”

Even the top-rated stations in the L.A. market rarely get more than a 7% share. With more than 80 stations jockeying for a piece of the listening audience, a 3% share is deemed quite good by most broadcasters.

Despite a rocky start--with angry KMET fans flooding the station with calls and letters in February--The Wave will not be receding, according to station management.

“The Wave is for people who grew up with music, but don’t want to listen to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ anymore,” said Frank Cody, KTWV program director. “It’s not elevator music, but music you can really listen to. And combining three musical genres together like this is adventuresome. It’s never been done before.”

But while Wave boosters such as Cody call it “the first new music radio format in 18 years,” its critics dismiss it as “lifeless, dentist-chair Muzak.” The Wave has depersonalized radio and created a faceless, synthetic station designed to do nothing but sell products to baby boomers, die-hard KMET fans grumble. Even the name, The Wave, they point out, is borrowed from Coca-Cola’s latest ad slogan.

The format includes no deejays--in fact, no live voices except for short, morning newscasts. Between musical cuts, there are canned slice-of-life vignettes fashioned after the successful Molson’s ale and American Express commercials that featured a man and woman coyly sparring with each other.

“I don’t know what kind of audience they’re going for, unless they are convinced that the whole world has turned into one big yuppie bar,” said Jim Ladd, one of the KMET deejays who was fired to make room for The Wave. “They say they are being progressive with the station, but I don’t see how getting actors to act out vignettes about mowing the lawn or spilling coffee on your shoe is being progressive.”

Ladd acknowledged that his opinion is tarnished with the bitterness of losing his job at KMET. But even Cody, who is proud of his new format, is sensitive to criticism that KTWV is conspicuously aimed at a yup-scale crowd.

“Don’t use the Y word,” he said repeatedly.

The premise for The Wave is simple, Cody said: Rockers grew up, cut their hair, became successful and bought nice cars. They didn’t necessarily outgrow rock, but they “matured” beyond the juvenile baggage that many associate with rock radio.

When New Age albums began taking up more space in record stores, the station decided to fill the radio void for the compact-disc generation.

What adults over 30 hate most about radio are commercials and deejays, in that order, according to Cody. He said he couldn’t get rid of the commercials, but he could--and did--get rid of the deejays.

“There’s a little bit of a harder rock edge that I miss,” said Christine Brodie, music director at The Wave. “But I feel that I matured along the same lines that the station did.”

Cody disagrees. In fact, he is betting that his format will catch on across the country, and that “Wave music” will eventually earn its own top-40 chart beside pop, soul and country lists in trade publications such as Billboard.

So far, only KSCO-FM in Santa Cruz has adopted a 24-hour-a-day New Age sound.

KMET fan Bill Bothman said Cody may be right. It scares him. He calls the WTWV format a disease and fears it will prove contagious.

“There must be a stop to what’s going on so our children can have a favorite radio station,” said Bothman, a 37-year-old Orange County inventor. “A station with people that talk to them. FM broadcasting used to stand for high fidelity, quality and loyalty to its audience. Now the other stations will see that it’s no longer true.”

Bothman said he began listening to KMET the day he returned from Vietnam in 1970. When management pulled the plug on his rock ‘n’ roll station, Bothman said it felt as if his best friend had been murdered.

“After 18 years of marriage, to plan your divorce like they did on Valentine’s Day, it’s just sick,” Bothman said. “I listened to KMET day in and day out. It was part of my thought process. Sure, I like rock ‘n’ roll, but the deejays didn’t just spin records. They had something to say. It was a real program.”

While most KMET devotees have grumbled, licked their wounds and switched to other rock stations, Bothman refuses to throw in the towel.

He said he has amassed more than 4,000 signatures on petitions, demanding the return of KMET to the Southern California airwaves. Some of the signatures look a little suspicious. “Jimi Hendrix” signed one petition. Donald Duck signed another.

But the bulk of the petitions, left at the counters of Orange County record stores, appear to bear authentic signatures of authentic KMET fans who collectively plead:

“We, the undersigned, are forgiving and faithful listeners. Please bring back KMET-FM (94.7).”

Bothman has not presented the petitions to KTWV but station officials are not likely to be swayed.

“I like a station that is controversial,” said Howard Bloom, general manager of KMET and, now, KTWV. “It feels the same now at The Wave as it did during the height of KMET’s success. People will get over it. And people will get over the fact that ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ went off the air.”

When they set out last year to revitalize their ratings, Bloom and Cody said they had no intention of killing KMET. Marketing surveys showed that people had a strange, nostalgic attachment to the heritage of KMET, but little identification with its more recent programming.

“People always talked about it in the past tense,” Cody said. “ ‘Yeah, it used to be such a great station. I grew up listening to KMET.’ But most of them didn’t listen to it anymore.”

So, rather than try to restore luster to the legend, Cody and Bloom chose to bury KMET.

“I don’t blame them,” said Steve Feinstein, rock editor at the trade paper Radio and Records. “If you have a restaurant that was fantastic but then people went there a few times and got burned, it’s pretty hard to bring it back to its original popularity. The best thing to do is change the name, move to a new location and start all over again.”