RADIO : KPCC Muscles In : After boosting its signal power, the Pasadena public radio station covers the L.A. Basin and beyond--and it’s taking on Westside heavyweight KCRW

If the names Rene Engel, Isabel Holt, Terry Gross, Ian Whitcomb, John McNally and Marian McPartland mean anything to you, then chances are you are someone who has listened to KCRW-FM (89.9) in the past and remember them as familiar on-air personalities whose voices disappeared from the Santa Monica public-radio station over the last few years. Possibly you know that each of them is still on the air in Southern California, but to hear them you have to nudge the dial a shade to the left, to KPCC-FM (89.3), the non-commercial station run by Pasadena City College.

KCRW, to be sure, remains the influential Westside National Public Radio affiliate it has been for more almost a decade, but the migration of Engel and Holt and the other public-radio talent to KPCC is an indication that KCRW now has a significant rival on the Eastside--and a rival sending out a more powerful signal.

Once a sleepy college station of 3,800 watts broadcasting the music of the big bands, KPCC has undergone a major overhaul in the last two years following its move in 1988 to boost its puny signal to an FCC equivalency allowance of 50,000 watts. The station now covers not only the entire L.A. Basin with better reception than KCRW and KUSC but reaches as far north as Solvang and as far south as northern San Diego County.

Music from the big bands can still be heard from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each weekday, but the “Classic American Music” format implemented by general manager Rod Foster and Engel, who is music director, has come to include Western swing, early R&B;, Rodgers & Hart, Anita O’Day, Louis Jordan and even such pop-rock names as Dr. John, Leon Redbone and Linda Ronstadt.

In addition, there is Engel’s estimable “Citybilly” program of country and folk music brought over from KCRW, Holt’s “Solo” jazz show, various blues and R&B; shows, the NPR news programs, five-minute NPR news updates on the hour, a radio drama unit, an array of ethnic service programs on Saturday and Sunday, plus a full hour every night of “Fresh Air,” the distinctive arts and entertainment interview show from Philadelphia hosted by the gifted Terry Gross--a show that KCRW dropped.

KPCC’s signal boost and programming additions, including a shift to a 24-hour schedule, have shown results that surprised even Foster and the trustees of the college, who agreed to loan the station $100,000 to make this transition to the big time possible. In the 2 1/2 years since it got the new transmitter, KPCC has already amassed a cumulative weekly audience of 223,500, according to the most recent Arbitron figures, compared to KCRW’s weekly total of 264,800.

Among the handful of local non-commercial stations, KUSC-FM (91.5) still has the largest audience (459,000 listeners per week in the same survey), but it’s primarily a classical station; KPFK-FM (90.7), a member of the Pacifica network, has a loyal following, but its focus is public affairs with a left-of-center point of view. KLON-FM (88.1) plays strictly jazz.

KPCC, meanwhile, is reaching for a relatively large general audience by attempting the kind of idiosyncratic, personally programmed music shows combined with NPR pick-ups that brought KCRW to prominence in the 1980s. It is also the only other NPR affiliate in the area, a source of some friction between the two stations, which sit side by side on the dial, as they vie for listeners using the same network identification.

There seems little doubt that KCRW’s growth over the last 12 years from an educational radio workshop at Santa Monica City College to the major cultural institution it became under general manager Ruth Hirschman served as a model for Pasadena City College, where students were puttering away in a similar radio lab when Rod Foster arrived to head the communications department in 1985.

“Here was this station that had this tremendous opportunity to move the transmitter,” says Foster, a Southern California native who spent nine years teaching television production at Fullerton College before being recruited for his current job.

But after moving the transmitter (to the top of Mt. Wilson), the question was what to do with the power.

“The first thing we had to do was break up the mom-and-pop mentality,” Foster says. “We had to walk that walk and talk that talk. We had to change our radio-station culture. If you want Joan Baez to come down and play in your studio, you can’t have something put together like a class project.” (Baez did come down.)

And there was the matter of what to do about the format.

“Prior to the transmitter change, we talked about classical and talk (radio) as a basic format,” the general manager says. “But we thought everybody else was leaving this format (big band and swing), so it served a niche.”

Says Engel, “We’re refining the format. It’s an experiment. We’re learning how to make adjustments and finding where we can make it bend. I myself am a convert. This was not my first music of choice. If I’d had my choice it would have been half classical and half country.”

Foster and Engel, in fact, met at a Grateful Dead concert years ago.

“But with the resurgence in the last 15-20 years of respect for the roots of our pop-music culture, to me, exploration of the big-band and swing era, early jazz, the great American composers, makes a lot of sense,” says Engel, whose own far-ranging musical curiosity and pleasures are evident from listening to him on the air. “And it’s important to me that it’s not treated in an archival fashion. This is not vintage radio or reliving memories of the past. This is relevant music.”

Indeed, KPCC may be picking up its share of listeners, now in their 30s and 40s, who grew up with the Beatles and the Beach Boys but began to lose touch with rock ‘n’ roll after the various new waves of head-bangers, lip-syncers and ironic poseurs grabbed center stage beginning in the late ‘70s. For such audiophiles unable to bear the future of rock ‘n’ roll now on the radio, there remains the opportunity to discover the past.

It should be noted that Engel, Doug Johnson, Matt Wright and other programmers play records by contemporary singer-songwriters as well--people like Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Robin Williamson and Katy Moffatt--and commonly preside over in-studio performances by such artists. Holt’s “Solo” show is conceived as “50% jazz and 50% anything that I think has been brought into jazz,” the host explains, “from Louis Armstrong to Lester Bowie, “ with excursions into blues, soul, African and Latin jazz. Yet the tone of the station is somehow less chic than KCRW, where nighttime host Deirdre O’Donoghue breathlessly spins the latest in “avant-pop.”

“One of the ways that we clearly want to position ourselves is as a more mainstream NPR station,” says program director Larry Mantle, who hosts a one-hour drive-time talk show that is as mainstream as Michael Jackson’s. “We don’t want people to worry about whether they’re hip enough to listen to us.”

“We don’t want to forget that we come from Pasadena,” Foster says, “and that somehow makes us different from a radio station that comes from Santa Monica. We do have an image of ourselves as being an Eastside alternative. And I like being an alternative. We know that with the ‘Classic American Music’ format we have an older demographic (group) that listens to us. The preponderance of our listeners are over 35, and there’s a huge cluster in the 55 area.

“And there are a lot of people in L.A. who would choose a more conservative radio station given that they still want NPR news and want to know what’s happening in the arts and entertainment community, but would opt for a more conservative station than one that’s more to the liberal side. I mean ‘liberal’ in attitude more than politically. I think that what separates us is more an attitude and a lifestyle than it is a political point of view.”

Yet Foster admits that the station has targeted conservative Orange County, where KCRW is not widely heard. “There are almost 3 million people down there and our signal is the best NPR signal in the market. That’s a hell of an opportunity.”

Ian Whitcomb, the British gadfly and author who combs the vaults of Tin Pan Alley four nights a week on KPCC between 10 and midnight, playing everything from Jimmie Rodgers and Irving Berlin to the Yodeling Dutchman, is the KCRW emigrant most vocal in his antipathy for the Westside and his former radio home. “KCRW became this chic, hip, we-have-to-have-stars kind of place. I felt a lack of respect there,” he says.

Whitcomb, whose irrepressible on-air candor has included dismissals of Glenn Miller and the Rolling Stones (“I like them personally,” he said in a typical remark about the Stones, “I just don’t like their music,”) speaks for some of his colleagues when he says that KPCC reminds him of the place KCRW once was. “It was a nice, free-wheeling station, a real public station. But it was taken over by the white-wine-and-Brie set.”

Isabel Holt, who spent 12 years at KCRW and was one of the architects of the now-famous program “Morning Becomes Eclectic” (she and her husband came up with the title) says that she left KCRW in 1988 because “I felt a little burned out there, and I also felt the station was headed in a direction I was not comfortable with. Its artistic aims and mine were no longer the same.”

Holt saw KCRW as a victim of its own success and respectability, which she found at odds with its earlier atmosphere of creative independence and experimentation.

“It’s tremendously successful,” Holt says, “but they’ve gotten to the point where if they make $50,000 less during a fund drive, they think they’ve failed.”

During one 11-day pledge drive in 1989, KCRW pulled in $865,000 from subscribers, believed to be a record in public radio. KCRW’s annual budget is now close to $3 million, based on 33,000 members, compared to KPCC’s $1.2 million, based on 11,000 members.

“So, you begin to be more cautious in what you play,” Holt continues. “There may be that one song that you know is perfect to pull a set together, but you remember that it’s not a favorite of the music director and so you don’t play it. I was never called on the carpet for playing something, but I felt it was right around the corner--since it had happened to other people there.”

Will Lewis, a management consultant who has been a key adviser to Hirschman and KCRW since 1978, takes issue with these charges.

“One criticism I would consider patently false is that we ride herd on the music programmers. Anybody who does a music program picks their own music. Tom Schnabel had no problem up until he left playing music that was on the cutting edge--what some people would call noise. No one tells Deirdre O’Donoghue what to play, and I can asure you it’s not music that Ruth likes personally. But she understands there’s a following out there for it.

“Certainly the station has changed,” Lewis says. “But you try to continue to do those things that got you those listeners to begin with. The station has attracted good people and kept good people. That doesn’t mean that the people the station has let go or fired weren’t good. It has to do with how effective the programming is at any given time. We don’t like to keep programs that don’t grow.”

KPCC, meanwhile, reminds Holt of “what KCRW was when I joined. It was on the verge, and I like that. I don’t think that KPCC will end up in the same place because the community is different.”

KPCC appears to have organized itself differently from KCRW, with Foster less a mastermind of its overall sound than a seeker of consensus among the staff on matters of programming and policy.

“What’s exciting to me,” Engel says, “is there’s a sense of dialogue on all the issues that affect the radio station. Radio at its best comes from an exchange of the people who are doing it.”

In contrast, KCRW appears to be very much the creation of Hirschman, who made it one of the nation’s top NPR affiliates both in style and financial clout but did so, according to many who’ve worked for her, by running it with an iron hand.

Hirschman is reluctant to comment on the rise of KPCC and the resettlement of her alumni there. For the record, she does not acknowledge the Pasadena station as a competitor, although it is no secret she has objected to KPCC’s use of the slogan “National Public Radio for All of Southern California,” since KCRW’s long-established slogan has been “National Public Radio for Most of Southern California.”

“I think every station has their own song to sing,” Hirschman says, “and they should develop their own song.” She adds, in a tone of diplomacy, “They’ve made a brave beginning, and we’ll see.”

“The goal was always to borrow from people we admired,” Foster responds. “I think there is a sense of competition between the stations, but the staffs get along great.”

Certainly KPCC has a way to go before it can be considered a true equal of KCRW, which still has such notable homegrown talent as satirist Harry Shearer, bandleader deejay Billy Vera, talk-show host Larry Josephson, dramatist provocateur Joe Frank and gossamer-voiced programmer Mara Zhelutka, as well as the diminished presence of Tom Schnabel, the former star host of “Morning Becomes Eclectic” who now does 90 minutes on Sunday morning since leaving his three-hour daily gig for an executive job with A&M; Records.

As part of KPCC’S continuing educational function, the middle of its weekdays are given over to a cluster of neophyte announcers working under Engel’s tutelage who sound mostly competent but are still finding their radio voices. “Each of us puts an hour or two hours together,” says Mia Karnatz, who, like most of the daytime on-air talent, was formerly a student at Pasadena City College.

In public-radio tradition, these announcers program their shows independently but must limit their selections to the relatively modest KPCC library. “I have a tendency to lean into Western swing,” Karnatz says, “but that fits because you can see how Bob Wills and Asleep at the Wheel are drawing on Count Basie.”

Engel, who often substituted for Tom Schnabel at KCRW, is perhaps KPCC’s most important voice at the moment, reminding listeners of the thematic sets, personal insights and laid-back in-studio interviews that made KCRW great. In addition to “Citybilly” on Monday night, he also does the two-hour “Wednesday Music Magazine”’ with Matt Wright that focuses on performers who are coming to town.

Engel’s shows don’t really have much in common with Chuck Cecil’s “The Swingin’ Years” or “Your Hit Parade,” two of the station’s syndicated nostalgia programs, but such variety is part of what many people find attractive about public radio to begin with. The question for any station eventually becomes how wide it can stretch its tone and quality without sacrificing its identity.

Following the heady experience of building an audience almost overnight, KPCC will now have to discover whether by hewing to the “mainstream,” it can also develop the kind of original programs that put KCRW on the map.

“I think the mainstream audience responds to original stuff as much as a fringe audience,” Foster says.

If there is a city anywhere to test that assumption, it is Los Angeles. Southern California has the largest public-radio audience in the country, with an estimated 1 million listeners out of the national total of 12 million. New York has three non-commercial stations. Los Angeles now has six.

“I think they’ve done a spectacular piece of work,” says Wallace Smith, general manager of KUSC, about KPCC’s emergence. “I feel competitive with them, but I feel it’s a healthy competition because the more listeners there are to public radio the better it is for all of us.”