Fending Off Anxious Suitors, KKGO Mines Mozart Crowd

The occasion for the visit to Saul Levine’s airy office, with its library of law books and prints by Hockney and Chagall, is the 10th anniversary, Jan. 1, of KKGO-FM (105.1) as an all-classical music station. The man with the booming voice over the phone whom you imagine to look like one of those substantial veteran opera singers turns out to be of ordinary build and soft-voiced as he reflects on KKGO’s highlights.

KKGO’s founder and president has history too. The station--situated since 1987 in its own modern, three-story building with skylights, adjacent to the 405 Freeway in West Los Angeles--is the longest-operating, independent radio station in Los Angeles under original ownership.

“The highlight to me is every day, when we present the greatest artistic music in the world,” Levine says. “Yesterday I was driving home, and Mozart’s 39th Symphony was on, and I was thinking, ‘That is so incredibly beautiful.’ Mozart and Bach and Beethoven and Schumann and Brahms; it’s a thrill.”

Nevertheless, Levine, who acquired the signal in 1958 after borrowing $10,000, doesn’t dwell on the past. Programming landmarks--whether the nightly “Evening Concert” or Thursday night performances of the Pacific Symphony live from the Orange County Performing Arts Center, or the series “Los Angeles Opera Live!”--are reserved for publicity brochures.

Instead, Levine homes in on the trying economics of running a commercial classical station, from the vagaries of the Arbitron ratings system to advertisers who he says don’t respect the 50-plus audience, the bulk of his listeners.

In the most recent ratings period, KKGO ranked 27th in the market with a 1.4% share of audience, the lowest in recent years. KKGO usually scores in the high 1% to low 2% range. And among 25- to 54-year-olds, the group generally favored by advertisers, KKGO sank to 29th place with only a 0.8% share (down from the previous quarter’s 1.5%).

But don’t cry for Levine. At a point in life when most people have already retired, Levine--UC Berkeley, 1952; UCLA Law, 1955--remains a player. He holds one of the best radio signals in the Los Angeles region, emanating atop Mt. Wilson with a reach from San Diego to Bakersfield, and he has received lucrative offers for KKGO. Still, he voices a certain measure of complaint.

“My ego is wounded,” he says. “We have a better [signal] than KIIS [FM-102.7] has, than KROQ [FM-106.7], yet they outbill us five to eight times. It also gives rise to the constant rumors that the station is being sold. I heard one just yesterday, because they know how much the station is worth”--hinting that KKGO could easily garner more than $100 million.

“Maybe someone [else] would keep it classical but the point is, we’re not selling. . . . My wife and I discussed it, and there are things money won’t buy . . . the respect we get from people that we’re bringing them something that is very dear to the community.”

Among KKGO’s suitors within the past year, he says, have been Top 40 station KIIS and Cox Radio Inc., which this summer announced its intention to sell talk station KFI-AM (640) and adult contemporary KOST-FM (103.5) to AMFM Inc. “I think one of the reasons they left L.A. [is] they couldn’t buy our station,” Levine says.

“We’re giving up $10 million, $20 million in revenue a year to be classical,” he continues. “That’s a sacrifice. I could own a lot of Rolls-Royces. People say to me, ‘Look, you could have a foundation, you could fund great causes, you could finance students who want scholarships in music.’ In a way I’m being selfish, but I’m getting $10-million worth of pleasure--or as they say in Jewish, nachas.”

As a child in a small farm community in north Michigan--his father had a general store, and worked into his 80s--Levine fell in love with radio, his lifeline to the world of arts and culture. “The closest stations were 300 miles away in Detroit. I loved listening to them. . . . Everything. In those days, it was big band and nostalgia, the Frank Sinatras.”

It’s the music he’s now back to playing on KGIL-AM (1260) after stabs at several other formats, including all-news and all-Beatles. Levine bought the station in 1993, and it now simulcasts with KGXL-AM (1650), an expanded band he acquired in June 1998. Originally KGXL was KKTR, all-traffic, but having failed to score a rating, he abandoned that format in March.

Levine began broadcasting classical music on his 105.1 FM frequency in 1959. The station was then known as KBCA. In 1961, under the onslaught of competition from KFAC, which then simulcast in AM and FM, he switched to jazz, changing the call letters to KKGO in 1978.

Then in September 1989, in the wake of KFAC-FM morphing into KKBT-FM (92.3), an urban outlet known as the Beat, Levine blended a classical / jazz format. But that didn’t go over with listeners, so as the new decade began, he went all-classical.

Talking about the current competition on KUSC-FM (91.5)--predominantly classical--Levine says: “They’re competition in the sense that they fragment the audience. . . . But there is certainly room for both of us.”

Brenda Pennell, KUSC’s general manager, agrees. “[If] you don’t like something on KUSC, you may flip to KKGO, which means that you’re listening to classical music longer and becoming more devoted to it. It actually helps both of us.”

Levine says KKGO is “modestly profitable.” While much of the music it plays is in the public domain, there are license fees amounting to about $200,000 a year for such composers as Gershwin, Copland and Bernstein.

Decrying advertiser preference for younger ears, Levine calls it “very shortsighted because we know that people over 40, over 50, the baby boomers, have huge disposable income. The McDonald’s and the Burger Kings won’t come on our station, but we do get the finer banks, the investment companies, Mercedes-Benz, the BMWs. . . . Actually, in the last quarter, we’ve had a huge upsurge in the dot-com business.”

He knows as well as anyone who advertisers want to reach. They include his 23-year-old daughter, Stephanie, who works for a record promotion company, and his son, Michael, 20, a college junior, both of whom prefer rock station KROQ to their father’s station.

Each, of course, has been substantially exposed to the classical genre, and Levine has hopes that their tastes will change. “Something happens to people when they reach 40,” he says. “They seem to develop a more serious interest in the arts and music.”

Asked about KKGO’s next decade, Levine is at first nonplused. He will keep on doing what he’s been doing, though he hopes the repertoire will also include 20th- and 21st-century melodic music. No dissonant stuff on his station from the likes of John Cage or Philip Glass. Levine insists on melody. And he is hoping that, under incoming Los Angeles Philharmonic Managing Director Deborah Borda, he’ll resume Philharmonic broadcasts.

With the millennium as inevitable as his station’s year-end countdown of classical favorites, Levine believes that time is on KKGO’s side. After all, as demographers point out, America is turning gray. Maybe, he adds, advertisers will see that too.