I want my country back

WHEN THEY took away my country music station, I went through many emotions, only some of which had to do with the flag, pickup trucks, Jesus and how much better life used to be.

I felt at a loss, disconnected from a part of me that’s a little tougher, a little more earnest and a lot more made fun of by my friends. Sure, it’s a bit of a pose for a guy from Jersey to be blasting Trace Adkins out of his yellow convertible Mini Cooper, but it makes me feel free. To my friends -- who are fine when I play rap, jazz, classical, musicals and even that guy who willingly calls himself Stench -- country is flat unacceptable: grating, stupid, declasse. Which just made me feel more like an outlaw.

But that’s gone now. Without warning, at 10:20 a.m. Aug. 17, KZLA-FM (93.9) changed formats to Movin’ 93, which tries to cater to Latino women in their 30s. Apparently, that means club music from the ‘80s and ‘90s. I don’t know what kind of lives Latino women in their 30s lead, but if they’re desperate to relive drunken singles nights, then that Cristina woman on Univision is not doing her job.

Besotted with grief, I called Whitney Allen, who worked KZLA’s afternoon drive, and convinced her that I could only cope with my loss by going to her house and having her play me songs from her collection. Unfortunately, all her CDs were packed in the garage because she lost her job while doing a renovation she now can’t afford to finish. I gave her a look that let her know we were here to deal with my pain, not hers. I wanted to hear someone sing about losing a job, not jabber on about it.

Allen, the 2005 Radio Music Awards Country Air Personality of the Year, grabbed a Diet Coke, lit up a Benson & Hedges and took me out on her electric-powered party boat on the lake her house sits on. I was already getting my country fix before we put any music on.

Since being laid off, Allen has spent most of her time answering the more than 1,000 e-mails from former listeners. She said she felt awful that she never got to thank them on the air. I cleared my throat loudly. “Oh, Joel, thanks for listening,” she said. “Every day no matter how I felt, for the four hours I was there everything went away except for the music and the listeners.” We hugged the kind of awkward hug you can only really get between someone who spends all day alone in a deejay booth and someone who spends all day alone typing.

To help me get by, Allen suggested that I go to next month’s Country Bash concert, leave my television on the Country Music Channel or hook up that satellite radio I got as a gift two months ago. The CMT thing was a great idea.

She also put together a personal playlist of her favorite songs for me to download. Then we headed inside to her home studio, where Allen records two syndicated shows, “America’s Hot List” and “The Big Time Saturday Night.” But the Tim McGraw disc wouldn’t load for some reason, and she couldn’t find the video on the Web, so we went to Amazon.com and played a snippet of “Everywhere.” It was the kind of 27 seconds that can really change your life.

With the first third of a McGraw chorus stuck firmly in my head, I left Allen and shoved in a Shooter Jennings CD for the drive home. But without KZLA, I felt like my world was smaller, that I was cut off from a crucial part of my own country, that our fragmented media was making the blue states bluer and the red ones redder.

Liberals may consider themselves more open-minded than conservatives who only get their news from Fox, but while New York City, San Francisco and L.A. now don’t have country stations -- even though the genre has outsold rap so far this year -- Wyoming and Utah have hip-hop stations. And Trace Adkins has a hit song, “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” that melds hip-hop and country cultures in the one thing they can both agree upon: objectifying women’s body parts. That, more than anything, is the America I want to live in.

jstein@latimescolumnists.com