21st: Metal Madness

Andrew Leonard on the battle over heavy metal radio station KNAC on the Web.

By Andrew Leonard

Feb 13, 1998 | Headbangers rejoice! The spirit of Quiet Riot, Motorhead and even Britny Fox lives on. KNAC, aka "Pure Rock Radio," is back. On Sunday, Feb. 15, at 2 p.m., three years to the minute after the much-beloved-by-metalheads Los Angeles station signed off the air, KNAC will be reborn, this time as a Web-based radio station.

The new incarnation comes complete with members of the original cast of hard-rocking disk jockeys -- Nasty Neil, Long Paul and Philthy Phil -- and promises plenty of Pure Rock attitude, a style perhaps best summed up by the once omnipresent-in-L.A. KNAC poster, a rearview portrait of a leather clad woman's buttocks with the superimposed slogan "Slap One On Your Bumper!"

Rock 'n' roll will never die, indeed. The '90s have been tough for hard rockers, from hair bands to death metal diehards. But on the Net, everything survives. KNAC's relaunch actually comes rather late in the game. Like every other pop cultural niche that, for whatever reason, barely registers on mainstream society's radar screen, heavy metal is alive and well on the Web, and has been for years.

"The long-haired metalheads of the '80s are all into computers," says Tracy Barnes, president of the pioneering Web-based hard rock radio station HardRadio. "All of the bands are Internet freaks now, everybody we know has a connection. Ozzy, the Metallica guys, Motvrhead, Mvtley Cr|e -- everybody is wired."

But KNAC has the brand, and in today's consumer entertainment market, even the call letters for a defunct 3,000-watt radio station whose puny broadcast range barely covered the Los Angeles basin are worth something. They may even be worth a lot, if the current squabble between several parties that each claim to exemplify the true spirit of Pure Rock is any evidence. Oh yes, the hard rockers are on the Net, and they're not just banging their own heads, they're banging on each other's.

The defining moment in the demise of the hard rock heyday came when MTV rejuggled its format in favor of the Nirvana-led grunge invasion. In a flash, a score of bands saw their careers aborted in mid-screaming solo. Ever since, album sales have declined and bands that once played sold-out stadiums have been reduced to strutting their stuff in half-filled nightclubs. But in terms of pure pathos, no single hard rock disaster matches up to the tragedy that befell KNAC.

KNAC was the station where Motvrhead's Lemmy could be found swigging whiskey in the studio with morning "jock" Thrasher, where bands like Guns N Roses and Metallica received their first big-time radio exposure. It was, as former KNAC program director Gregg Steele remembers, "a very pivotal radio station in a lot of people's daily lives in Southern California for a great period of time."

But even at its best, says Steele, now the program director at Miami's WZTA, "KNAC was just a little Long Beach radio station. KNAC was never about large, massive Arbitron ratings and market share. KNAC operated with a pretty minimal budget, with a very niche format."

As such, KNAC couldn't fight the forces sweeping the radio industry in the early '90s, an era in which stations began to be bought and sold like used records at a flea market. In 1995, a Spanish-language broadcaster purchased KNAC, and L.A.'s only source for Pure Rock vanished.

Enter impresario Rob Jones Jr., vice president for new media at the Internet broadcasting company DemoNet. Jones, a long-time hard rock promoter, is convinced that there is a market for advertising to hard rock-famished metal fans on the Net. Not only are there countless fan sites for virtually every hard rock band that ever existed, but there's also the sterling example of the 3-year-old HardRadio, which has long been home to industry refugees, including several former KNAC staffers.

But to Jones, HardRadio is little more than a "commercial free automated jukebox. Half of the essence of KNAC was the jocks as well as the music and the attitude. There is an audience out there that isn't necessarily getting served in this genre."

Like any good promoter, Jones is a fast talker full of bold visions, which makes him perfect for the nascent world of new media. Jones says that "KNAC on the Net" will provide round-the-clock live broadcasts brought to listeners by the latest audio streaming technologies, complete with live jock banter and news reports and, eventually, streaming video as well. As of a week before launch, he had yet to secure firm advertiser commitments, but he seemed confident of his business model and even suggested that the Web radio version of KNAC, like the old broadcast version, might include commercials in the audio stream.

There's no disguising the gamble. Listeners on the Web, accustomed to being able to pick and choose what they hear and see at their own discretion, may balk at being force-fed old-media-style ads. And it's far from clear whether audio streaming technology is quite up to the job, even if more than 650 radio and television stations have already put live broadcasts on the Web, as Kevin Epstein, a product manager at RealNetworks, the industry leader in streaming technologies, asserts.

If you have a powerful computer, the latest software and a fast connection to the Net, you can, occasionally, get what Epstein calls "CD-equivalent sound." But most Web music still sounds, as one critic points out unkindly, "as if it is being played underwater." And there's always a better-than-even chance that congestion somewhere on the Net will disrupt the audio feed, causing irritating "rebuffering" pauses that tend to hamper appreciation of a Megadeth speed metal riff. "Is it quadraphonic?" says once-and-future KNAC jock Long Paul. "No, it's not, but as the Net grows and the technology grows with it, we will obviously grow with it also."

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