It’s a typical Tuesday night in the Time Warp.
Up in the second-floor broadcast studio, a woman with black roots and a bleached-blond coif ratted to the size of a toy poodle is working the control board, raking her pink nails through a small record store’s worth of platters by the likes of Hank Ballard, Chuck Berry and the Elegants. Opposite her sits the inimitable M.C. Goober, raconteur and sole guardian of The Official Goober Information Packet.
“I’m always looking for the bizarre. The good you can listen to anytime,” says Goober, eyeing the list of 1950s-flavored items he’ll discuss with listeners and his radio cohort, who’s known to the outside world only as Ranger Rita.
Topics will include the Dallas school district lunch menu for that week 37 years ago, the size of the ’58 Plymouth Fury’s tail fins, and prune-flavored milkshakes.
At some point Ranger Rita will tell listeners they are tuned to the “Magic Time Warp Machine” on KNON-FM 89.3, “the Voice of the People and Home of Community Radio.” Then in a high-pitched nasal whine-what actor Slim Pickens might have sounded like had he been a woman-she’ll invite the audience to call in those pre-’62 oldies requests to “TAylor3-7490. You can dial us up on your rotary dial phone and you’ll get right through.”
You’ll get through all right, but what you reach isn’t just Rita and her magically warped wavelength. You’re really tapping into part of a parallel broadcasting universe that features more than 60 disc jockeys spinning everything from low-rider music to lesbian love laments, 24 hours a day.
The disc jockeys don’t get paid. They have to deal with SWAT teams occasionally raiding the crack houses that surround their roach-infested east Dallas studio. And, as often as not, they have to buy their own records. But the most amazing part is that they’ve been getting away with this musical mayhem for 10 years.
Ask the folks involved with KNON why it works and they’ll tell you it comes down to people and their passion for what they play and get to say-people like D.J. Lefty, who does the “Meridian to Bakersfield” country oldies show preceding the “Time Warp Machine,” and his brother Righty and their sister, Julie, who help him pull records and take requests.
“It’s a love,” said Righty who, by day, hangs his black fedora at Temple Beth Emunah in nearby Irving, where folks know him as Rabbi Frank Joseph. “It’s my diversion from the synagogue. It’s just a good feeling when a listener requests a record and you can provide it.”
Of course not just anybody can get a KNON gig like Lefty’s and Righty’s. Though most jocks have to grovel for donations during the station’s quarterly pledge drives, spend maybe 20 hours a week doing something they don’t get paid for and even have to help purchase the used tubes that the station’s transmitters run on, plenty of people want a slot.
“I had 10 interviews a week for 18 months. I limited it to two a day,” said former disc jockey and program director Craig “Niteman” Taylor, recalling the crush of KNON wannabes who hounded him to get a spot after the station hit the airwaves on July 30, 1983, with what Taylor recalls as about 30 watts of power. “For many people it’s the most important thing in their lives.”
It was certainly a turning point for Taylor, who played his first gig with Killbilly, the band he now fronts, in the studio in March of ’87, after bouncing from being a real estate developer with a Harvard MBA to a limo driver.
Lucky for the Niteman he got the group together; like countless ‘NON jocks, he eventually got the ax.
“I got fired in ’88 ’cause the station manager hated my guts and I hated his,” he said.
It happened to Nancy Moore too.
Nine years ago Moore was known as Shaggy, 16-year-old host of “The Pajama Party.” When Texas Monthly did a big feature on the station, Shaggy became a personality, a scenemaker and eventually a six-year KNON vet.
These days she’s driving a limo and going to an area junior college; it all unraveled when she tried to work an outside job, go to college to put some kind of real career together, and basically got so overextended that her show went down the tubes.
“I keep saying `we,’ ” she said, reflecting on the station and her tenure that ended about three years ago. “It really hurt bad at the time; basically fired from something that wasn’t even a job. I cried my eyes out.”
But that doesn’t mean she won’t defend the station’s musical contribution. “If it’s one thing KNON is good for, it’s we don’t have to wait for something to come out. We can make it happen.”
And they’ve made it happen despite an administrative law battle with a religious broadcasting operation in the 1980s that forced the station to move from its original 100,000-watt, 90.9 frequency to its current 55,000 watt, 89.3 authorized spot.
