Insert Foot vs. Dave FM.

The Bay Area just lost a huge chunk of its musical soul—and just as big of a slice of its cool factor.

San Francisco alt-rock station KITS-105.3 (Live 105/Alt 105; it switched names in 2017, but was always Live 105 to those remembering life before internet radio) is gone. Without warning—which is always the case in the radio business—it became something called Dave FM and/or “totally random radio.”

More like totally giving up, as it seems they can’t even come up with a half-baked name worth making fun of. It’s owned by a company called Audacy, that owns another 235 stations, which doesn’t sound very audacious.

However …

I was prepared to beat the good old days drum on this one and lament the passing of what we used to call alt-rock on the radio. I admit, sometimes I hate change. I hate that love can vanish (especially when aimed at me). I hate that people we love die. I hate that I no longer have any control of my children. I hate that I can no longer inhale a large pizza and a pitcher of beer without serious life consequences.

But, like James Hetfield says, time marches on.

I wouldn’t even know how to construct an argument against corporate radio and how it makes money without boring you to death. If the demand isn’t there, it isn’t there (I know where you’re about to go, and the dwindling demand for legitimate news outlets is a totally different argument. If you don’t understand how that gives chimps like Donald Trump power, then you’re hopeless).

But good, free, “alternative” radio? It’s miraculous we had Live 105 for 35 years. We can argue later how “alternative” it truly was the entirety of that time (at times it was anything but), but for the sake of this column, let’s assume it was.

The sad thing is that Live 105/ALT 1053 went from 14 local, passionate and creative staffers in 2017 to only ONE last year

I don’t know about you, but I feel local on-air personalities are what makes terrestrial radio unique and special to their communities 🤦

Call me crazy! https://t.co/ww60UciI9i

— aaron axelsen 🎧 (@AaronAxelsen) October 16, 2021

For shame. I grew up on Live 105. 😿 screw radio anyway. No one listens. I’ve left it for good as a broadcaster. As a music fan, @FLOODFM has given me a ton of music to love again.

— Heather Larson (she/her) 🇸🇻 (@WriterHeatherL) October 16, 2021

Let’s celebrate the fact that Live 105, more or less, was the best radio station in the Bay Area for people with a certain taste for (good) music for more than three decades—at least two decades after internet radio became mainstream. That is astonishing.

What an incredible success story.

When I was a real-life paid music critic—another thing that changed and made me unhappy—I used to occasionally appear on Live 105 to spread my small ideas of what was good and what wasn’t. I went to their events—BFDs, Not So Silent Night shows, other events at which I mingled with their people. There was an aura around them, in their physical building, even. It was a nice blend of fun and cool. Maybe, to white suburbanites like me, anyway, it was just about the coolest thing about radio in the Bay Area.

When Live 105 exploded in the Bay Area, I was a teen listening to hard rock, which was only played in my neighborhood on KVHS, a high school station that you had to be within a few miles of Concord to hear. Otherwise, the dial was full of classic (’60s and ’70s) rock, dance music, AM pop and some specialty stations that could exist in a different age, when no one imagined paying for radio.

Without Live 105, many of us wouldn’t have been exposed—at least not as much—to bands like Oingo Boingo, New Order, The Cure, The Replacements, Radiohead, Fishbone, Social Distortion, The Pixies, Bad Religion, The Plimsouls, The Smithereens, Squeeze, The Damned, Jane’s Addiction, and on and on. Live 105 amplified the Seattle stuff in the ’90s, as well as the Beastie Boys, Bay Area faves Green Day and Rancid, all the Lilith Fair acts, The Strokes and the whole garage band thing of the aughts. Live 105 insisted on playing so much great music a lot of people weren’t hearing elsewhere.

This is where I throw in a plug for Flood FM, where former Live 105 music director Aaron Axelsen now is trying to do the 2021 equivalent on the internet.

Life goes on and ceaselessly makes us feel older because we were comfortable with how things were. We don’t like change, but no one is asking us to make less money and remain stagnant to preserve their comfort.

Change is the only constant. Ironically, a new station called Totally Random Dave Radio (whatever) playing Fleetwood Mac and Bryan Adams just isn’t exciting. But it’s safe.

That sounds terribly boring.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.