The familiar voice of WKRP in Cincinnati star Gary Sandy welcomed listeners to the new WKRP in Cincinnati on the radio at 6 a.m. Monday, as “The Oasis” 1970s rock music stations brought the beloved call letters to the Queen City airwaves for the first time.
“We play essentially the same music that they played on WKRP. It made more sense for us to do this than any other station in town,” says Jeff Ziesmann, who owns the three-station network which beams the new WKRP from northern Kentucky to north of Dayton.
The stations teased the switch by airing the WKRP theme song continuously since midnight.
Ziesmann bought the call letters in April from a tiny Raleigh, N.C., low-power FM station which had announced their availability in January as a fundraising effort.
It has taken a month to prepare the transition, including getting Sandy — the Northern Kentucky resident who played WKRP program director Andy Travis on the 1978-82 CBS comedy set in a fictional Cincinnati radio station — to record “liners,” or short promotional announcements heard between songs.
But don’t expect former “Oasis” DJs Dave Mason, Ernie “The Fat Man” Brown or Dayton veteran John Beaulieu to sound like burned-out morning man Dr. Johnny Fever, or start wearing salesman Herb Tarlek’s leisure suits.
And this new WKRP-FM won’t transform into a bumbling broadcaster that does jingles for funeral homes or drops live turkeys over a shopping mall.
“The presentation will be a tribute to the TV show — not a parody of a 40-year-old TV show that aired for only four years,” Ziesmann says. “For us, WKRP is more of an attitude.”
The arrival of the WKRP call letters comes with a big change for another Greater Cincinnati legacy station. WKRP-FM will broadcast on 97.7, which in the 1980s and ‘90s was Oxford’s iconic independent rock station WOXY-FM.
"97x" received national notoriety in the Oscar-winning Rain Man movie shot here when Dustin Hoffman’s character kept repeating the station’s marketing line, “97x! Bam! The future of rock ‘n’ roll!” (Here’s a link to WVXU-FM’s Cincinnati Edition 2023 show about the history of WOXY 97x.)
WKRP-FM’s signal, broadcast from Middletown's old WPFB-FM tower, reaches from Cincinnati to Dayton. The WOXY calls letters were moved to the former WYDB-FM (94.5) in Englewood, a northern Dayton suburb. No changes were made to WNKR-FM (106.7) in Dry Ridge, Ky., where the studios and headquarters are located for Ziesmann’s Grant County Broadcasters.
While the call letters and branding have changed, the music remains the same.
“This is just a rebranding. We don’t want to spook those people who might think we threw out their favorite radio station,” Ziesmann says.
Ziesmann and partner Randy Michaels have curated more than 1,800 rock and pop songs from the 1960s through the 1980s — from the Beatles, Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Elvis Presley and Elton John to Credence Clearwater Revival, Queen, Styx, Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles and Eric Clapton.
Part of the popularity of the WKRP TV show was hearing Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) and Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid) playing current rock music. They actually debuted some future hits, such as Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”
The 140,000 listeners also hear songs recorded at Cincinnati’s King Records and Fraternity Records labels by the Lemon Pipers, James Brown, Lonnie Mack, Starstruck (“Black Betty”) and others.
“The station is 100 percent programmed locally. You’re not going to get that from Cumulus (owners of WARM98, WGRR-FM and 92.5 The Fox) or iHeartMedia (owners of WEBN-FM and KISS 107.1), which basically have one play list nationally for each of its formats,” Ziesmann says.
Fictionally set in Cincinnati, WKRP was inspired by a radio station in Atlanta where creator Hugh Wilson had worked in advertising, and filmed at MTM Studios in Los Angeles from 1978 to 1982.
No Greater Cincinnati broadcaster has ever used the WKRP call letters — although WKRC-AM edited the sitcom’s theme song to say “WKRC in Cincinnati” soon after the sitcom’s premiere, and WBQC-TV (Channel 25) branded its low-power station as WKRP TV (no hyphen) in 2008.
The WKRP call letters were used in 1980s by radio stations in North Vernon, Ind., and at West Georgia College northwest of Atlanta before low-power “101 nine WKRP” in Raleigh, N.C.
“I'm pleased to say that WKRP is coming home to where it belongs,” says D.J. McIntire, WKRP-LPFM general manager. McIntire received inquiries from Greater Cincinnati — and other broadcasters — after my Feb. 9 story about how the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization was auctioning off the call letters by April 30. The sale generated funds for the nonprofit, and to help other low-power FM stations “in need of funds to stay afloat,” he said.
The hope for Ziesmann and Michaels is that the new WKRP in Cincinnati will put the home-grown format on the map.
“One of the issues with ‘The Oasis’ is the fact we called it The Oasis. The concept was that we created a musical oasis in a desert, where all this great music went. But people would see it on a billboard and not know what is was,” Ziesmann says.
“The ratings have been up and down, but the truth is that it makes money. So this is a way to create awareness to get people who never heard of The Oasis to sample us.
“This was an opportunity to try out the concept,” Ziesmann says.
After nearly five decades, finally there’s a radio station called WKRP in Cincinnati.
Roll over, Beethoven, and tell Les Nessman the news.
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