The former programmer for Mix 94.1 and Lite 100, back in town after five years in San Diego, has spent the past few weeks reacclimating himself to Las Vegas at the Weekly’s reigning two-time Reader’s Choice best local radio station award winner.
Has anything in the market changed dramatically since you’ve been gone?
Yeah, we’ve got a kick-ass radio station on the air now that’s playing a lot of music that really hasn’t been played in the market for a long time, going back to ’99/2000 when the Edge went away. What we’re delivering is very diverse. We have a local show on Sunday nights. We have an indie show on Sunday nights. We have Project RPM on Saturday nights, which meshes our stuff with other stuff that might be popular in more of a club vein. This station can do a lot of things with ’90s-era music. And it all really does work—everything from Nirvana and Pearl Jam to Linkin Park, Smashing Pumpkins and Modest Mouse.
We’ve noticed the station has begun referring to itself as Area 107.9, rather than Area 108. Any particular reason?
We’ve made a shift to that just because we wanted to keep from being confusing about the 108. Back in the day, when not everybody had a digital radio, that was what radio stations did—round it off. But we’re not at 108, we’re at 107.9, and that’s largely how people that listen to the radio station refer to us anyway. So why not be who we are?
Format-change rumors were flying when you first came on board. That’s not happening, though, right?
I think that’s normal anytime there’s a change in the programming department of any radio station ... but we are committed to the format. Sure, this is a radio station that’s always going to be tweaked. We can sound consistent, but if we don’t tweak it and sound somewhat different, who wants that? That’s already being done here on several other frequencies [laughs].
You guys play older alternative stuff like The Smiths, “indie” stuff like The Shins and harder-edged stuff like Rage Against the Machine. Any concern that makes it tough to maintain a consistent listening audience throughout?
I think we’ve got an interesting dichotomy. A Rage works for us as well as, say, a Red Jumpsuit Apparatus or a White Stripes because those artists have had to find a place to exist in this market. We look at ourselves as a station that is really playing the music that our demographic is most fond of. We want them to know that even if they don’t necessarily love the song that’s on right now, they’ll probably like the next one.
What’s your vision for the station’s morning show?
When you take a look at what’s going on in Las Vegas radio in the morning, as you spin around the dial you find a lot of talk, and that is first and foremost the thing that we wanted to look at. Why can’t you turn on the radio and get a good balance of music as well as information? So we really are focused right now on music. And as the show progresses, because we know that an audience probably wants a little more than that in the morning, we’re gonna look at doing other things.