HFS Is Dead. Long Live HFS.
Ladies and gentlemen: WHFS, the so-called home of alternative rock in the DC-Baltimore area, is dead.
It appears that The Beast has finally consumed its own tail in the DC Metro area. Our own Jormangund in local radio finally killed off, for good, what was once one of the greatest radio stations on the face of the earth.
WHFS -- Hi-Fi Stereo, back when that meant something -- was initially founded in Washington DC as a free-form independent community radio station in the early 1960s. It was run, fiercely independently, by Jake Einstein for two decades. Jake's son, Damian, was and is a simply phenomenal DJ, despite the fact that a car accident left him with a distinct speech impediment, which was unacceptable in the modern broadcasting world. When Jake was forced to sell the station in 1989, the new owners took Damian off the air because his impediment was deemed too harsh for commercial radio.
That was the beginning of the end. The howls of protest, the 10,000 who turned out to Joe's Record Paradise in Olney for a "Save Damian" rally -- you just knew it was over, somehow.
After he was bought out, and after laying low for a while, Jake moved out to Annapolis and started a new freeform station, WRNR (103.1 in the Greater Annapolis area), which is still a true joy on the FM dial. Damian is still the lead DJ there. It rocks, and it sucks, because the Schmoo can't get WRNR from his home or his car. Occasionally, he will take sojourns out to eastern Maryland just to listen to RNR for an afternoon.
That's how good it is, and how good HFS was.
Once Jake Einstein left, HFS was never the same. The old guard of DJs who knew good music and could discuss it at length with a random midnight caller became the same stale TRL-inspired cracker ghetto punks. There was a brief flash of hope several years ago, but then Johnny Riggs got busted for child porn, and it's been a merciless slide towards hopeless FM mediocrity since.
What was worse was that because of HFS's history, it still considered itself cool and could preach that mantra to the kids, despite the fact that the old guard of fans -- the Schmoo's classmates in high school and the hipster stoners he so admired who were in college back then -- gave up on HFS years ago.
As HFS's audience skewed younger and younger, and 98 Rock (97.9 in Baltimore) and DC101 (101.1 in DC) lapped up the remaining few HFS listeners who still placed their musical faith in the public airwaves, their ratings began to plummet. No matter what they did, they couldn't bring back the listeners they'd lost, and their only viable market -- the Abercrombie and Fitch crowd -- was too fickle and too disingenuous to support a sustainable system. The Schmoo knows quite a few local youngsters who loved HFS through high school, only to come home after a semester or two away at college decrying the shamelessness and "sucktacity" of their former mistress.
The Schmoo will miss HFS, but not the bloated craptaculence it became in its velvet-jumpsuit-and-Vegas days. Rather, the Schmoo remembers fondly the wild sexiness of white boys and girls turning the Delta blues upside down for a suburban audience, and reflects that Jake and Damian Einstein and the Followers of The Olden Ways still know a thing or two about capturing the heart of American youth.
Long live Young Elvis. Long live Jake Einstein. Long live "true alternatives".
God Bless America.
Replies: 1 comments
Wow. I had no idea they went spanglish on us. It's one thing to change formats and its another to do it at the drop of a hat. According to the Sports Junkies page, they were told after their Wednesay show that the station was changing...now. That's no way to run a railroad or a, um, radio station.
Posted by @ 01/14/05 9:33 a.m. ET