A ‘Monument’ on the Airwaves
STEVIE WONDER’S KJLH SERVES A CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY
In his professional lifetime, Stevie Wonder has achieved any number of firsts, most notably in the 1970s with his consecutive “album of the year” Grammy accumulations. A decade earlier, he was also the first of Berry Gordy’s acts to reach the top of the Billboard album charts, with Recorded Live The 12-Year-Old Genius.
Less familiar is the fact that, in 1979, Wonder bought the first black-owned radio station west of the Mississippi – and is still the proprietor.
It’s billed on-air as “Radio Free, 102.3” these days, but is more formally known as KJLH-FM Los Angeles – or, as Wonder tagged the station after the acquisition: Kindness, Joy, Love and Happiness. “Anytime there’s an independent voice that has freedom in playing music and talking about things that [people] don’t want to discuss,” he told Billboard’s Gail Mitchell last year, “we know that we have an outlet that will allow us to speak truth and not just say things that are fashionable to say.”
Someone just called Stevie on-air to say…
For helping the truth to be spoken in a riot-torn city some years ago, KJLH won a prestigious Peabody award, of which more in a moment.
Licensed to Compton and based in suburban Inglewood, the station is equipped with a modest signal that best covers the communities of colour in Los Angeles, Compton and Long Beach, and earns revenues estimated to be anywhere from $20 million to $50 million annually. Through a corporate entity, Taxi Productions, Wonder bought the station for $2.2 million – the equivalent of $9 million today – from mortician John Lamar Hill (hence, the call letters).
The outlet’s current music format is adult urban contemporary, laced with the likes of Lizzo, Silk Sonic, H.E.R. and Latto, and spiced by enduring names such as Earth, Wind & Fire, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Beyoncé and Lauryn Hill. The station aims at the 25-54 audience demographic, and recent ratings have placed it ahead of FM station KDAY (classic hip-hop) but behind KRRL (hip-hop/R&B) and KTWV (with an older, more crossover version of soft R&B). During the week of the Martin Luther King holiday this year, Wonder’s own “Happy Birthday” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” were in higher-than-usual rotation. Lately, its most-played modern Motown artist has been Ne-Yo.
“In the late 2010s, they were an interesting mix,” comments programming consultant and industry newsletter author Sean Ross. “Very aggressive on new music by the standards of Adult R&B stations – some of which play very little current music these days – as well as any adult-friendly Hip-Hop, especially Kendrick Lamar, and even some appropriate pop crossovers.
“KJLH is a little less eclectic now, but they’re still very current. Most everything in rotation in regular programming is 2000s-forward, while most Adult R&Bs are heavily late ’80s/’90s-based, with acts such as TLC, New Edition and Jodeci. Stevie’s station is much more recent, probably partly as a response to KTWV, which is now ‘The Soul of Southern California’ and very gold-based.”
A CONVERTIBLE IN COMPTON
Wonder is said to leave day-to-day programming chores to his team, but has often appeared on-air, and for several years, he co-hosted Stevie Wonder’s Morning Thunder Thousand Dollar Thursdays. He’s also a strong advocate of KJLH’s gospel offerings, such as Sunday broadcasts of sermons from local churches, and the highly-popular Spread The Word show, hosted (as it has been for more than 25 years) by Aundrae Russell.
On those rare occasions when Wonder has new music on release, it has been featured on the station, and when his Stevie Wonder Comes Home special was broadcast on TV, it was simulcast on KJLH. Naturally, his annual House Full of Toys benefit concert is linked to the station, which also backs other local events, such as the Compton Christmas Parade – where Wonder and Julio Iglesias once rode together in a silver Rolls Royce convertible.
A fellow Motown artist on the air at KJLH
“Listening to the radio when I was a kid in Detroit was what got me interested in music,” Wonder told the Chicago Tribune soon after acquiring KJLH, in one of the few media interviews in which he’s discussed the purchase. More recently, the host of its early-morning The Front Page show, Dominique DiPrima, said the musician was actively involved. “He calls us on the hotline during a break and will say, ‘That was good,’ or ‘Ask him this question.’ ”
Wonder’s support for a station tailored to its audience was never more apparent than in 1992, when “not guilty” verdicts in the Rodney King trial sparked days of riots in Los Angeles. KJLH abandoned its music format (and commercials) to report on the city’s devastation, and opened its phone lines for listeners to express their outrage and frustration. For this “sensitivity, keen insight and care and concern for the community’s well-being,” the station received a Peabody award, radio’s equivalent of the Pulitzer prize.
With ownership, of course, come tough decisions. In the past 20 years, KJLH-FM has been sued twice by on-air personalities after they were fired. One claimed that his dismissal followed an internal discussion of payola allegations against staff members. On another occasion, Wonder was reported as opposing employee efforts to unionise. In 2012, comedian D.L. Hughley recalled when he was a KJLH “sidekick” in the 1990s and made a poor joke on-air (“Do you think this station would be this raggedy if Stevie Wonder could see?”), only to have the boss storm into the studio 45 minutes later. “Of course, I’d always loved Stevie Wonder,” Hughley confessed in his book, I Want You To Shut The F#ck Up, “so having an icon like that yell at you was more weird than anything.” He added, “I was so fired.”
A CALL FOR EQUITABLE FEES
In 2017, Wonder went into print with a provocative opinion piece for Billboard about the rates that independent radio stations, such as his, had to pay to performing rights organisations, among other complaints. “We have societies that lose significant artists to other societies,” he declared, “but make no adjustment in the fees they charge to stations for their remaining roster.” This was, he argued, far from equitable.
Wonder was not the first music superstar to own a front-line radio station in the U.S.A. – James Brown had three – and others may yet do the same. But these past 43 years have proven a remarkable commitment and sensitivity to local communities in the city where he lives. “We are a home to our listeners,” he also wrote in Billboard, “a place they find comfort and refuge from the mass market.”
In closing, I’m reminded of words once spoken by Wonder’s lawyer, the late Johanan Vigoda. He was talking about Berry Gordy, but the point can be extended to his client. “Kids in the ghetto see Motown as a company which a man put together single-handedly to become the largest black-owned company in the United States. All things may not be exactly as people see them, but they need heroes, heroines, ideals. All monuments make a difference.”
Music notes: for your own take on KJLH, there’s no better option than to listen live, which you can do via this link. Naturally, the station’s website details its various programming strands (including the immensely popular Steve Harvey morning show) and community activities. Playing on-air as I wrote this was, coincidentally, “Be Like Water,” the hit track by PJ Morton featuring, uh, Stevie Wonder and Nas.
Family notes: its owner aside, KJLH had for many years a popular broadcaster with a Motown connection – namely, Dominique DiPrima. She is the daughter of the late Amiri Baraka (otherwise known as LeRoi Jones), who was a leading figure in America’s racial equality struggles of the 1960s and ’70s. Baraka’s album, It’s Nation Time, was originally released in 1972 on Motown’s Black Forum label, and reissued on vinyl in 2018. Prima left KJLH last year for Southern California talk station KBLA, which is also black-owned.