The much-loved and eclectic campus radio station KUCI, 88.9 FM, turns 55 this year, and it has been quite a ride. What started as an underground station was among the first to embrace the internet. With an audience that now spans the globe, KUCI continues to air a diverse schedule of music and voices (and UC Irvine sports) and offers students the chance to gain skills, cultivate a passion and meet people of differing perspectives in a space where it is safe to do so. For The UCI Podcast, Aaron Orlowski speaks with Kevin Stockdale, the broadcast media coordinator for KUCI, who has been with the station since he was a UC Irvine student in the mid-1980s.

To get the latest episodes of The UCI Podcast delivered automatically, subscribe at:

Apple Podcasts – Spotify.

TRANSCRIPT

Aaron Orlowski:

This year, KUCI turns 55, which is a big achievement. Tell us about the radio station’s origins. Who started it back then, and why did they do so?

Kevin Stockdale:

Why is because there was no internet back then. They entertain your friends. So making an illegal AM radio station in your dormitory was the way to get things done back in the sixties.

There are some different stories and one that was long accepted as fact. And then about five or seven years ago, we had a training director rewrite the history based on some other stuff she found. But the essence of it is that there were a few engineering students who were living in the dorms around 1968, and they created a low-power AM broadcast station, and it got shut down. There was some disagreement as to whether the FCC shut it down or the university shut it down. The story I had grown up with was that the FCC had shut it down, but more recently we’ve gotten some anecdotes that it was more likely the university. But with that said we had some enterprising students who went through student government, ASUCI, and got a few thousand dollars awarded to work on getting a station. And lo and behold, the FCC was a lot less busy back then, and they awarded us a low-power educational non-commercial frequency at 89.9.

Aaron Orlowski:

So it started as a rebellious act, breaking the rules.

Kevin Stockdale:

Yes.

Aaron Orlowski:

But then quickly came into the fold.

Kevin Stockdale:

Yes.  It took more than a year or so. As the station grew, as time went on, and as the population grew, I guess the student population was interested, and there became a very tight-knit group of dedicated ASUCI radio DJs and music fans. The station did a lot of news coverage. And even in 1976, they sent a team on a road trip to cover the Democratic National Convention. And then they started filling up 24 hours a day of programming. So going from practically nothing with a few people to within five or six years, you’ve got enough people to fill up ‘round the clock was pretty amazing. As that continued and a sense of purpose grew to expose underground artists and do an anti-corporate thing before it was a cool thing to do.

If I look at the old playlist from before my time, you see artists like The Cure and things like this, but back then, there was no station playing The Cure. And when I started, I remember U2 was huge on college radio, and then REM followed, and they didn’t have any commercial success anywhere. So we have continued to the best of our ability to encourage and reinforce people to find artists that you’re not going hear, voices that are not represented.  

We had some talk shows back when I started. We had three hours a week of public affairs programs that were either 30 or 60 minutes for a total of three hours a week where they had holistic health and career advice and some simple things like that. And then for the last, I’d say, 20 years now, we’ve had 20 hours a week – two hours five mornings a week, and two hours five afternoons a week – of public affairs programs. Some of them are long-running and well-established. And post-COVID, we’ve been building ourselves back up, and now have a lot more student involvement.

Aaron Orlowski:

You have shared a fair bit about how the programming has changed and improved over the years. But regarding the technology, how has that changed? Starting from 10 watts – which, how far does 10 watts broadcast? How close do you have to be to catch that signal?

Kevin Stockdale:

When I started, we added some structures to the antenna that allowed us to amplify the signal within legal limits. So we were effectively 24 watts, but the transmitter only put out 10 watts. Either way, you could drive up Campus toward Jamboree, take a right towards the 405 and start to lose it. I remember going to my orientation in September 1983 and being somewhat curious about it. I listened to the station on my way home from that orientation week and thought they sounded like amateurs and were hard to listen to. And then the signal’s gone. We were shortchanged by being what they call a height above average terrain. The FCC engineers measure the radius and then take into account the elevation. The average terrain is three meters above us. So instead of the height above average terrain, we’re three meters below average terrain, and that means we really are underground radio <laughs>.

We just had this transmitter, this antenna, this very basic connection from here to there, connecting the station and the transmitter to the antenna. And then, over time, things got more sophisticated. We bought a newer transmitter that was solid state, so we didn’t have tubes anymore. And it performed better, we had more adaptability, and we were able to manipulate and process the sound. We added some sound processing equipment. And due to some minor changes in SEC regulations, we were able to squeeze in and upgrade the boundaries of other stations that were already licensed and were on the frequency before us, namely KXLU, the Loyola Marymount station, 88.9, in west Los Angeles. They have 3,000 watts.

Trying to get any more of a footprint without stepping on their giant footprint was tricky. But we do have a specialized antenna with a kidney bean shape to it, so we’re not putting too much energy toward their protected contour. That being said, when we were permitted, that meant we were able to go to stereo for the first time. One other technological advance was the advent of streaming audio on the internet. In 1997, we became one of the first stations anywhere in the area to start streaming on the internet. And we’ve been doing that ever since for the last 27 years. And that technology has saved us, and taken us away from our obsession with the low power and the signal.

The internet gives us a worldwide audience. People are not there just driving by going up and down the dial and noticing, oh, what’s this station? You have to know where to go when you’re on the internet. But through social media now, which is yet another technological advance to help our promotions and marketing, we’ve been able to make a lot of improvements and word of mouth. My DJs stuck at two in the morning may think they got a terrible show, but I tell them it’s 10 a.m. in the UK. We used to have a very popular electronic music show that was Fridays from midnight to 3 a.m., and they had a good following in the UK. We would get donations from the UK and have to pay the money to ship the thank-you gifts over there. The internet has been a huge advance for us, as well as for the rest of the world.

Aaron Orlowski:

And midnight to 3 a.m. is also actually the right time for an electronic music show.

Kevin Stockdale:

Yes, it is. Absolutely.

Aaron Orlowski:

But what about podcasting? Has that played into your evolution as a station?

Kevin Stockdale:

It absolutely has. We were, we were making our public affairs talk shows available on demand before the podcast was a concept. We would have it on our website, and you could stream it or download it, but it was not in a podcast format. But then podcasting became a thing. And we’ve been there all along. We are not allowed to make copyrighted music available, so we only do our talk shows. And for many years I archived all the men’s and women’s basketball and UC Irvine baseball broadcasts that we did. We have certain podcasts of certain shows that have been around for decades that have, 1,000-1,500 episodes up.

Aaron Orlowski:

Let’s dig a little bit into your story. You started at KUCI in 1983 and joined professionally in 1988. You were a biological sciences major. So what drew a bio sci guy to radio?

Kevin Stockdale:

I stuck with my bio side, despite not really wanting to pursue it after I got too involved with KUCI. I grew up listening to Classic Rock radio, which was just rock radio back then, but I liked rock and hard rock and things like that. And my friend from high school came to UC Irvine, and we were bio sign majors together, trying to figure out what to do. And we had joined the commuter club, and we had gone to one meeting, and we had come to the orientation for KUCI. I like music, so it kind of made sense.

My friend Sharif, who sadly passed away a couple of years ago, was the whole reason I got involved. He started to make a little bit more progress, so I made sure I had to keep up with him. And so we started our radio show in the summer of ’84, after the end of our freshman year. It just kind of grew to a really neat experience, both musically, professionally and then socially. He and I were kind of shy, quiet people in high school. And to be able to be around and just be in the room while people are socializing and talking music, and then it kind of made us feel comfortable and at home. And so that’s how we ended up sticking with it.

Kevin Stockdale:

My friend was determined to go to medical school and be a doctor, so he was only really involved for the first two and a half or three years. I never wanted to be a doctor, but I thought maybe I would find some opportunities in research or something. But nothing ever came to me. And I graduated knowing that I had only had a few more classes to take, so I stayed around for a fifth year and got a management minor. Being the KUCI student program director my fourth year and student general manager my fifth year, it made sense to have that as a minor. And everything made sense to me, except for what would be next.

I did send out a couple of tapes to the local Long Beach station, KNEC, which came on the scene around 1986 as the low-power commercial hard rock station. But I did not get picked for either of the positions I applied to. Then I thought about the record industry. And then there was talk about creating a part-time position at KUCI for someone to work on a power increase. And my boss that created my position, Dennis Hampton, the long-time executive director of ASUCI, saw this opportunity and knew that this was the only opportunity for KUCI to go open in power.

And he knew that there was not going to be a student to be able to devote what turned out to be three years to the project. But all along Dennis knew that creating this position would allow them to have some continuity. There’d be some institutional memory, finally. There was a lot of carryover from year to year with students, but there was nothing that could compare to having somebody who’s seen and done these things. So he had that in mind as well. The power increase was fantastic, and being able to have some order, organization and the institutional memory has been some of the biggest benefits for the station.

Aaron Orlowski:

Radio is a unique medium. What has kept you in it? What do you love about radio in particular compared to other forms of media?

Kevin Stockdale:

The localism, I guess is the term that’s bandied about, is really where it’s at – that you have somebody who knows what’s going on in real-time right now that the power is out, my radio still works because I have batteries. I don’t have to worry about a Wi-Fi connection. The immediacy and the localism of having somebody on the ground and seeing what you’re seeing or experiencing what you’re experiencing makes radio a very powerful medium that despite its struggles in recent decades still exists, and I think will always exist in some form or another.

Aaron Orlowski:

You cherished your experience at KUCI as a student and continue it as a career. What do you think students gain in general from participating in the station and even hosting a show?

Kevin Stockdale:

It’s a unique experience in a lot of ways. And people come here who may be interested in music or they may be opinionated and curious about an area of a talk show concept. They come in here and learn FCC rules and regulations, station policies and campus policies to a certain extent, and they get hands-on training. There are also a lot of computer skills developed because you use Adobe Audition to edit audio software. And we would have people record their demos from a cassette to a CD or a thumb drive. And now we have them record an Adobe audition and share it on Google Drive – so they get those kinds of stills.

It’s a great experience to learn how to interact with a diverse group of people. And it’s always been a diverse group, and it’s always been heavily liberal. But there are still conservative people here, and it’s never really an issue of one side versus another. It’s like we’re all here for the same reason, and some of us talk about different things or play different things. And then for many people who are serious enough, this is a great stepping-off point for careers in media –making what’s left of the record industry, what’s left of radio. There are not a lot of opportunities for either of those. But there are certainly other media-related things. I have more people who were KUCI folks who have moved on and are working for some sort of media company. I remember we had a grad student 25 to 30 years ago, and she went on to be a bigwig at CBS dealing with music licensing, clearances and all that kind of stuff. And she credits KUCI for getting her moving in that direction and giving her the experience.

Aaron Orlowski:

Speaking of that diversity of perspectives, if only there were other places where folks from the liberal and the conservative sides could mix and mingle and share perspectives in a respectful and community-oriented way. KUCI has been around for 55 years. If you were to dream for the next 55 years, what do you hope the station does or becomes in that time?

Kevin Stockdale:

I think better funding for additional staff. I tell people who ask what do you do? What’s your job? And I say, I’m kind of like den mother as well as the prison warden. I’ve got 16 security cameras here, and I’ve got this big screen over here, and I can see every part of the station inside and out. I don’t focus on it, but it’s there in my peripheral. I can hear when people come in the front door; I look to see who’s here. So I feel like I’m kind of trying to keep the peace and keep the rules, but I’m also trying to guide people and stuff like that. But having more than just me here as a paid ongoing position would be great.

I did have a student assistant who was an hourly part-timer who became a non-student, 20-hours-a-week part-timer. That funding ran out, unfortunately, after a few years as COVID started. But having somebody to deal with the administrative stuff now that we have more HR duties. Everybody who wants to be a volunteer has to go through the whole onboarding process where they have to sign documents and get their hand scanned for a background check. And you can’t start until you do this. Just a lot of tedious, tedious stuff. But we also don’t have an onsite engineer. We have a consultant engineer I talk to regularly who comes down here a few times a year for a one- or two-day, set of projects. But having somebody here to see why the CD player or something else isn’t working would be great.

I’ve been here long enough, and I’ve learned so much that I can fix a lot of the little things, and I know who to call or how to Google the right response to find things out. But having somebody even part-time here to handle the technical stuff. And if we had a fundraiser or, looking at the big picture for the next 55 years, an endowment so we wouldn’t have to worry about the trends of people giving and not giving money. Our biggest donors are not our listeners but are actually our former DJs. But those are our people who understand the station. And I have the fondest memories. And even if they weren’t students, ‘cause we have had non-students over the years mixed in. They’re all very supportive of KUCI, but having some chunk of money where we live off the interest, so I can have a bigger building that’s not a rotting trailer. You know, we have been in for 30 years, and it’s moved twice. And so those are some big-picture things. And I think if you have some stability and security in terms of staff support and your facility funding, I think everything else falls in line in terms of what you do with your content and with your people.

Aaron Orlowski:

We will all be rooting for that endowment to happen and for that fundraiser effort to succeed. Thank you so much for spending time with me today on The UCI podcast.

Kevin Stockdale:

Absolutely. Had a blast. Love KUCI, and love talking about it.