SOURCE: blockclubchicago.org by Gwen Ihnat
From left: Jessie Bullett, Mitch Michaels, Gregg Allman, Lee Abrams, Sky Daniels and a record company rep at the Loop. Credit: The Loop Files/Paul Natkin
There are a lot of frequent fluctuations on the radio dial, and if you grew up in Chicago, there’s probably one long-lost station you can’t believe is no longer on the air: WLUP (97.9 FM).
Now, a new volume by a former WLUP employee, “The Loop Files: An Oral History of the Most Outrageous Radio Station Ever,” is letting readers revisit those unhinged days of radio.
A few decades back, the FM rock station wars of the ‘70s gave way to the over-the-top antics of larger-than-life disc jockeys in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
And no station was more legendary than the Loop (as WLUP was commonly called), with iconic Chicago characters like Jonathan Brandmeier, Kevin Matthews, Lorelei and of course, Steve (Dahl) and Garry (Meier). Even if you never heard a single nanosecond of the Loop when it was on the air, you’ve likely heard of “Disco Demolition,” Dahl’s still-controversial anti-disco WLUP promo stunt at then-Comiskey Park in 1979, which started a riot and caused the White Sox to forfeit the second game of a double-header.
From the station’s dawn in 1977 to its eventual demise in 2018, the Loop was the consummate Chicago station. Over the years, broadcasting from the John Hancock Tower at 875 N. Michigan Ave., its format swayed from rock to talk to various combinations of both.
Eventually, the station was sold and WLUP became WCKL-FM, a Christian music station. The last song played on WLUP on March 9, 2018, was a Steve Dahl suggestion: AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.”
For many of WLUP’s most notorious years, Rick Kaempfer was there. The suburban Chicago native was the producer for Steve and Garry, eventually getting his own on-air slot on the station as a disc jockey. He eventually moved on to writing and publishing: He’s been a regular contributor to the Illinois Entertainer since 2013, interviewing various media personalities, and now runs his own publishing company.
But he told Block Club that The Loop always stuck with him. And now, he’s compiled multitude of interviews and memories into the new volume, “The Loop Files: An Oral History of the Most Outrageous Radio Station Ever,” released on his own Eckhartz Press.
“I’ve been doing these interviews for, you know, 30 years, in some way, shape or form. So I had a big base of stuff to start with. And some of the people in the book are not even alive anymore. Having those interviews was special.
“About a year or so ago, my co-publisher said to me, ‘Hey, dummy, how is it that you worked there all these years, and this station has been gone now for so long and nobody has ever written about it. You literally know every single person that ever worked there. Why don’t you write this book?’”
Kaempfer wisely decided to do the volume in an oral history format, with over 100 individual interviews. “So I can tell the story of the Loop without me being the one telling the story. It’s the people that were actually there telling the story. And I’m just putting it into a narrative form.”
That form is, frankly, fascinating, as Kaempfer’s interviewees reveal stories from the unbridled days of FM radio, like an R-rated “WKRP in Cincinnati.” Then-famous names like Sky Daniels, Buzz Kilman and Bob Stroud reveal station rivalries with other RIP rock stations like WMET, recall seeing a young band named Van Halen at the Aragon and describe microphone effect pranks gone awry.
“It was mayhem,” Kaempfer remembers. “Just walking the hallways during the day you might run into, you know, Milton Berle and Eddie Van Halen. You just never know what you’d see.”
Due to most of the jocks’ effervescent personas, WLUP eventually transitioned from a rock station to one that was more personality driven; its AM counterpart, WLUP-AM, went all talk. Most of the jocks even had their own bands so their fans could see them perform live, like Brandmeier’s Johnny and the Leisure Suits and Kevin Matthews’ Ed Zeppelin.
But even in a studio full of stars, none were bigger than Steve and Garry and their followers united under the moniker, “Insane Coho Lips.”
As Kaempfer described working on that show, “It was a tightrope. Because even on the good days, there was tension. We didn’t really plan out the show, past just bullet points and what we may be discussing. So every day, the show could go in a million different directions, and I just had to be prepared. And often when I wasn’t prepared, 300,000 people would hear about it. So it was really good motivation to work hard, basically.”
The careers of Steve and Garry had a few major milestones: one being the “Disco Demolition,” in which the pair (with Dahl leading the charge in military garb) invaded the field at Comiskey in between two games of a double-header to blow up disco records, in honor of their motto, “Disco Sucks.”
From a modern standpoint, the anti-disco movement is seen as racist and homophobic, since disco artists and audiences were primarily made up of gay people and people of color. But Kaempfer remembered that day differently, and also addresses the “Disco Demolition” controversy in the book.
“I was a teenager when it happened. And I considered myself an anti-disco person, and there was not a trace of racism or misogyny or being homophobic,” he told Block Club. “For me, it was like, I love rock and roll. And these other music genres are not as cool as rock and roll.
“Now, looking back on it, I can see why people think of it that way. And I’ve watched all the specials that say it, but I know that that was not their motivation. And having been one of the anti-disco army people myself, I know that that was not our intention.”
The other explosive moment in the career of Steve and Garry was when the pair broke up in 1993, practically on air. Meier had gotten married and was off on his honeymoon; before he left, he insisted that his wedding not be discussed on the show. When Dahl went ahead and talked about the wedding on air regardless in Meier’s absence, Meier broke up the partnership. Dahl did not show up for the ceremony when the pair was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2013, and Meier was not among the number of former jocks who revisited the station for the Loop’s final broadcast day.
Kaempfer had already left the show by that time, but he was less surprised by the split than most. And his exploration of it is one of the most riveting segments in his book. He says Dahl discussing Meier’s wedding “was kind of the final straw. And when you read it, I think I laid the groundwork for how it was already kind of deteriorating at that point. It was just the final nail in the coffin.”
Loop fans were devastated over the dissolving of the duo, a local version of the Beatles breakup. Because with Steve and Garry, Johnny B, Kevin Matthews and the rest, the city holds its local media figures in high regard, Kaempfer said.
“Brandmeier was very generous with his time talking to me about this book. And the thing that I took away my time talking to him, is how much he appreciated the listeners, that the connection to the audience was much more important to him than the accolades and the media or whatever.
“That’s a Chicago media thing. It’s a major city, but it’s very provincial. We consider our local celebrities our own. Even if Steve and Garry went nationwide, they were always gonna be Chicago.”
Then as now, there’s one item of clothing that was unparalleled in coolness in Chicago: the black Loop T-shirt. Kaempfer recently was in search of the classic shirt ahead of an appearance on the WGN morning show, featuring anchor Robin Baumgarten, who used to do traffic on the Loop.
Fortunately, “I just found one online,” he said. “They’re still out there.”
“The Loop Files: An Oral History of the Most Outrageous Radio Station Ever” is available to order at eckhartzpress.com. Rick Kaempfer will appear at a launch party for the book 7-9 p.m. Thursday at Pippin’s, 39 E. Chicago Ave.