Pump Up the Volume

You never know what you’ll hear on community radio station KHOL.

BY Mark Huffman
Photograph by bradly j. boner

IN RADIO, THE trend for years has been bigger and blander, more of the same and nothing weird, remotely produced, and strictly managed. KHOL doesn’t get it. The Jackson station, at 89.1 FM, started as a dream in the mid-1990s and went on the air in 2008. The station’s 3,300-watt signal is heard in Yellowstone; Victor, Idaho; and “almost to Bondurant,” says station manager Zach Zimmerman. KHOL is a staple for area music lovers, partly because it plays just about anything you can imagine. And it’s the music and the people playing it that make the station stand out among the 15,000 others in the country.

Because the volunteer DJs pick their own thing to do, “We’re heavy on the jam band scene,” Zimmerman says. But there’s also a steady musical diet of blues, rock, metal, reggae, EDM, indie, rockabilly, and rhythm. One recent morning show had the DJ going from John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers to the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” to “Stomping Grounds” by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones.

MOST KHOL DJS start out long on love for music and short on experience. “Becoming a radio DJ was not on my bucket list at all,” says Rosie Read, a Jackson attorney who specializes in immigration law. “But I’ve always really taken a lot of joy in sharing music with people.” Read likes what she calls “post rock,” which includes bands such as Caspian, Sigur Rós, and Explosions in the Sky. She plays emo and hardcore such as Sunny Day Real Estate. And trap music, a combination of trance and rap.

Neil Albert, who works for Roadhouse Brewing Co., says the same about how he got into KHOL: “I had zero radio background.” Hearing that a community station was starting, Albert volunteered, crediting the fortunate confluence of a love for music and the fact that KHOL was “right around the corner from where I lived.” He didn’t think he’d end up on the air. “Everybody is a DJ so choose something,” Albert remembers being told. He mentioned he was a fan of Phish. Eight years later, Albert’s 9 p.m. Monday show, Live Phish, is KHOL’s longest running.

THE STATION PLAYS to a market of between 20,000-25,000 people, and has about 4,000 weekly listeners. Nearly 2,000 tune in online each week, going to the website 891KHOL.org and hitting the “listen” icon at the top of the page. It’s all live, except from midnight to 6 a.m., when KHOL plays tapes of its own programming. There are six- to eight-minute interviews with Jackson newsmakers by Cassandra Lee, the station’s part-time community affairs director. Lee talks to two people a day, five times a week.

But it’s still mostly music, and, like the time and the cash, it’s mostly donated, brought in by the DJs, or sent by musicians and publishers eager for exposure. During their two-hour shows each DJ is required to play five or six tunes that stretch their boundaries. Read likes this aspect. “I never play the same song twice,” she says. “It would feel like a waste, because there’s so much more, the lesser-known—obscure, some might call it.”

KHOL’s budget is a bit more than $100,000 a year, Zimmerman says, donated by listeners and a few business sponsors. There are two fund drives per year, and the Community Foundation of Jackson Hole, via the annual Old Bill’s Fun Run, is a big source. The station runs mostly on dedication. Albert says the payback is the feedback. When he first started, he was reassured about his lack of skill by a guy who said, “Don’t worry, man, nobody’s listening.” Now he hears from listeners every Monday night, “people who call in to request songs, people who’ve let you into their lives,” he says. “I work all the time. This is the thing I look forward to every week.” There are always DJ openings, Zimmerman says. This past summer, he was hoping for someone to play classical music. “There’s no experience necessary,” he says. “We’ll train you.”