Houston Chronicle

 

OCTOBER 20, 1991

WHEN THE MUSIC DIED

FCC pulls the plug on "Pirate Radio Network" in Odessa 
Dateline: ODESSA
Texas

Estimated printed pages: 6

Article Text:

ODESSA --

From the bleak brush lands west of here, amid squeaking pump jacks and rusted drilling rigs, came sounds unlike any heard on the airwaves of the Permian Basin.

Bone-crushing bass lines. Screeching guitars. Teeth-gnashing vocals.

Sounds rarely heard on radio.

Illegal sounds.

On Saturday, Sept. 14, as the first chords of Judas Priest's Breaking the Law wafted illicitly into the night air over this blue-collar oil town, federal agents swooped down on two non-descript mobile homes and pulled the plug on the hard-rocking, two-station "Pirate Radio Network."

Three persons -- a television station chief engineer and two ex-employees of licensed stations -- have been charged with illegally operating a broadcast facility. Each is free on $35,000 bond.

The disc jockeys at KROX and KFRE -- stolen call letters from licensed AM stations in Crookston, Minn., and Fresno, Calif. -- are now nonchalantly unrepentant! .

They knew it was illegal, but say they did what they had to do.

"We wanted to do on radio what public access stations do on cable," said Mark Anthony Chanez, 25, who resigned his engineering job while the charges against him are pending.

"There's always been a need for underground radio stations," said Richard Lane, 39, an ex-disc jockey. "They're beating that huge tribal drum."

Another defendant, Thomas Eugene Barnes, said: "The main reason we were doing it was because we felt the local stations were stagnant."

Ron Rogers, manager at locally owned music store, Endless Horizons, agreed: "The kids who were out cruising heard about these stations. They were hungrier for harder rock than what gets played around here."

The popularity of the stations, Rogers said, earned strictly through word-of-mouth, "was just taking off when they got busted."

For six months, KROX/KFRE, operating at 107.7 and 95.5 on the FM band, spewed forth heavy m! etal and hard rock with a signal that barely covered the 903 s! quare mi les of Ector County, halfway between Dallas and El Paso.

With surplus hardware or modified Radio Shack components set up in bedrooms and closets, the main studio was at KROX. KFRE served as a translator, simply relaying the signal, Barnes and Lane said.

KROX broadcasted with 120 watts; KFRE with 15. By comparison, federal officials say, the smallest licensed stations are typically 3,000 watts.

Songs that didn't make the local album-oriented rock station's play list -- because of offensive language, song length or excessive screeching guitar intensity -- were the pirate stations' meat and potatoes, Barnes and Lane said.

They included bands such as Accept, Krokus and WASP, and head-banging metal groups whose compositions, with titles like Balls to the Wall or Headless Children, don't see the light of air play at even the most daring urban licensed stations.

The stations took requests through an elaborate system in which calls were forwarded from a! site miles away to a beeper worn by one of the on-air employees, Barnes and Lane said.

Although non-commercial, the stations were close to finalizing a deal with a local nightclub to barter commercials for beer, they say.

And two new ideas were on the drawing board.

Another station, to be called Radio One and focusing more on news and commentary, was scheduled to operate on 88.1 and be located in Lane's downtown apartment, Barnes said.

Also planned was a low-power television station, which had already simulcast Pink Floyd The Wall to the area around Barnes' house.

Barnes' wife Wendy, 23, also was charged, but the case against her has been dropped. Thomas Barnes said six other on-the-air personalities were involved in the stations, but they haven't been charged.

A trial date is pending.

The lion's share of the equipment was seized from Chanez's trailer, home of KROX and the nerve center of the pirate empire.

Agents there nabbe! d the guts of the twin station set-up: hundreds of albums, com! pact dis cs, cassettes and tape reels, along with several thousand dollars worth of equipment, according to the search warrant return.

For good measure, federal agents felt the need to douse it all with roach spray, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jan Hartung.

Chanez, Lane and Barnes each could be fined $10,000 and sentenced to a year in prison if found guilty, Hartung said.

Jail house rock, indeed.

Officials at the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the nation's phone business and broadcast airwaves, says unlicensed station shutdowns are rare.

Although statistics aren't kept, fewer than a half-dozen unlicensed stations are uncovered each year, said Dan Emrick, FCC chief of investigation and inspection in Washington, D.C.

Although the Odessa stations operated like most other illicit stations -- with surplus or jury-rigged equipment and at a low power level -- the West Odessa facilities showed surprising sophistication.

"It's the ! first one I can recall ever operating with two stations broadcasting the same programs at the same time," Emrick said.

A complaint was lodged against the stations in August and surveillance was initiated, said Jerry Montgomery, a Dallas-based FCC engineer who led the investigation.

Specially-equipped vehicles monitored the station for a month and pinpointed the locations. After the stations were located, the case was turned over to Hartung.

Emrick admits operating a non-commercial, pirate radio station isn't a particularly heinous offense -- no one is physically harmed, no illicit money changes hands -- but he contended it poses the potential for anarchy.

"It has to do with maintaining the integrity of control of a scarce resource, which is how we view the radio spectrum," he said.

Radio regulations, in fact, were drawn up after the early days of the medium. Unregulated stations switched frequencies, resulting in a confusing cacophony of jumble! d, overlapping signals, he said.

Another problem of pira! te stati ons: cheap equipment can cause the signal to "bleed" into the area of other frequencies.

KROX, at 107.7, was dangerously close to the aviation band, which begins at 108. Interference there, he said, could cause trouble for planes trying to communicate with air traffic controllers.

Located about a mile apart on the mazelike grid of county roads that cuts through the high-weed wastelands, the stations began as separate entities.

Chanez said he built his first transmitter and did his first illegal broadcasts at 13. He did it again in 1986 when he moved here and began KROX the next year. He stopped broadcasting in 1988.

Lane and Barnes met several years ago when they worked at the same Odessa station.

Barnes said he worked on pirate and legal stations in his native Oregon. Lane worked extensively in legal radio and returned to Odessa after a stint in Arizona.

Using equipment Barnes had stockpiled over the years, they began broadcasting KFRE a ! few hours a day, playing mainly classic and more middle-of-the-road rock, back in February. One night, they clicked on a radio to hear their station. Turning the dial, they stumbled upon a station whose format they didn't recognize.

It was Chanez's KROX.

"We tried to look it up, but it wasn't listed," Lane said with a smile. "It was a pirate, too."

Chanez said he heard KFRE and decided to fire up his transmitter again to get their attention.

So they paged him on the air.

Chanez called the beeper and left the number of a nearby pay phone. They called him there.

Added Barnes: "It took him 30 minutes to find us. It took the FCC 30 days."

Barnes wanted access to raunchier rock. Chanez wanted anonymity. They struck upon a deal.

"He (Chanez) was afraid to talk on the air because he had a familiar voice (to local radio and television workers)," Barnes said. "I had the voice he wanted. He had the records I wanted."

So they merge! d and went on the air weekdays and weekends, with KROX program! ming the nights and KFRE programming the days.

They flaunted their outlaw reputation.

"Jamming the frequencies, this is the Pirate Radio Network," Lane can be heard saying on an FCC monitoring tape. Another instance: "We've got free-form radio for the Permian Basin. We stir 'em all up and get them mad at each other. Here at the Pirate Radio Network."

They even had their own professionally sounding jingles, stolen and dubbed over from a satellite radio service.

Local rock radio station officials say they didn't even know the pirate stations were on until the bust was publicized.

"If I had known it was going on, I would've called the FCC," said Mike Levine, owner and general manager of KCHX, a Top 40 station. "What they did was stupid because there are so many dark (unused) frequencies they could've (legally) used."

Two AM stations have gone off the air and left their allotted frequencies vacant. Two FM slots have been approved but haven't yet attra! cted applicants.

"If the radio business here was under-licensed, with not enough stations, you could see these guys as rebels with a cause, free spirits," Levine said.

"But this is dumb."

Counters Barnes: "A person like me couldn't possibly afford a license. It's like $2,000 just to apply and that's not refundable if they turn down your license application."

"If I could've been legal, I would've been."

"We are outlaws by being honest," Lane said. "We're outlaws by freedom of thought."

Lane thought it was good fun until the bust, when armed U.S. Marshals and Border Patrol agents -- temporarily deputized as U.S. Marshals -- descended on the studios.

"I've never been in any serious trouble before," he said. "I didn't own the stations or the equipment. All I did was some voice-overs. All I did was play some records. All I did was talk once in a while."

Ironically, Chanez said, the trio had discussed stopping a week before the law ! descended.

"We had such a large following with this thin! g, we th ought about shutting down because we thought we were going to get caught."

Lane doesn't think pirate radio merits a prison sentence.

Barnes agrees.

"I love radio," Barnes said. "That's what's so sad about this. I feel like I'm going to be fined for something I love.

"The thing is, they've got what they want -- the stations are off the air. I'm never going to do it again. If I try to do it again, they'll know it's me. That's punishment enough."

And will history remember Permian Basin pirate radio?

Probably.

On Odessa's 16th street, someone already has spray-painted the following words:

                                            "KFRE-KROX Lives!"