Article: An Ode to KAFA

Tucked against the foothills of the Rockies just north of Colorado Springs, Colorado, is an American institution. It's relatively new as far as American institutions go, only fifty years old or so, but it's nonetheless a venerable institution by virtue of what it is: the United States Air Force Academy.

I have close lifelong ties to the Academy. My father graduated from there in 1970. He was subsequently stationed there twice as a chemist, for a total of six years, and had his retirement ceremony at the AFA officer's club. I took my first ice skating lessons at the Academy ice rink, spent summers in the community center pool, went to my first football game at the AFA stadium, had my first communion at the on base Community Center Chapel, and had two broken bones treated at the hospital emergency room.

When I was in high school, we lived across the valley from the Academy, which meant I was just within the broadcast range of the cadet-run radio station, KAFA.

I cannot stress enough how momentous this was. There I was, a kid whose musical sensibilities until that time had been pretty much bounded by Madonna and Wham. (I blame this on living in Grand Forks, North Dakota between 1982 and 1985. I spent the whole of 1984 utterly convinced that every other sixth grader in the country was having more fun than I was.) Then in 1989, hunkered in my bedroom with my first dual cassette boom box, I discovered college radio. The DJs may have been military cadets and budding Air Force officers in training, but they were still 18-22 year olds put in charge of entirely commercial free radio. And they knew their stuff.

Never have your taxpayer dollars been put to better use. (At least, that's what I thought in the winter of 1991, during the height of my KAFA listening years and the middle of the Gulf War.)

Some of the bands I heard for the very first time on KAFA: The Clash, Depeche Mode, the Cure, Concrete Blonde, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Smiths, Violent Femmes, They Might Be Giants, the B-52s, the Dead Milkmen, the Dead Kennedys, Suicidal Tendencies, Camper van Beethoven, Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, Front 242, Kraftwerk, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry—

You get the idea.

(Ministry will be forever known to me as the Band that Eats Brains, because a college boyfriend of mine had a gigantic poster of the art for The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste hanging in his room, and when I saw it all I could think was, hmmmm, braaaaainnsssss. . .)

I was a sponge, catching up on a decade of great music that I had somehow missed (Most of it hadn't reached Grand Forks yet, is my theory). I didn't usually pay attention to details like band names or song titles, but I absorbed the music, the styles, the sensibilities. I still have songs playing in my head from KAFA that I haven't heard since and would take me an hour of googling to figure out who did them. I still have a bunch of cassettes of songs I taped off KAFA. For awhile one of the DJs did a weekly show called Industrial Espionage—two hours of pure German industrial inspired mayhem. I'd lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, listening, thinking, "This is brutal, this is dangerous, and this is as close as a super clean cut suburban kid like me is ever going to get to that kind of world." (Which is really the point of a lot of this music, I think—which makes it a lot like fiction. Super clean cut suburban kids, who maybe didn't fit in as much as they wanted, or thought they should, could hide away in their rooms, listen to this music, and dream, without getting into any kind of real trouble. Mind you, this was in the days before people worried too much about slightly misfit kids who hid away in their rooms listening to German industrial.)

You could spot the kids at my high school who listened to KAFA: they wore all black and too much eyeliner, even the guys. (Except me. I was a stealth KAFA fan. I suspect there were others. The kids who wore all black scared me a little.) I memorized the phone number and called in requests all the time. (I even went on a blind date with a KAFA DJ when I was home from college one summer. I called in to request something by Too Much Joy and we talked for an hour. A couple days later we went for pizza at Poor Richard's downtown. After dinner, he said, "Hey, you have my number, you should call me!" Uh, no, I don't think so.)

I got a taste of college radio before I actually went to college in Los Angeles. In L.A., though, alternative was everywhere and not quite as special as it had been back home. A couple of summers into school, I stopped listening to KAFA. First the DJs changed, and with them the musical tastes changed (around 1994 or so, grunge and hip hop started taking over, but I still hadn't gotten enough of the New Wave). Then KAFA faded from the dial. It got harder and harder to tune in, until I just stopped trying. I never found out what happened. I suspected maybe their funding, and therefore their broadcasting power got cut. Or on a more sinister note, I wondered if someone in the Academy top brass discovered that their cadets had been corrupting a whole generation of local suburban kids and they had to put a stop to it.

By that time, I had enough disposable income to buy CDs every now and then, and I didn't miss KAFA as much as I might have. But I will always be grateful that because of KAFA, I was buying Eurythmics and not Mariah Carey.

You have to be a little bit crazy to go to one of the military academies, and once there you have to be a little crazy to survive. (I had Dad read over this, and he wants to go on record as disagreeing with the "crazy" part. Mom, however, doesn't.) That craziness usually finds outlets. My Dad and one of his roommates kept a cat in their room for a semester—he's got the pictures somewhere to prove it. He also tells a story of the time someone blasted "Hair" out their window over the Terrazzo during a haircut inspection. Hey, it was the Sixties. But I digress.

I want to thank the cadet DJs of KAFA from the late 80s through the early 90s for letting their craziness seep out on the air, and for showing me that I didn't have to listen to Casey Kasem anymore.

Copyright © 2006 by Carrie Vaughn