WKVB (107.3 MHz) is a non-commercial FM radio station licensed to serve Westborough, Massachusetts, United States, carrying a contemporary Christian format known as "K-Love". Owned by the Educational Media Foundation (EMF), WKVB does not broadcast any local programming but functions as the network affiliate for K-Love in Greater Boston and Worcester. With its transmitter located in Hudson, west of Boston, its signal is supplemented by WNKC (104.9 FM) in Gloucester, which serves the North Shore and Merrimack Valley, and WLVO (95.5 FM) from Providence, Rhode Island, which covers Southeastern Massachusetts. The station also has boosters in Boston, Lexington, and Waltham. In addition to a standard analog transmission, WKVB broadcasts in HD Radio and is available online.
Historically, this station is perhaps best known as WAAF, which carried a commercial rock music format for nearly 50 years in various forms of the genre, with an active rock orientation between 1989 and 2020. The station also featured personalities including Bob Rivers, Liz Wilde and Greg Hill, and was the first high-profile radio home for Opie and Anthony in the mid-1990s. The station was sold by Entercom to the Educational Media Foundation on February 18, 2020. WAAF's former programming continues on HD Radio subchannels of WBMX and WEEI-FM and on the Audacy platform.
History Early years
On October 5, 1960, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) awarded the Waterman Broadcasting Corporation, owner of WAAB (1440 AM), a construction permit to build a new FM radio station licensed to Worcester on 107.3 MHz, to transmit from Asnebumskit Hill in Paxton. WAAB-FM went on the air on June 29, 1961. In its early years, WAAB-FM simulcast the full service programming of its AM sister station; in 1967, it broke away from the simulcast and launched a stereo beautiful music format.
WAAB-AM-FM was sold to WAAB, Inc., in 1968 for $675,000. WAAB, Inc., was owned by Ahmet Ertegun and his brother Nesuhi Ertegun, as well as record executive Jerry Wexler; all had just recently sold Atlantic Records to Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. The FM station took on a new WAAF call sign on May 28, 1968; the call sign had been dropped the previous year by a station in Chicago. The change from WAAB to WAAF was made to distinguish its identity.
In later years, WAAF ownership would erroneously claim a longer history than that of its own license, stretching back to experimental FM station W1XOJ in the late 1930s. W1XOJ—later given the normal call letters WGTR—was part of the first FM network, put together by the Yankee Network and its principal, John Shepard, who at the time also owned WAAB. While WAAB-FM/WAAF initially utilized the same transmission tower as this previous station, there is no connection. WGTR, in its later years used to provide audio on city buses, shut down on July 14, 1953, and the license for WGTR was deleted at the request of General Teleradio on July 24.
Freeform era WAAF ended its automated middle-of-the-road programming on March 16, 1970, and introduced a live progressive rock format, which emphasized folk and folk-rock during the day and harder rock at night. It ran as a freeform station known as "WAAF, The Rock of New England", where the air talent was given total control over what music to play. The station was sold in 1971 to Southern Massachusetts Broadcasters, owned by George Gray, in an $800,000 acquisition.
On November 7, 1971, WAAF was in the middle of an all-Beatles weekend when its transmitting building was damaged by a homemade pipe bomb, knocking it off the air temporarily and causing $4,000 in damage. A group demanding the end of capital punishment and "parole law" in Massachusetts claimed it had orchestrated the bombing. The station was forced to temporarily operate on a limited schedule from the transmitter site, as the blast put its studio-transmitter link out of service. Gray sold his Worcester stations to the Robert L. Williams Broadcasting Company of Massachusetts in 1976 for $1.465 million; he had previously sold his other radio stations in New Bedford and Binghamton, New York, the year before. Robert L. Williams also owned WEZN radio in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Album rocker
By the mid-1970s, WAAF had settled in as an album-oriented rock outlet. The station was one of the first clients of the "Superstars" format, developed by consultants Lee Abrams and Kent Burkhart; WAAF would continue to use their services until January 1984. Promotional slogans of the period played off the call letters, including "The WAAF Air Force" and a giraffe mascot known as the "WAAF GirAAF".
WAAF had completed the first of several technical improvements to reach listeners in Boston in 1972 when it increased its effective radiated power to 16,500 watts; it had operated with less than 2,000 ever since signing on. However, it was not until 1978 when the Boston Globe heralded WAAF's entry into the Boston market and its "rock radio battle". In 1977, the station managed to outrate talk outlet WMEX. WAAF's third sale of the decade would come in 1978: the station, its AM counterpart WFTQ, and WEZN were sold to a group of employees, known as Park City Communications, for $3.2 million. Park City sold all of its stations to Katz Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Katz Media Group, for $16 million in November 1981.
WAAF encountered ratings success in the Worcester market to start the 1980s; despite newfound competition from WCOZ (94.5 FM) in Boston, the station attributed its success to extensive marketing, promotion, and contests. WAAF appeared in ratings surveys not only in Worcester and Boston but in Providence and Springfield; WAAF listening was even measured as far away as Peterborough, New Hampshire. Remaining a "Superstars" client, WAAF relied on Abrams' playlist input and received criticism for not taking chances to play other music genres; Abrams notably told WAAF's program director in 1980 that new wave "isn't the coming thing". Music heard on the station tended to lean toward a harder rock focus from artists like Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, Van Halen, and Pat Benatar.
It was during this time, in September 1981, that the Rolling Stones played a warmup show for a group of WAAF listeners at Sir Morgans Cove, a Worcester nightclub. WAAF connected with the band while they rehearsed at Long View Farm in North Brookfield and gave away all 300 tickets for the free show as a reward for locals respecting their privacy; demand exceeded 4,000 in what Radio & Records termed "an unprecedented radio concert promotion coup". All day, station staffers drove around Worcester in unmarked cars handing out tickets to locals who had station stickers or T-shirts. While WAAF refused to announce the name of the location, WBCN obtained the information from a Worcester police officer, causing a large crowd of 4,000 to form outside of the 300-seat venue; 10 people were arrested. WAAF promotion director Steve Stockman blamed WBCN for announcing the venue on-air, declaring his competitor's actions "reckless and irresponsible".
A few months later, Bob and Doug McKenzie (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) teamed up with WAAF for a contest to promote their The Great White North comedy album, where the winner received an afternoon trip for two to Tewksbury, while the runner-up won a weekend trip for two to the Lowell suburb. WAAF staffers came up with the contest idea after noticing a sign in Tewksbury that reminded them of toque knit hats referred to in the album. The station had also asked the town's fire chief to give the winner keys to the city; he declined, believing the initial offer to be a prank phone call.
Bob Rivers co-hosted morning drive on WAAF between 1982 and 1987 with Peter "Zip" Zipfel. Titled Bob and Zip, the program became known for parody and novelty songs produced by Rivers; the most memorable one being "Breakin' Up Is Hard on You" ("Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" by Neil Sedaka) regarding the Bell System divestiture, and charted at #70 on the Billboard Hot 100. Rivers also performed "Just a Big Ego" ("Just a Gigolo" by David Lee Roth) which debuted as Roth announced his departure from Van Halen, and was included in The Rhino Brothers Present the World's Worst Records. Rivers and Zipfel attracted attention on the day of the 1984 United States presidential election by instructing their listeners who planned to vote for Ronald Reagan to simultaneously flush their toilets at 7:00 a.m., and listeners voting for Walter Mondale to flush their toilets at 7:30 a.m.; the station then contacted the various regional water authorities and based their exit poll off of the drops in water pressure. Rivers left WAAF to take over as morning-drive host at WIYY in Baltimore; Drew Lane replaced him and was later teamed up with Zipfel.
WAAF attempted another unusual promotion where the station was to have dropped 100,000 one-dollar bills from a helicopter onto downtown Lowell on November 26, 1988, at 1:07 p.m. This event was abruptly canceled at the last minute by Lowell city officials concerned about the safety of people who would have participated, while station management had intended for it to promote Lowell's revitalization.
"Untamed Radio"
On March 10, 1989, NewCity Broadcasting traded WAAF and WFTQ to Zapis Communications in exchange for WEKS-FM in Atlanta in what was a tax-free asset swap; each half of the transaction was valued at $15 million. Zapis Communications was headed by Xenophon Zapis and his son Lee Zapis, who also owned WZAK in Cleveland. NewCity already owned WYAY, and agreed to keep it in the Gainesville, Georgia, market as a condition of the asset swap.
When Zapis took over operations in the summer, John Sutherland took over as general manager, promotions director Ron Valeri was promoted to operations manager, Nance Grimes was promoted to acting program director (Grimes left that October, with Valeri assuming the programming role outright) and John Gorman—a Boston native best known for programming WMMS in Cleveland from 1973 to 1986—was hired as a consultant. As a sign of things to come, Aerosmith was in-studio to play their upcoming album Pump two weeks in advance of the album's release.
Owing in part to Gorman's consultancy, WAAF hired Ruby Cheeks for morning drive that October. Cheeks was formerly a part of WMMS's morning show and had also hosted evenings and afternoons, and had left the station in a contract dispute. WAAF's musical direction was shifted to what was called "Rock 40", featuring harder songs by core artists while increasing the amount of new and current music played. Gorman publicly called it a "fine-tuning" of the playlist instead of a format shift, while the move was also made to improve WAAF's ratings in Boston as opposed to Worcester. With the relaunch, the station was re-branded as "Untamed Radio", a slogan also used on WRQK-FM in Canton, Ohio, another station Gorman oversaw.
Greg Hill, who had joined the station's promotions department in 1986, was promoted to overnights in June, then named as Ruby Cheeks's co-host that November. While John Gorman's consultancy over WAAF eventually ended after he took over as program director for WMJI in Cleveland and subsequently returned to WMMS and WHK (1420 AM) in 1994, Gorman held high praise for Valeri's work as programmer for WAAF, telling Hitmakers magazine, "could you imagine what (Ron) would do with a full Boston Metro signal?"
Starting on January 9, 1991, WAAF's programming was simulcast over WFTQ due to what John Sutherland called "substantial losses" for the AM station's prior format; among the people dismissed was Steve LeVeille. This simulcast ended on September 8 when Zapis Communications entered into an agreement with the Boston Celtics, then the owners of WEEI (590 AM), to simulcast the newly converted sports radio outlet under the WVEI call sign.
Alternative and "raunchy" lean