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On January 12, 2005, WHFS dropped its alternative programming and became "El Zol 99.1 FM."
Last edited Mon Jan 13, 2025, 05:55 PM - Edit history (3)
WHFS Sells Out the Deejay
7/5/2018 in DC, Maryland, Virginia by Dominic Charles
On June 11, 1989, 8,000 people crowded into a Wheaton parking lot in front of Joe’s Record Paradise for what the Washington Post described as, “a grass-roots rebellion,” to protest the removal of beloved WHFS FM 99.1 deejay, Damian Einstein, from the airways. Attendees of what store owner Joe Lee dubbed “Damianfest,” included die-hard fans who fell in love with Damian’s expansive musical tastes which he revealed to listeners on his daily 9am-Noon slot, WHFS colleagues, and artists who owed some of their success to Damian’s ear for talent. Technically, according to new WHFS general manager, Alan Hay, Damian had not been fired so much as a “promoted” to an off-air role. However, to the horde gathered in Wheaton – and to thousands of dedicated listeners across the DMV – the move suggested something more ominous.
{snip}
{snip}
The next decade would be a roller-coaster ride for the station and its listeners. Catching the wave of suddenly-mainstream grunge music, WHFS took off in popularity. Ratings soared as deejays began jamming the repeat button more frequently than ever, playing the same Pearl Jam, Cranberries, Nirvana, and other alternative tracks over and over again. Ironically, grunge was the sort of hidden sound which WHFS deejays like Damian might have prided themselves in introducing to listeners in an earlier time. However, with the explosion of Nirvana’s Nevermind album in 1992, once proudly alternative music started to be played with regularity on more mainstream radio stations.
{snip}
On January 12, 2005, WHFS – which, by then was owned by Infinity Broadcasting, a branch of Viacom and the largest radio conglomerate in the country – departed from the Washington, D.C. airways. The end came abruptly. At noon, after the final chords of Jeff Buckley’s 1995 hit, “Last Goodbye,” faded, listeners heard an energetic greeting in Spanish:
{snip the rest, including the footnotes, which are worth looking at}
7/5/2018 in DC, Maryland, Virginia by Dominic Charles
WHFS deejays Damian Einstein (far right) and Weasel (front) pose with musician Jesse Colin Young (second from right) and an {unidentified} record executive (far left) at WHFS headquarters in Annapolis, MD in 1983. (Photo source: Handout photo/Steve King).
On June 11, 1989, 8,000 people crowded into a Wheaton parking lot in front of Joe’s Record Paradise for what the Washington Post described as, “a grass-roots rebellion,” to protest the removal of beloved WHFS FM 99.1 deejay, Damian Einstein, from the airways. Attendees of what store owner Joe Lee dubbed “Damianfest,” included die-hard fans who fell in love with Damian’s expansive musical tastes which he revealed to listeners on his daily 9am-Noon slot, WHFS colleagues, and artists who owed some of their success to Damian’s ear for talent. Technically, according to new WHFS general manager, Alan Hay, Damian had not been fired so much as a “promoted” to an off-air role. However, to the horde gathered in Wheaton – and to thousands of dedicated listeners across the DMV – the move suggested something more ominous.
{snip}
Print found on t-shirts given out at Damianfest. Damianfest was held on June 11, 1989 in the Joe’s Record Paradise’s parking-lot in Wheaton, Maryland on June 11, 1989. The t-shirt was provided to Boundary Stones by Dick Bangham who was one of many fans who organized Damianfest. He is also currently coproducing a WHFS documentary with Jay Schlossberg titled “Feast Your Ears.” Check out the trailer for the documentary here: https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/movies/bs-fe-whfs-20180110-story.html
{snip}
The next decade would be a roller-coaster ride for the station and its listeners. Catching the wave of suddenly-mainstream grunge music, WHFS took off in popularity. Ratings soared as deejays began jamming the repeat button more frequently than ever, playing the same Pearl Jam, Cranberries, Nirvana, and other alternative tracks over and over again. Ironically, grunge was the sort of hidden sound which WHFS deejays like Damian might have prided themselves in introducing to listeners in an earlier time. However, with the explosion of Nirvana’s Nevermind album in 1992, once proudly alternative music started to be played with regularity on more mainstream radio stations.
{snip}
On January 12, 2005, WHFS – which, by then was owned by Infinity Broadcasting, a branch of Viacom and the largest radio conglomerate in the country – departed from the Washington, D.C. airways. The end came abruptly. At noon, after the final chords of Jeff Buckley’s 1995 hit, “Last Goodbye,” faded, listeners heard an energetic greeting in Spanish:
Transmitiendo desde la ciudad capital de America: "Esta! Es! Tu! Nueva! Radio!"
"Transmitting from America's Capital City: This! Is! Your! New! Radio!"
{snip the rest, including the footnotes, which are worth looking at}
JAN 12, 2005, 2:19 PM
WHFS, R.I.P.
Kyle Gustafson
Just under two hours ago, venerable alternative radio flagship station WHFS, 99.1 on your FM dial, was taken off the air and replaced by “El Sol” which will play “a mixture of Salsa, Merengue and Bachata, targeting adults 25-54.” Ack! The move took many area radio listeners by surprise. Billboard Radio Monitor called the format change “a shocking move.”
“We have made clear our desire to expand into this burgeoning market and believe this move marks an important step in our commitment to Spanish radio,” Infinity president/CEO Joel Hollander said in statement. “There exists a tremendous opportunity for Infinity to launch a Spanish-language format in Washington, D.C. where almost 10% of the population is not being directly served. El Zol will be the most powerful Spanish radio station in the area and will provide listeners with the music, entertainment and information relevant to the many segments of the Latino culture.”
Color DCist shocked. Yes, the station played too much Good Charlotte (even playing an influential role in breaking the band nationally), other mall-ternative punk bands and mid 90’s grunge, but they peppered that with the occasional tune by Franz Ferdinand, The Killers and their indie rock peers. Savvy DCist readers have pointed out We have, at this moment, no alternative station, no college rock station, no AAA station, no indie station, nothing, nada. True indeed, but we’ll always have our iPods.
Worst of all? No more HFStival!
WHFS, R.I.P.
Kyle Gustafson
Just under two hours ago, venerable alternative radio flagship station WHFS, 99.1 on your FM dial, was taken off the air and replaced by “El Sol” which will play “a mixture of Salsa, Merengue and Bachata, targeting adults 25-54.” Ack! The move took many area radio listeners by surprise. Billboard Radio Monitor called the format change “a shocking move.”
“We have made clear our desire to expand into this burgeoning market and believe this move marks an important step in our commitment to Spanish radio,” Infinity president/CEO Joel Hollander said in statement. “There exists a tremendous opportunity for Infinity to launch a Spanish-language format in Washington, D.C. where almost 10% of the population is not being directly served. El Zol will be the most powerful Spanish radio station in the area and will provide listeners with the music, entertainment and information relevant to the many segments of the Latino culture.”
Color DCist shocked. Yes, the station played too much Good Charlotte (even playing an influential role in breaking the band nationally), other mall-ternative punk bands and mid 90’s grunge, but they peppered that with the occasional tune by Franz Ferdinand, The Killers and their indie rock peers. Savvy DCist readers have pointed out We have, at this moment, no alternative station, no college rock station, no AAA station, no indie station, nothing, nada. True indeed, but we’ll always have our iPods.
Worst of all? No more HFStival!
News
Radio Days
Mourning the long-lost beat at WHFS
by Mark Jenkins
January 21st, 2005
There was something familiar about the protesters who marched along 7th Street NW on Saturday, encouraging drivers to “Honk 4 HFS,” three days after the venerable alt-rock station WHFS-FM was switched to a Latin-pop format. In spirit, they were much like the kids who protested the Jan. 1979 closure of WGTB-FM, Georgetown University’s free-form station, or the 1983 sale of the original WHFS.
The 100 or so marchers, many of them Maryland teenagers, showed the same loyalty to their favorite station and the same passionate attachment to the music that helps define them. What had changed dramatically since WHFS’s early days as a rock station was not the listeners, but the radio business. It’s now dominated by a handful of national companies, notably Clear Channel Communications and Infinity Broadcasting, which bought WHFS in 1996.
“We’re here to let Infinity know we want our radio station back,” said Evan Woodard, the 18-year-old Laurel High School student who organized Saturday’s demonstration via his Web site, tsrally.com. The site includes a link to an online petition. As of Monday morning, more than 27,000 people had signed, requesting that El Zol revert to modern rock.
That’s not likely to happen. Broadcast radio is increasingly turning to “urban” and Latin formats, as more affluent listeners switch to satellite radio, cable music channels, and portable music players. (In fact, there was speculation last year that Clear Channel would shift DC101, WHFS’s principal Washington-area rival, to a Latin format.) Rock and other longtime formats are weakening, and overall broadcast-radio listenership is declining.
{snip}
Art accompanying story in the printed newspaper is not available in this archive: Doug Boehm.
Radio Days
Mourning the long-lost beat at WHFS
by Mark Jenkins
January 21st, 2005
There was something familiar about the protesters who marched along 7th Street NW on Saturday, encouraging drivers to “Honk 4 HFS,” three days after the venerable alt-rock station WHFS-FM was switched to a Latin-pop format. In spirit, they were much like the kids who protested the Jan. 1979 closure of WGTB-FM, Georgetown University’s free-form station, or the 1983 sale of the original WHFS.
The 100 or so marchers, many of them Maryland teenagers, showed the same loyalty to their favorite station and the same passionate attachment to the music that helps define them. What had changed dramatically since WHFS’s early days as a rock station was not the listeners, but the radio business. It’s now dominated by a handful of national companies, notably Clear Channel Communications and Infinity Broadcasting, which bought WHFS in 1996.
“We’re here to let Infinity know we want our radio station back,” said Evan Woodard, the 18-year-old Laurel High School student who organized Saturday’s demonstration via his Web site, tsrally.com. The site includes a link to an online petition. As of Monday morning, more than 27,000 people had signed, requesting that El Zol revert to modern rock.
That’s not likely to happen. Broadcast radio is increasingly turning to “urban” and Latin formats, as more affluent listeners switch to satellite radio, cable music channels, and portable music players. (In fact, there was speculation last year that Clear Channel would shift DC101, WHFS’s principal Washington-area rival, to a Latin format.) Rock and other longtime formats are weakening, and overall broadcast-radio listenership is declining.
{snip}
Art accompanying story in the printed newspaper is not available in this archive: Doug Boehm.
Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3 FM - Trailer
Feast Your Ears The Film
656 subscribers
32,876 views Nov 11, 2015
Documentary film about WHFS freeform FM radio station. Interviews with DJs & musicians from the '68-83 era of social, cultural & political change. More info at www.feastyourearsthefilm.com
Music
1 songs
Me and the Boys
NRBQ
Lou and the Q
Feast Your Ears The Film
656 subscribers
32,876 views Nov 11, 2015
Documentary film about WHFS freeform FM radio station. Interviews with DJs & musicians from the '68-83 era of social, cultural & political change. More info at www.feastyourearsthefilm.com
Music
1 songs
Me and the Boys
NRBQ
Lou and the Q
Fri Jan 12, 2024, 08:48 AM: On this day, January 12, 2005, WHFS dropped its alternative programming and became "El Zol 99.1 FM."
Thu Jan 12, 2023: On this day, January 12, 2005, WHFS departed from the Washington, D.C. airways.
Wed Jan 12, 2022: On this day, January 12, 2005, WHFS departed from the Washington, D.C. airways.
10 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Musical Urbanism
Blogging at the intersection of urban studies and popular music
the view from suburbia: Dead Kennedys, Washington DC, 6-5-83
by Leonard Nevarez on Jun 4, 2013 • 10:59 am
It’s been said 14 is the influential age in the development of our musical tastes. That was the case for me: I find I regularly return to the music that I explored and embraced as my own back around 1983. It wasn’t just what I heard that has shaped my ideas about ‘good’ music, though, but how and where I heard it.
Suburban lessons in DC hardcore
When I was 14 years old, I was a freshman at McLean High School in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. At the time, McLean was well-to-do but not yet submerged into the extended Northern Virginia sprawl that now characterizes the Washington metropolitan area. For instance, the town’s major shopping mall, Tyson’s Corner, didn’t yet have the retail/office expansion for which journalist Joel Garreau would deem it the ur-Edge City. A number of our parents worked “inside the Beltway” at government jobs, but otherwise high school kids lived lives roughly familiar to the teenage life depicted in “Dazed and Confused”: jocks and preppies, long-hairs smoking cigarettes in the parking lot (“fleabags,” we called this group), and the unquestioned hegemony of rock radio from stations like WAVA and DC-101.
Something musically exciting was happening in the city, but as a freshman too young for a driver’s license, I could only get glimpses of it. Legendary alternative-radio station WHFS broadcasted with a weak signal back then that I couldn’t really tune into from where I lived. Family excursions into the Georgetown neighborhood (the most visible scene for DC’s first wave of gentrification) were infrequent, but a couple of trips to the new wave boutique Commander Salamander there were tremendously exciting for me. And most famously, hardcore punk was raging in DC in 1983, maybe the last year in its golden age marked by the career of Minor Threat.
My musical tastes were already evolving to reflect British new wave and postpunk in my freshman year. I was really affected by acquiring and, separately, going into record stores to buy albums like the Clash’s Combat Rock, the Psychedelic Furs’ Forever Now, ABC’s Lexicon of Love, the Human League’s Dare (actually, that was taped off a full-album broadcast on FM radio), Devo’s Oh No It’s Devo, and Duran Duran’s Rio. (The influence of the suits that Duran Duran wore on the back cover of Rio is the subject of another blog some day.) But DC hardcore was in the ether at my high school back then, if you knew where to look, or who to look at.
The guys who played in the high school’s unofficial ultimate frisbee team (the Flipping Lids) looked not too dissimilar from the fleabags — shaggy hair, flannel shirts, the scent of some kind of smoke wafting from their cars. But then I saw a few of them play a mangy version of “Louie Louie” at a high school talent show with an alternate lyric: “Who needs love when you’ve got a gun/Who needs love to have any fun.” I soon learned they played Black Flag’s version of “Louie Louie.” Or then there were the kids involved in theater — the “drama queers”, they were called — that I ran with thanks to working on the tech crew for “Fiddler on the Roof.” From them I discovered Fear’s debut album The Record and danced (if that’s what you called my G-rated spazzout) to “Beef Baloney” at a theater party.
Yet I really have Nils Ahlgren to blame/thank for showing me the world of DC hardcore. Nils was a problem child, if I recall correctly: smart but disruptive in class, verbally dismissive of the popular kids, a little uncomfortable-looking in his nondescript clothes. I don’t recall how we latched on to each other freshman year, but he found a willing and impressionable comrade in me. He came over to my house one day with three LPs that showed me a new world of sound and style: the Ramones’ Subterranean Jungle, Public Image Limited’s Flowers of Romance and the Alternative Tentacles compilation of North American hardcore Let Them Eat Jellybeans. In Spanish class, we would go to the library’s language lab, where he would eject the Spanish exercise cassette and pop in homemade tapes of DC music that he had collected, such as hardcore heroes Government Issue or local weirdoes 9353. (This is how we shared music in the pre-Internet age, kids.)
{snip}
Blogging at the intersection of urban studies and popular music
the view from suburbia: Dead Kennedys, Washington DC, 6-5-83
by Leonard Nevarez on Jun 4, 2013 • 10:59 am
It’s been said 14 is the influential age in the development of our musical tastes. That was the case for me: I find I regularly return to the music that I explored and embraced as my own back around 1983. It wasn’t just what I heard that has shaped my ideas about ‘good’ music, though, but how and where I heard it.
Suburban lessons in DC hardcore
When I was 14 years old, I was a freshman at McLean High School in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. At the time, McLean was well-to-do but not yet submerged into the extended Northern Virginia sprawl that now characterizes the Washington metropolitan area. For instance, the town’s major shopping mall, Tyson’s Corner, didn’t yet have the retail/office expansion for which journalist Joel Garreau would deem it the ur-Edge City. A number of our parents worked “inside the Beltway” at government jobs, but otherwise high school kids lived lives roughly familiar to the teenage life depicted in “Dazed and Confused”: jocks and preppies, long-hairs smoking cigarettes in the parking lot (“fleabags,” we called this group), and the unquestioned hegemony of rock radio from stations like WAVA and DC-101.
Something musically exciting was happening in the city, but as a freshman too young for a driver’s license, I could only get glimpses of it. Legendary alternative-radio station WHFS broadcasted with a weak signal back then that I couldn’t really tune into from where I lived. Family excursions into the Georgetown neighborhood (the most visible scene for DC’s first wave of gentrification) were infrequent, but a couple of trips to the new wave boutique Commander Salamander there were tremendously exciting for me. And most famously, hardcore punk was raging in DC in 1983, maybe the last year in its golden age marked by the career of Minor Threat.
My musical tastes were already evolving to reflect British new wave and postpunk in my freshman year. I was really affected by acquiring and, separately, going into record stores to buy albums like the Clash’s Combat Rock, the Psychedelic Furs’ Forever Now, ABC’s Lexicon of Love, the Human League’s Dare (actually, that was taped off a full-album broadcast on FM radio), Devo’s Oh No It’s Devo, and Duran Duran’s Rio. (The influence of the suits that Duran Duran wore on the back cover of Rio is the subject of another blog some day.) But DC hardcore was in the ether at my high school back then, if you knew where to look, or who to look at.
The guys who played in the high school’s unofficial ultimate frisbee team (the Flipping Lids) looked not too dissimilar from the fleabags — shaggy hair, flannel shirts, the scent of some kind of smoke wafting from their cars. But then I saw a few of them play a mangy version of “Louie Louie” at a high school talent show with an alternate lyric: “Who needs love when you’ve got a gun/Who needs love to have any fun.” I soon learned they played Black Flag’s version of “Louie Louie.” Or then there were the kids involved in theater — the “drama queers”, they were called — that I ran with thanks to working on the tech crew for “Fiddler on the Roof.” From them I discovered Fear’s debut album The Record and danced (if that’s what you called my G-rated spazzout) to “Beef Baloney” at a theater party.
Yet I really have Nils Ahlgren to blame/thank for showing me the world of DC hardcore. Nils was a problem child, if I recall correctly: smart but disruptive in class, verbally dismissive of the popular kids, a little uncomfortable-looking in his nondescript clothes. I don’t recall how we latched on to each other freshman year, but he found a willing and impressionable comrade in me. He came over to my house one day with three LPs that showed me a new world of sound and style: the Ramones’ Subterranean Jungle, Public Image Limited’s Flowers of Romance and the Alternative Tentacles compilation of North American hardcore Let Them Eat Jellybeans. In Spanish class, we would go to the library’s language lab, where he would eject the Spanish exercise cassette and pop in homemade tapes of DC music that he had collected, such as hardcore heroes Government Issue or local weirdoes 9353. (This is how we shared music in the pre-Internet age, kids.)
{snip}