By David Fiorella

In early 1980, Capital Cities Inc., which owned KPOL AM @ FM, changed the call letters of the long time "good music" station to KZLA. The format was changed to a country music format to compete with long time country music station KLAC. KZLA had no official company song just a straight forward identification at the top of the hour. It went like this: "At 1540 on the dial this KZLA and at 93.9 this KZLA-FM Los Angeles". A simulcast would consist from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM Monday through Saturday. Sunday, the programming was completely separated throughout the whole day until 10:00 AM Monday Morning. When not simulcating, KZLA would identify itself in a seperate manner at the top of the hour depending if you were tuning on AM of FM. Example: "At 93.9, this is KZLA-FM Los Angeles". "At 1540 on the dial, this is KZLA, Los Angeles". Again no company song, just three in a row country hits, with each song being identified by an announcer when the three songs would be completed. Nothing fancy whatsoever. Some of the songs on the playlist were these: Charlottes Web (Statler Bros), Pecos Prominade (Tanya Tucker); Atlanta Blue (Statler Bros); Yellow Rose of Texas (Johnny Lee); El Paso City (Marty Robbins); Queen of Hearts (Juice Newton); Amarillo By Morning (George Strait); Official Historian of Shirley Jean Burrell (Statler Bros); Looking For Love (In All the Wrong Places) (Johnny Lee); Angel In the Morning (Juice Newton) and Strong Enough To Bend (Tanya Tucker). Sometime in the mid 1980's KZLA-AM was sold to a Spanish group and the call letters and format was changed to KSKQ Spanish Radio. Later, 1540 AM became an all sports outlet, "One On One Sports" KCTD, and now has the heritage calls KMPC. KZLA and KLAC were both bought out by Shamrock Broadcasting for awhile. KLAC was the more traditional country station; oldies country of the past. KZLA-FM played the hot new country stars in contemporary times. KLAC and KZLA eventually parted their association a few years ago. KLAC today plays Adult Standards of the 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's music while KZLA's format was today's new country basically. KZLA-AM is no longer in operation as I stated from above. I listened to this station when I worked at GTE doing the mail run up the coast to Zuma for a period of time. We had AM radios in the mail vans and the van I had was equipped with a radio that was poor picking up KLAC, so I played KZLA-AM when I would do my "run" for GTE. KZLA, when not simulcasting would have a "semi simulcast" to it's program. The programming was unique. KZLA-AM would run it's programming three or four minutes ahead of it's FM sister station. This would include music, station announcing, advertisements and news. A song finishing on KZLA-AM would be just beginning on KZLA-FM. The news finishing on KZLA-AM would be starting on KZLA-FM. This would be during the non-simulcast hours. The simulcast would be a true simulcast after 10:00 AM hour to 6:00 PM. This was the only station that practiced this procedure. KPOL in it's day did the same thing. I should say Capitol Cities did this programming for both KPOL and continued the simulcast-non simulcast practice of this sort with KZLA. Back To Radio Main Page socalradiohistory.com