I’m not saying I was an anxious kid but for two full years, all through junior high, I couldn’t sleep unless I had a fan blowing on me and I was listening to KOST.
KOST served the Los Angeles area and was a station that playing love songs, specifically.
I was starting to get hip to edgier music, further afield I still remember hearing “Girlfriend in a Coma” by The Smiths for the first time when I was in 8th grade. Someone had a boombox or something, and I heard it in the quad at Traweek Junior High. I didn’t know if I liked it. It was such a deadpan description of a really melodramatic situation.
However, come nightfall it was all KOST. They had this thing called “Love Thoughts,” in which a female commentator would, in a really smarmy voice, deliver a message from someone somewhere in the 818 to someone else in the 818. “And Bobbie, Jeanne wants you to know that she’s sorry and she’s been missing you a bunch. Jeanne can’t stop thinking about you. She asked us to send you this song.”
Yes, the love thoughts were cheesy as hell. But then frickin Sherrif would come on with the prettiest Monster Ballad of all time: “When I’m With You.”
Am I alone in thinking that song is underrated? And my fan, the kind with the blue blades that everyone had in the ’80s, would blow softly on my face. And I’d drift softly off to sleep. Yeah, KOST was the shit, though no one wanted to admit it.
KROQ was for the day. KOST ruled the nighttime.
–Sarah Torribio
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