Whenever a radio station goes under, you can count of just about everyone to suggest that the radio station could have been saved if they'd only played exactly the kind of music that they wanted from a radio station. There's some talk over at Kuff's place about what might have been done.

I never really listened to KLOL, so I don't feel particularly qualified to say that if they'd mixed Ben Folds with Phil Pritchett and They Might Be Giants they would have been successful (though I'm sure they have!), Houston Press music critic John Nova "Texas Bowel Movement" Lomax puts in his two cents about KLOL and the last major format changed station KIKK.

Could the likes of KIKK and KLOL have done anything to ensure their survival in light of all these factors? "Yes," and "probably not," respectively. As for KIKK, their stab at a Texas country format was half-assed and ill conceived. Alongside their Waylon & Willie and Pat & Cory, they played way too much Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Tim McGraw and Shania. They should have spun more Steve Earle, Hank, Guy Clark and Johnny Bush instead. There are quite a few stations in the Hill Country that have thrived after doing just that.

Mr. Lomax said much of the same when KIKK changed its face a while back and some people he interviewed agreed.

I disagree.

For a several month span during the rise and fall of its Texas Country period, I listened to almost nothing on the radio except KIKK 95.7. I was there when they jumped head-first into the Texas Country pool and when they started inching their way back out.

The problem was not that they did it half-assed, it's that they were rigid and in a way, went too far with it (and in another way didn't go far enough). For my part I loved the fact that they started playing only Texas Country music from 5-10pm on weekdays.

But there simply wasn't (and isn't) enough familiar music coming out of Texas to carry a station during peek hours. But because they roped it off as only allowing Texas music, they had to fill that time anyway. So they started replaying songs with greater frequency than even ClearChannel-owned 93Q. Robert Earl Keen is great, but not four times on the hour every hour.

They could have started digging deeper into the CDs of the ones that took immediately, but even after you play everything on Bleu Edmondson's or Jason Boland's CD, you're going to run out of material. On the national scene, there's always more artists to branch out to in order to avoid repetition or you can go back to an earlier CD put out by the artist. Bur Roger Creager had only two CDs, Dub Miller one, Bleu one.

They kept tweaking with it and started using a more generous definition of "Texas Country" playing George Strait, Mark Chestnutt, and Chris Cagle's one-hit over and over and over again.

The 5-10 slot and their affection for country music more-or-less ended at the same time.

But for the most part, Shania and Kenny weren't really the problem. I would go weeks without hearing either. Except that on the weekends they'd both get a heck of a lot of play because the weekends were roped off for national acts - or so it seemed.

The problem was that they viewed Texas Country Music as Texas Country Music (5-10pm), Nashville Country Music as Nashville Country Music (weekends), and classic country music as a non-entity (except when playing Willie & co. to fill the 5-10 slot).

If they'd been less rigid, they could have really tried to blend Texas acts with their inspirations (Johnny Cash, Hank, etc.), and even have thrown in some local alt-country (CCR and TGD) and better yet acts outside of Texas that fit within the mold (Tim Easton, Matthew Ryan, etc.). They honestly could have even thrown in select Nashville stuff to round it out and provide a bit of more familiar stuff.

Of course, that's me saying what kind of music station I would want, falling into the same trap that I noted above. But whatever they'd done and however they'd mixed it, I would have prefered something mixed so that when I turn on the radio I wouldn't have had to look at my watch to find out what I was going to hear.

Maybe that wouldn't have worked. Maybe a market like Houston is simply too big and full of non-natives for that sort of thing to work. Unfortunately, because KIKK screwed it up I'm not sure we'll get the chance to find out.

Before concluding, I should repeat that despite the mistakes I believe that they made, the contribution that KIKK did make while it existed cannot be overstated. In a six month span, I saw the Firehouse go from usually empty to sometimes so crowded that I had to leave. Artists that couldn't get 50 people to show up in Dallas were playing to large and enthusiastic crowds in Houston.

More's the pity that it didn't work out.