Denver Radio: Rick Crandall OUT As KEZW Drops Adult Standards

Rick Crandall

Radio Personality  Rick Crandall started at KEZW 1430 AM n 1991 with the sole purpose of babysitting the station for three months while its owners were considering selling it. Although the station has changed hands a few times since then, Crandall ended up being there for thirty years — until now. 

Current owner Entercom Communications, which bought KEZW in 2002, just shifted formats from classic music to the sports-betting station 1430 AM/The Bet, and Crandall is out, reports westword.com. 

He signed off one last time on Monday, January 25, before the station changed formats. He says KEZW was one of the last of its kind — the adult-standards format — in a major market.

Crandall was 34 when he started the gig. On his first day on the job, a listener called to gripe about how he had misattributed one of the songs: “That was Tommy Dorsey, not Glenn Miller, you idiot. You're not going to last very long.”

That listener was wrong. For the next three decades at the station, Crandall, who went on to become KEZW’s program manager and Breakfast Club host, not only spun music of the big-band era, but also played songs from the ’40s through the ’70s, including classics from Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra.

“It was a radio station that every program-director book will tell you shouldn't exist,” Crandall says. “It just doesn't fit any kind of reasonable pattern to how this works, but it worked in Denver, and it was partly my relationship with the audience that kept it going, and then the work we were doing in the community.”

While other stations around the country were playing similar kinds of music over the past few decades, Crandall says they weren’t doing the community outreach that he and other staffers at KEZW did with local veterans.

While listeners tuned in for big bands and crooners, Crandall also became their news source, particularly for a generation that still wanted to get information through the radio. He’d relay current events, talk about the weather, and mention concerts they might want to attend.

Crandall, who went to high school in the ’70s and listened to rock acts like Chicago and the Doobie Brothers, found it funny that he spent thirty years playing big-band music.