Northern CA Radio: KZRO Truly A One Man Show

Dennis Michaels at KZRO

It's no secret that we live in a time when the media landscape is changing dramatically, and the world of radio is no expectation. But Northern California can claim something of an antique: it's rock 'n' roll radio done the old fashioned way and, for one man, that means doing it the hard way, reports CBS News San Francisco.

"ZZ Top on Northern California's home of the classics, The Z Channel,"  KZRO 100 FM owner Dennis Michaels said into one of the microphones in the station's Mount Shasta studio.

For anyone who has ever made their way along Interstate 5 in the Shasta area and gone searching for some music on the radio, it's a station that, at first glance, may sound like normal classic rock radio. Only this isn't just a radio station. It's the work of one single person and it might be hard to find anyone else doing anything quite like it. 

KZRO 100.1 FM (12.5 Kw)

"I don't know. Nobody?" Michaels laughed. "Nobody else is stupid enough to do it."

By that, Michaels means running the whole show by himself. He picks the songs, records the jingles, even produces a lot of the commercials. He also does all of the maintenance and just about everything else.

"Music programming," he added. "Traffic. I don't do sales. I suck at sales. So basically, I program everything right here. Three or four software programs that kind of commingle. I send that over to the server which is down here. This is what's on there now. Chili Peppers. Styx up next."

Over the past 25 years he's built his own music library and runs the 24-hour-a-day schedule with the help of nine different computers.

"Every time I hear something I like," he explained, "I place it in the rotation. I think we do well. We're tracking about 22,000 cities on the Internet. Australia, Barbados, Germany, Canada. Russia I track it because I can see ... right where the server is and it's always right at the Kremlin."

One-man radio station in shadow of Mount Shasta keeps the rock rollin' https://t.co/S42s6D7eS4 via @KPIXTV

— Tom Benson (@Tombenson1) November 26, 2022

All of those people, including the fans in Moscow, are listening to one man's playlist of 8,000 songs but it's really been a lifetime of music. Michales started as a teenager on AM radio in Chicago before his career took him to Los Angeles.