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<\/p>\nThe familiar voice of WKRP in Cincinnati star Gary Sandy welcomed listeners to the new WKRP in Cincinnati on the radio at 6 a.m. Monday, as \u201cThe Oasis\u201d 1970s rock music stations brought the beloved call letters to the Queen City airwaves for the first time.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe play essentially the same music that they played on WKRP. It made more sense for us to do this than any other station in town,\u201d says Jeff Ziesmann, who owns the three-station network which beams the new WKRP from northern Kentucky to north of Dayton.<\/p>\n
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The WKRP in Cincinnati cast (from left) Richard Sanders, Jan Smithers, Tim Reid, Loni Anderson, Gordon Jump, Frank Bonner, Howard Hesseman and Gary Sandy.<\/p>\n
The stations teased the switch by airing the WKRP theme song continuously since midnight.<\/p>\n
Ziesmann bought the call letters in April<\/a> from a tiny Raleigh, N.C., low-power FM station which had announced their availability in January<\/a> as a fundraising effort.<\/p>\n Courtesy Grant County Broadcasters<\/p>\n “The Oasis” rock hits format debuted in July 2022.<\/p>\n It has taken a month to prepare the transition, including getting Sandy \u2014 the Northern Kentucky resident who played WKRP program director Andy Travis on the 1978-82 CBS comedy set in a fictional Cincinnati radio station \u2014 to record \u201cliners,\u201d or short promotional announcements heard between songs.<\/p>\n But don\u2019t expect former \u201cOasis\u201d DJs Dave Mason, Ernie \u201cThe Fat Man\u201d Brown or Dayton veteran John Beaulieu to sound like burned-out morning man Dr. Johnny Fever, or start wearing salesman Herb Tarlek\u2019s leisure suits. <\/p>\n And this new WKRP-FM won\u2019t transform into a bumbling broadcaster that does jingles for funeral homes or drops live turkeys over a shopping mall.<\/p>\n \u201cThe presentation will be a tribute to the TV show \u2014 not a parody of a 40-year-old TV show that aired for only four years,\u201d Ziesmann says. \u201cFor us, WKRP is more of an attitude.\u201d<\/p>\n The arrival of the WKRP call letters comes with a big change for another Greater Cincinnati legacy station. WKRP-FM will broadcast on 97.7, which in the 1980s and \u201890s was Oxford\u2019s iconic independent rock station WOXY-FM. <\/p>\n “97x” received national notoriety in the Oscar-winning Rain Man movie shot here when Dustin Hoffman\u2019s character kept repeating the station\u2019s marketing line, \u201c97x! Bam! The future of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll!\u201d (Here\u2019s a link to WVXU-FM\u2019s Cincinnati Edition 2023 show about the history of WOXY 97x.<\/a>)<\/p>\n WKRP-FM\u2019s signal, broadcast from Middletown’s old WPFB-FM tower, reaches from Cincinnati to Dayton. The WOXY calls letters were moved to the former WYDB-FM (94.5) in Englewood, a northern Dayton suburb. No changes were made to WNKR-FM (106.7) in Dry Ridge, Ky., where the studios and headquarters are located for Ziesmann\u2019s Grant County Broadcasters.<\/p>\n While the call letters and branding have changed, the music remains the same.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is just a rebranding. We don\u2019t want to spook those people who might think we threw out their favorite radio station,\u201d Ziesmann says.<\/p>\n Ziesmann and partner Randy Michaels have curated more than 1,800 rock and pop songs from the 1960s through the 1980s \u2014 from the Beatles, Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Elvis Presley and Elton John to Credence Clearwater Revival, Queen, Styx, Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles and Eric Clapton.<\/p>\n Part of the popularity of the WKRP TV show was hearing Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) and Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid) playing current rock music. They actually debuted some future hits, such as Blondie\u2019s \u201cHeart of Glass.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) broadcasts from the WKRP studio which featured a large Cincinnati map on the wall. <\/p>\n The 140,000 listeners also hear songs recorded at Cincinnati\u2019s King Records and Fraternity Records labels by the Lemon Pipers, James Brown, Lonnie Mack, Starstruck (\u201cBlack Betty\u201d) and others.<\/p>\n \u201cThe station is 100 percent programmed locally. You\u2019re not going to get that from Cumulus (owners of WARM98, WGRR-FM and 92.5 The Fox) or iHeartMedia (owners of WEBN-FM and KISS 107.1), which basically have one play list nationally for each of its formats,\u201d Ziesmann says.<\/p>\n Fictionally set in Cincinnati, WKRP was inspired by a radio station in Atlanta where creator Hugh Wilson had worked in advertising, and filmed at MTM Studios in Los Angeles from 1978 to 1982.<\/p>\n No Greater Cincinnati broadcaster has ever used the WKRP call letters \u2014 although WKRC-AM edited the sitcom\u2019s theme song to say \u201cWKRC in Cincinnati\u201d soon after the sitcom\u2019s premiere, and WBQC-TV (Channel 25) branded its low-power station as WKRP TV (no hyphen) in 2008. <\/p>\n The WKRP call letters were used in 1980s by radio stations in North Vernon, Ind., and at West Georgia College northwest of Atlanta before low-power \u201c101 nine WKRP\u201d in Raleigh, N.C.<\/p>\n![\""The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1777899910_349_.jpeg\"\/)
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