Big Rick Stuart looms large over Bay Area radio

here's an article from the Oakland Tribune written just after I came to KFOG


Big' Rick Stuart looms large over Bay Area radio
Disc jockey maintains focus on the music

Jim Harrington

There are on-air personalities, and there are disc jockeys. The East Bay's Big Rick Stuart is a disc jockey.

That's not to say that there is anything wrong with Stuart's personality. He's a warm, friendly and funny man with a large enough personality to match both his moniker and his football-lineman build.

It's just that he didn't get into the business more than 20 years ago to hear himself talk. The Oakland resident got into radio to play music. In a world full of Howard Stern-wannabes, that desire makes Big Rick a refreshing change of pace on the radio dial.

As Stuart picks through the remains of a cobb salad during a recent lunch at Kincaid's restaurant at Oakland's Jack London Square, only moments before departing for his shift at KFOG radio, the popular DJ explains that he developed his radio style from listening to the legends of the industry.

"Wolfman Jack is one of my all-time heroes," Stuart says. "Wolfman Jack would say _ to paraphrase _ that his job was to make it fun for people to listen to music that they like.

"And that's as simple as it is. He would straight up say that he wasn't the show. It wasn't Wolfman Jack on the radio. It was Wolfman Jack playing music that the listeners liked to hear."

In similar fashion, Stuart firmly believes that playing music is the most important part of his job.

"That's not true of every disc jockey and every disc jockey's job," he reasons. "But it's definitely true for me. And that's what I want to do. That's the only kind of radio that I want to do. If I had to do a morning show and do stunts and have shock-jock stuff . . . I couldn't do it. I would turn the job down."

The 41-year-old San Francisco native's love for music stretches back to his childhood in the '70s. Growing up in Richmond, not-yet-"Big" Rick Stuart listened to an assortment of popular bands of the day.

"I was a really big music guy," he recalls. "I had everything from Parliament and Kiss to the Ramones and the New York Dolls. So, I listened to a lot of different music. And I constantly listened to the radio."

Not wanting to move far from his boyhood home in the East Bay, Stuart enrolled at the University of San Francisco after graduating from high school in 1979. It was at the "Home of the Dons" where Stuart got his first crack at radio.

He took some shift work at KUSF, the university's acclaimed radio channel, and was immediately hooked. However, Stuart wasn't a natural on the radio at first.

"I was totally nervous," he remembered. "I was totally mic shy."

But Stuart is "Big" in the determination department as well. He practiced at night, imitating local DJs, and took as many shifts as possible at KUSF. He progressed to the point where he was offered a weekend job at a small station two and 1/2 hours north of the Bay Area in the Clearlake area in late '79.

"It was incredibly glamorous," Stuart laughs. "You string up the tape and press play and sit back for 59 minutes. That was how it worked. But I got to say 'KBLC Lakeport' once an hour."

But that was the beginning of Big Rick's professional career. He began working his way up the ladder in Bay Area radio and got a big break in 1986 when he was hired to work at Live 105 in San Francisco.

It was the right time to be working for a modern rock station, as what once was truly "alternative music" began to define the mainstream. Stuart worked as a DJ at Live 105 for 14 years and soaked up the sounds of bands like R.E.M., the Cure, Pet Shop Boys, Roxy Music, U2 and the Clash.

The most difficult period of his time at Live 105, Stuart says, was weathering the storm of Seattle bands that dominated music for the first half of the '90s. It was the overwhelmingly dark music of groups like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden that had Stuart thinking about a different profession.

"It was really a whole form of music that came out that was just depressing. If I was a troubled teen at the time, I probably would have really listened to it," says Stuart. "I considered getting out of radio during the whole grunge-on-the-radio movement. I really considered walking away from it because it was so depressing."

But then acts like No Doubt and Green Day came along to add a bit of levity and light to the Seattle bands' gloom and doom and, for Big Rick Stuart, music became fun again.

And music is still fun for Stuart, although the music he is playing has changed quite a bit. Since late 2000, Stuart has worked for KFOG, a station that answers upon its promise of "true variety" with a mix of classic rock bands like the Rolling Stones and The Who and new acts such as Phish and Shawn Colvin.

Stuart works the evening shift, from 4 to 11 p.m., playing acts like Norah Jones, Jackson Browne, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and countless other performers.

"The great thing about KFOG is that there is a 10,000-song library," Stuart says. "There are just so many songs."

So many songs. So little time. Luckily, Big Rick Stuart plans on sticking around at KFOG for quite a while. Even after all these years, the Oakland-based DJ is still fascinated by radio.

"There's a lot that is good about radio," Stuart states. "Unfortunately, the perception is that it is pretty stale. But I actually don't think that it is. There is a lot that is on radio. You can go up and down the dial and hear so many different types of music and, even, languages.

"It's a great medium. I still love radio. I love driving Interstate 5 at night, just hitting the seek button."