KUTX’s first Music Director and current Music Editor retires this month but will continue to host
By Paul Carruba, Uptown Saturday Night host
“The very first job I ever had was at a radio station,” started Jeff McCord, who after decades of hipping folks to new music over the airwaves and in print, is retiring from his full-time position as music editor this month.
You may know Jeff as the host of his show, What’s Next. You may also know him from the 17 years he spent as the host of Left of the Dial. You may even know him from articles and reviews he’s written here at KUTX, the Austin Chronicle or Texas Monthly. If you don’t know Jeff from any of those things, here’s what you should know: No matter the job, Jeff has dedicated his entire career to discovering and introducing the world to the newest and coolest music.
Even back to his first job. Although back then, the commute was less than ideal.
“I was not old enough to drive,” said Jeff. “My dad drove me to work. And I was still in high school, it was a weekend part-time thing. But I wanted to work in radio so bad. I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, which you would not think would be the most musically enlightened place in the world, yet by the time I grew up, FM was in its infancy and there was this amazing free-form FM station there.”
The radio bug had bitten Jeff, and it eventually led him to San Antonio where he attended Trinity University where he joined the staff of the fledgling KRTU.
“One of the reasons I went there was they were starting a radio station and it wasn’t even on air when I started. And it was a little low-wattage thing, and all the people that were behind it were calling all the shots,” said Jeff.
Jeff was on air their first day, and eventually, he was calling the shots—even if it meant putting up with a particular level of professionalism from the all-volunteer staff of college kids.
“All the people that started it graduated and moved on. And I ended up running the radio station by the end of my senior year,” recalls Jeff. “By the time I was running it, I remember getting called at 3:00 in the morning, ‘So-and-so is not here, I’m going to sign off, man.’ I’m like, ‘No. No. Don’t do that.’ People would just sign-on and sign-off just for nothing. And it was that kind of radio station,” chuckling at the memory.
The small college station was on-the-job training, not to mention an opportunity to chat with the interesting and musically famous.
“It was great fun. It really was,” said Jeff. “I remember Todd Rundgren played there, and who else? We did a live show with Doug Sahm. A lot of jazz shows like Al Jarreau and Dave Brubeck and his sons. And I got to interview all of them. By the time I was a junior or senior, we upped the wattage to I think 250-watts. So, instead of going two miles, it went maybe 15. The radio station still exists and it’s apparently much higher wattage now.”
Quite a lot higher, in fact. In 2017, KRTU started broadcasting at 30,000 watts. After graduating, Jeff, “much to the consternation of [his] parents,” spent his time playing in bands and was, he admitted, not in a hurry to get a real job. But he eventually found him in a part-time gig at San Antonio’s legendary rock station, KISS-FM.
“It’s a metal town. And a lot of bands like Judas Priest, Pavlov’s Dog and things like that broke in San Antonio because of the station,” said Jeff.
Playlists at KISS-FM were loose, to say the least. Even though he wasn’t a metalhead himself, Jeff still managed to win over audiences with something new and interesting.
“It was right at the time when punk rock was breaking,” said Jeff, “So, I figured out pretty quick that I could just play punk rock and the kids loved it.”
Unfortunately, KISS-FM was bought, tightened its “anything goes” approach to programming, and that meant that Jeff and a whole bunch of his coworkers were out of jobs. Luckily, about 80 miles up I-35 from San Antonio, there was a place almost tailor-made for a switched-on music fanatic like Jeff.
“I had discovered Austin pretty quickly after going to school in San Antonio, and I was going up to see shows all the time,” said Jeff. “My band was going up to play in Austin all the time. And so, I would drop in at KLBJ and try to get to know those people and see if there’s any way I could get hired up there because I really wanted to move to Austin.”
So he did. It wasn’t, however, great timing for getting a job at the then mostly freeform KLBJ.
“In Austin, KLBJ was a really forward-thinking radio station. It broke The Police. It broke just a whole bunch of new wave stuff and all that was happening. I wouldn’t call them freeform, but they were pretty close to it,” said Jeff. “When I left KISS, at almost the same time, KLBJ changed to an album rock format. And so, I go, ‘Well, that’s shot.’ And I just thought I was done with radio at that point.”
It would take a few years, but radio wasn’t done with Jeff McCord yet.
In the meantime, Jeff found a home and a scene in Austin. He worked at record stores, including the nascent Waterloo Records, while still playing in bands and writing for the Austin Chronicle. The music scene was transmogrifying and blossoming into what would become the “New Sincerity” movement. It was the heyday for clubs like Liberty Lunch, Club Foot and long-defunct venues like The Beach (where North Campus watering hole Crown & Anchor now stands).
“The Beach was essential to that scene because they would let anyone play,” remembered Jeff. “So, I mean, it was hard to get into Liberty Lunch, and it was hard to get into the Continental Club unless you had a following or anything like that. But The Beach, you could get in. You might be the first of three bands, but you could play, so you would go there and just see these brand new bands, and it was just really exciting.”
The Reivers, or as they were known then, Zeitgeist, were one of the biggest bands in the scene, and they needed a manager.
“I got asked to manage Zeitgeist,” said Jeff. “I thought about it for a while and signed on with them and they signed on with Capitol Records. It was two records, and a lot of tours. I went on the road with them, and it was quite an experience, man. I’ll tell you.”
When asked if he had any previous experience managing bands, Jeff simply answered, “None.”
“Having worked in record stores and being a buyer, I had knowledge of the music business,” said Jeff. “I certainly had an idea how things worked, and I talked to a lot of bands and I heard a lot of stories. But when I first walked into those guys at Capitol Records, I had to figure out pretty quick who was actually going to be able to help us.”
Jeff found his footing, but the band had a lot of struggles with the suits at the record company.
“I went to a meeting at Capitol with our, I think it was our third different A&R man (they kept getting fired). And he goes, ’There’s a lot of changes happening here at Capitol, and I just don’t know what’s going to happen.’”
“I went back and reported that to the band, and that was that. They went on to make a couple of more great independent records. And I’m still friends with all of them. It was a bit of a shock when I got fired, but I got over it.”
There was, Jeff admits, an adjustment period. Jeff pivoted once again, writing for Texas Monthly, the Oxford American, DownBeat among others.
Writing, journalism and an eclectic taste are quite coded into Jeff’s DNA.
“My dad was a newspaper editor. He was a lifelong journalist. He also had pretty eclectic music tastes. He was very into swing jazz. That’s what he grew up with. But he loved Bob Dylan. Took me to my first Bob Dylan concert. He gave me my first assignment covering a Rolling Stones concert when I was still in high school.” recalled Jeff.
Jeff would end up spending two decades as a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly, an experience he clearly cherishes.
“If I’d ever been offered full-time employment there, I would’ve grabbed it because one of the great things about writing there is you have a cadre of great editors and fact-checkers and people to help you guide your piece to get it to be what you want it to be,” said Jeff. “What I loved about Texas Monthly was if you could think of the idea and they accepted it, you could do it, as long as it had some connection to the state. There was a lot more curiosity about the world at large.”
It was also during this time of transition after managing the Reivers that Jeff also went to work for South by Southwest.
“I actually stuck it out full-time at SXSW for seven years,” said Jeff. “I was booking all the music panels. And I got to know a ton of people in the industry. And it was incredibly stressful, but also rewarding in a way that no job I’ve had has ever been. it’s a very freaky thing to work all year long for 10 days of events. And to see it come to fruition is just an amazing thing. So, that was a really valuable experience.”
Despite the fulfillment that comes with a good job done well, Jeff still felt like something was missing. A couple of years before he started his tenure with SXSW, Hayes McCauley, an old friend from the Waterloo Records days, encouraged Jeff to go for a radio gig at KUT.
That’s how it started—in the early nineties, Jeff McCord started his KUT (eventually to become KUT and KUTX) career doing red-eye overnight shifts that harkened back to his early high school radio days.
“I started working these overnight shifts again,” remembered Jeff. “And then I went off-air when Morning Edition started, I think it’s 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. I was on Mondays. And then I did Wednesdays for a while and Thursdays. This was around 1992 or ‘93. And man, you talk about free-form radio, there was nobody to tell me anything. Nothing. I could play whatever I wanted.”
When asked for examples, “40-minute electric Miles tracks” was the first example cited followed by mentions of BH Surfers, The Clash (near and dear to my very own heart), Ornette, Dylan, the Gang of Four.
“I kept doing the radio shifts, and started doing all these things. We had this show called Live Set, which was on Sunday nights, and it was exactly what it sounded like. We’d go into what was our studio 1A at the time, and let a band play for an hour,” said Jeff. “The Gourds were one of the first bands I had on. The Shins played one at their early tours. One of the things I started doing was this Christmas show, and it was just insane. I would invite everybody that I liked and that was playing music, and they would come in and do one Christmas song and everybody else stood in the hall and it was live, mind you. Herding cats; my wife would stage-manage. And I did that three different years. Lots of dead air moments. And oh, my god, it almost killed me. But it was really fun.”
Jeff launched his own ecletic program, Left of the Dial, in 1997. And soon, he would be, once again, in charge of the fun, when he became KUT’s first music director in 2001.
“It was a crazy time,” said Jeff. “It’s hard for anyone to imagine that knows the station now, what it was like then. There was no real connection to the music industry. There was no news department. I was there when they made their first hire. It was right next door to me that they set up the newsroom, and as far as music hosts, it was still primarily specialty shows by John Aielli, Larry Monroe, Paul Ray, Jay Trachtenberg.”
When asked to supervise vets like Monroe, John Aielli and Paul Ray on his staff, Jeff, who had had radio jobs going back to his very first, felt more than a few twinges of imposter syndrome.
“I just knew that they were just…’Who is this guy?” said Jeff, “And I’ve just been hired there, and these guys have all been there for at least a decade in John’s case two, three, doing whatever they want, and they’re supposed to listen to me? I tried but I wasn’t very good at supervising them”
He made mistakes (according to him) and progress was slow (also according to him), but it was still progress. KUT connected with the industry, began to establish some cohesion and forethought about programming. Arguably KUTX would not be the station it is today without the solid foundation laid in those early days by newly minted music director Jeff McCord and the show he hosted for 17 years, Left of the Dial. Jeff would eventually leave LOTD to take over a Friday morning slot that he hosted for six years.
And after nearly two decades as music director for KUT and KUTX, he left that job to pursue a newly-created position, music editor, where he could pursue his writing and work to expand the scope of kutx.org. As KUTX’s music editor, he was able to really explore and dig deeper into the music scene considerably more than a single broadcast allows.
If I had to guess, I would say that a lot of why KUTX is so willing to just try stuff is because of folks with minds as open as Jeff’s. But that’s me. Let’s hear from the boss-man, KUTX Program Director, Matt Reilly.
“Jeff laid the groundwork for what would become KUTX. Long before KUTX launched, the music side of KUT, under Jeff’s leadership, had become one of the best in the nation,” said Matt. “So when I was tasked with launching KUTX, Jeff’s previous work gave me an excellent platform from which to build the new station. One of the big aspects of that was Jeff’s ear for great Austin music and his dedication to the Austin music scene. That continues to this day on KUTX and we have Jeff to thank for setting us on this path.”
Jeff might be “retiring,” but you’ll still be getting the benefit of his good taste every Thursday night on What’s Next, where he continues to do what he does best: diving into a metric ton of new music, mixed in with musical milestones. From just-released tracks to big reissues and more, there’s no better curator than Jeff McCord. After all, he’s been doing it since he was 14.
