Houston, we have a problem

“Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit's dead, there's something wrong”

With the uncanny accuracy of a latter day Nostradamus, more than 40 years ago David Bowie predicted current events in Enid. There is something very wrong indeed: The Rocket is lost in space and its circuits are dead. KEIF 104.7, our local classic rock radio station, is no longer broadcasting and its signal has been forever banished to the cold, heartless silence of outer space.

The reasons for its demise are many and well documented by the Enid News and Eagle. 

The newspaper recounts the long history of infractions committed by the ownership of the station and I am sure the rescission of their license was carefully considered by the FCC and unfortunately unavoidable. As for me, I don’t give a feather or a flying fig for the laws and regulations that led to The Rocket’s demise. All I know is a valuable musical resource is no longer available in Enid, and our community is the poorer for it.

Counter to the current corporate radio playlists, The Rocket played a wide ranging variety of music, albeit within the classic rock format. KRXO 107.7, the major classic rock station in Oklahoma, seems limited to the same one, two, or three thousand predictable warhorses of the 1970s and 1980s, concentrating on mainstream rock radio hits. KEIF often played somewhat lesser known tracks by those same stars and occasionally mixed in artists that lamestream radio ignores. The day before the axe fell, I heard them play Robert Palmer. Not Addicted to Love or Bad Case of Loving You (written by Altus native Moon Martin), but one of Lowell George’s best compositions, Sailing Shoes, segueing into the Palmer penned Hey, Julia, seamlessly followed by the Allen Toussaint classic Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley. It was nine and a half minutes of radio rapture cranked up to eleven.

To incompletely quote Sir Elton John,

“And I think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find”

a station as much fun to listen to as the late, great KEIF 104.7, The Rocket.

Not to mention that we will probably never hear a Gospel weather forecast ever again.