KBLX-FM

KBLX-FM is an Urban Adult Contemporary radio station that broadcasts from the San Francisco Bay Area. Broadcasting on 102.9 FM, the station is licensed to Berkeley, California, and is owned by Entercom Communications. The station has studios located in the SoMa district of San Francisco, and the transmitter is located atop the San Bruno Mountains.

Until its sale in April 2012, KBLX was owned for more than 30 years by the now-defunct Inner City Broadcasting Corporation and was better known as "The Quiet Storm" with a strong following among Bay Area listeners, especially the African American community.

History

KRE-FM and KPAT-FM

On April 29, 1949, KRE-FM signed on simulcasting KRE's programming. In 1962, the station changed their call letters to KPAT-FM. In 1973, they their call letters back to KRE-FM.

KBLX "Soft and Warm, The Quiet Storm"

In 1979, the station was sold to the New York-based Inner City Broadcasting Corporation, headed by Percy Sutton (which also owned its flagship station there, WBLS), and was relaunched as KBLX (the call letters KBLS, which would otherwise honor its sister-station relationship with WBLS, were unavailable, assigned to another station in Kansas). It was one of the first true radio stations with an adult contemporary format, hybrid with an Urban Contemporary format to focus on The Quiet Storm R&B subgenre era at the time. KBLX marketed the station as an adult contemporary format, rather than urban, in order to attract a wider audience.