Dusty Street, a DJ familiar to Southern Californians as one of the seminal personalities in the early days of KROQ, and one of the pioneering female voices in rock radio, period, died Saturday at age 77 in Eugene, Oregon.
With her sultry voice and deep knowledge of the music she played, Street was not just an essential personality in L.A. rock radio history. She began her career in San Francisco, DJ-ing at freeform KMPX beginning in 1967 before moving on to KSAN in 1969, where she held court for a decade. She moved on to KROQ in 1979, as the new wave movement was cresting and making that station feel like a clubhouse for a new generation. Her other stints in L.A. radio included stops at KWST and KLOS. Street eventually moved to Las Vegas and then Cleveland, from which she did her SiriusXM show on the Deep Tracks channel over the last two decades. She settled back in Oregon in 2022 as she battled health problems.
Street was heavily featured in this year’s MGM+ documentary “San Francisco Sounds: A Place In Time.” She was an inductee into the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame.
Many former colleagues took to social media to memorialize Street. Freddy Snakeskin, a fellow KROQ alumnus, called her “one of my life’s all-time favorite people” in a post. “Shattered,” wrote Tami Heide, one of the women who later followed in her wake at the station, saying “thank you for all you did for KROQ, and women radio hosts.”
Geno Michellini broke the news on Facebook. “I have been in Eugene the last two days at Dusty Street’s bedside,” he wrote late Saturday night. “The numerous afflictions that she has been so indomitably fighting these last years finally caught up to her. I am writing with a broken heart to say that Dusty left us tonight. She died peacefully, quietly and surrounded by love in a beautifully serene location overlooking the most beautiful lake you could ever want. As befitting the queen that she was. Tonight I lost one of the best friends I ever had and the world lost a radio and music legend as befitting her starring role in the ‘San Francisco Sounds’ documentary movie that just came out recently. She was all that and so much more. There will never be another Dusty Street. The queen is gone, but she’ll never be forgotten.”
Fellow KROQ DJ Richard Blade wrote, “Time is a cruel mistress. … It was Dusty who trained me to run the board at KROQ, and trying to emulate her expertise was a tough job. She brought so much of her love of music — particularly Dark Wave like Siouxsie, Bauhaus, and so many others, to the airwaves. In today’s barren terrestrial radio market, there is no one like her. I’ll so miss her voice, her laugh, her caring for animals, our trips to Hawaii together, and our visits when I’d do a gig in Cleveland – where she did her show on SiriusXM and made her home for the past decade. Your talents will not be forgotten. Fly low and avoid the radar, Dusty.”
Heide quoted a favorite line of Street’s, which she had said in an interview she once said to her ex-husband: “A good segue is better than sex.”
Although it sounds like the perfect radio nom de plume, Dusty Street was, in fact, her birth name. The Palo Alto native said that when she graduated high school in 1964, she received a draft notice, her name having been mistaken for a man’s.
Street discussed her history at length in an oral history written by Elizabeth Ohanesian as a university thesis. The DJ said she had been working in television at San Francisco State when a friend said a local “underground” radio station needed engineers. Soon enough, when one of the DJs didn’t show up, she filled out his shift. “They got all pissed because back in those days, you could say could say ‘damn’ but you couldn’t say ‘god damn’ together. We were playing ‘God Damn the Pusherman’ from Steppenwolf. So, because, you got to realize that when we started on FM radio, the only thing that was on FM radio was cooking shows, God and foreign language. Nobody had FM in their cars. There were no FM radios in cars, can you imagine that? The only way you could get FM was you had to have one of those tuners on a high- fidelity system. … We would send out these little diagrams of how you would attach a coat hanger or a piece to the back of your stereo. … It had all been very regulated AM radio.”
Years later, she got an interview with KROQ the day that Frazier Smith got fired, and landed the job. “I got a telephone call from FrazierSmith after I had been on the air for a little while and he said, ‘You know, I wanted to hate you, but you’re not bad.'” After doing weekends and then mornings, she landed a 6-10 p.m. slot. Her tenure lasted from 1979-89, with a couple of blips early on, when she briefly defected to KLOS and K-West before program director Rick Carroll brought her back in 1991.
She described early KROQ as being like “that movie ‘Airheads.’ … It was really crummy. It had this
horrible green carpet that went everywhere through it and the green carpet was because the owner ofthe radio station had carpeted his house in this green carpet and had a trade out with Carpeteria and they had some leftover carpet and used it for the radio station. So, we had to do a Carpeteria spot every half-hour and we did Carpeteria spots as long as I was there, until Infinity took over. It was pretty funny.
“The people were great; the pay was terrible,” she continued, saying she remembers take-home pay being about $800 a month after taxes. “But once again, you do it for the love. Radio for me has always been about the music. I never thought about being a ‘star’ or a great disc jockey or any of the rest of it.”
Her tastes sometimes proved surprising, for someone who had come up in the SF counterculture. “I was the queen of goth,” she told Ohanesian. “As a matter of fact, I got a gold record from Beggars Banquet record label for the entire record label rather than just a single record, which is what most people get the album for. They gave me a gold record for the entire company. I was the home of goth for a long time. If you were going to hear Bauhaus or Love and Rockets or any of that stuff — Sex Gang Children, Alien Sex Fiend — all that stuff. I love that stuff. I’m a complete gothy.”
Street did not hear much on contemporary broadcast rock radio that impressed her. She said, “What I fmd really horrible about these radio stations like Jack, they’re just segues for the sake of segueing. There’s no rhyme or reason to them. They’re put together by a computer and it’s, as far as I’m concerned, one train crash after another. It’s like, we’re going to take every genre of music and throw it together because that’s what freeform radio was. It is the weirdest mutation of what was an artform that I have ever heard.”
The testimonials continue to come in. Wrote DJ April Whitney, “To a truly amazing woman who has been my friend for the last forty-some years and I already miss her like crazy. She took me in to her heart when she had every excuse not to back in the ‘80s and we’ve been tight ever since. I love you to pieces, Street. She could have just as easily chewed me up and spit me out but instead we grew to respect each other and became life long friends. How lucky am I that life brought our roads to cross. How cool that we’ve been friends all these years. You touched my life in some unimaginable ways — thank you Street. I know that we will see each other again my friend. Until then, avoid the radar and enjoy those beautiful wings.”
Music journalist Annie Zaleski befriended Street during the latter’s years in Cleveland. “When I was writing my book on Duran Duran’s ‘Rio,’ I knew I wanted to talk to DJs and radio folks who were there as the band was coming up and breaking in America, to get a sense of how they were perceived. The world-famous KROQ of course was high on my list — and, as it so happened, I was friends with Dusty Street, who of course had played the very first Duran Duran singles in 1981 on her legendary ‘The import Show.’ She happily chatted to me about what made them special — naturally, she picked up on the beautiful parts of Simon Le Bon’s vocals — and I was thrilled to have her voice in my book.”
Continued Zaleski, “Anyone who heard Dusty’s voice even once remembered it: a smoky, jovial instrument that was welcoming and sparkled with wit and mischief. Her name was no radio pseudonym — and her radio persona was no persona. It was who she was: a passionate, open-minded music fan who wanted to share her new discoveries and old favorites with listeners. She was determined to do this even as radio playlists became narrower — her Sirius Deep Tracks playlists especially had plenty of Dusty sprinkled in. … Dusty also had amazing ears. Yes, she was one of the first DJs in America to play Duran Duran — but she also broke bands like Depeche Mode and AC/DC, and loved Billy Idol. … Dusty was the opposite of a gatekeeper: She certainly had no problem telling you when she didn’t like something — but she also encouraged you to give things a chance.”
In Street’s interview with Ohanesian, she cited her insistence on having a hand in picking the songs that were played on her shift as a reason for her exit from KROQ, saying that number gradually went down from five personal picks per hour to just one during her tenure… and then, in the years that followed, just one per shift. “I wasn’t a complete freak,” she said. “I gotta give people what they want to hear. You want to hear Duran Duran, Depeche Mode and U2, I’m going to play that… But I’m going to interject it with some of the other stuff I want you to hear like the Bronski Beat or Flesh for Lulu or whatever else it is that I happen to pull out of my hat. … It has a name in the business, it’s called the ‘thread of the familiar.’ … (But) you know how you hear the same records over and over and over again ad nauseum? To me that’s the ‘threat of the familiar.’ But, you know, those days are long gone and they will never return.”
She continued, “I don’t know of any disc jockey that’s becoming as famous as we were at KROQ on the air today,” she said. “You have your Howard Stem, of course, and you have your Rick Dees and Ryan Seacrest, but, trust me, if Ryan Seacrest weren’t on ‘American Idol’ nobody would know who he was outside of Los Angeles. It absolutely is not the personality. It is the music, but then you have to take it another step further and the reason why it was the music that was popular is because we were picking the music.”
