One Job At One Station Not Enough For KENZ And KAEP's Bushman

Kari Bushman is living out her rock'n'roll dream twice over. The Salt Lake City native holds the MD and midday slots at two of Citadel's modern rockers: KENZ (the End) Salt Lake City and KAEP (the Peak) Spokane, Wash.

She got there after doing P/T work on Salt Lake modern rival KXRK. KENZ PD Bruce Jones told his former MD Dom Casual, who had become KAEP PD, to listen to Bushman's show. Casual liked her, so she spent the past year as KAEP's MD/midday host until KENZ had an MD/midday opening.

Her new gig(s) started the same way, through Jones and Casual's networking. Jones pitched Bushman for the KENZ MD/midday slot. When Casual told Bushman, she was torn. "In talking to Dom, I said, 'I wish there were a way I could be two places at once.' He said, 'Well, we probably could do that.' " Jones and Casual "know how each other work and work in the same formats," Bushman says. "That's what made this such a successful situation. Dom and Bruce are friends."

So now she is hosting two midday shows and doing two music meetings every week. So far, she's loving it. "I graduated from college in '98, and now I'm doing two stations," she says.

"I expected to be a lot more overwhelmed than I am," she says. Her biggest problem so far is keeping the frequencies?which are 107.5 (KENZ) and 105.7 (KAEP)?straight. "The biggest thing on my side in this situation is the time zone difference," says Bushman. "I will do my show here in Salt Lake and get off the air and do all the office stuff before 5 o'clock." That's when she spends up to an hour in the production studio cutting her KAEP tracks for the next day's midday shift. By the time Casual gets her breaks, it's only 5 his time, and he can review the shift before he leaves. "He'll call me at home, and again the time difference is on my side. I can come in the office at 9 [the next morning] and rerecord it, and it's only 8 o'clock there. So he gets it in plenty of time."

Given the breadth of stations that can be called modern these days, KENZ and KAEP "are very similar, and that's one of the reasons that this works so well," Bushman says. "The core artists are the same. We play the Dave Matthews Band, Counting Crows, U2, Moby, and Lenny Kravitz, but the End tends to skew a little bit more adult, whereas the Peak is a little bit younger demo. We're still not into the hard stuff, but the bands that are a little more edgy I would recommend to Spokane.

"Salt Lake has a great alternative heritage," she says. "I grew up [here] listening to alternative, whereas in Spokane, until the Peak came along five years ago, they never had an alternative station. They're a very rock market, meaning people there still live and breathe Pearl Jam and Nirvana."

Here's a sample hour on KENZ: Red Hot Chili