Goodbye, HFS

Kanishka: It must have been 1993 or 1994. On a Sunday night, HFS was to broadcast Pearl Jam live from Atlanta. Being a school night, I had beg and plead with my parents to be allowed to stay up and listen to the show. They were none to happy, but this was like the most important concert of my lifetime and I just had to listen to it. I remember staying up until 1 a.m., hearing live versions of "Go" and "Porch" for the first time. Perched over my crappy double tape deck, I recorded every minute of the show and carried those tapes with me every day on the way to school, listening to them on the bus or between classes. That was also the night I first saw the video for "Longview" on MTV's 120 Minutes -- unrelated, I know, but deeply connected in my mind. I think HFS started going downhill around the same time MTV stopped playing music, and listening to that decline has been sad... but I'll always remember nights like that one, when I could listen to a live rock concert from my suburban bedroom.

Catherine: I can’t say that I’m too sad to see HFS go -– I’d thought in the past few years that it’d turned into a bastion of mediocrity instead of the pioneering alt-rock station that I grew up with, happily playing terrible post-grunge and rap-metal music. Not to mention the fact that the DJs, who had once been personable and quirkily witty, had been replaced with bland, obnoxious frat-boy types. But I’ll still hold onto memories of HFS introducing me to the singles of bands like Radiohead, Pavement, Jeff Buckley –- artists that came to mean a lot to me as the years went on. I can only hope that another radio station will be able to fill the void of "decent alternative station" so that all the 15 year-olds stuck out in suburbia, like I once was, can be exposed to music they wouldn’t hear otherwise.

Hemal: I was just starting to move away from the teen pop genre, this must have been in 1991 or '92, around 7th grade, and looking for something more in the music I was listening to. Soon after that, I started making old school mix tapes, taping songs off the radio and I listened to HFS for hours and hours on end, waiting to record certain songs and I was just totally happy.

I've got these old tapes now with weird starts and stops, and they also have the voices of the old DJs on there, introducing songs, so just rambling on about something. I'd listen to Catherine and Aq every morning before high school, and then I'd skip gym, sneak into a friend's car, and spend the entire period listening to HFS.

No more classic HFS, but thank god for John in the Morning on KEXP.

Amadie: My first HFStival was in 1992, the last year it was held at the Prince George's Equestrian Center in Upper Marlboro. Traffic heading out was so bad that we eventually parked on the side of the highway and walked the last half-mile or so to the center. We sat on hay bales, and hoses in the back cooled off the concertgoers. The lineup included such acts as Too Much Joy (to this day, still one of my favorites), Charlatans UK, and Soup Dragons (capped off by a guy bungee jumping from a hot-air balloon over the crowd). The next year, it moved to RFK and featured X, Iggy Pop, Matthew Sweet, INXS, and Stereo MCs. The most amazing thing about the HFStivals is that they brought together alternative legends like X, Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop, Blondie, and the Violent Femmes with bands just coming on the scene.

Zoe: When I was in high school I only listened to HFS. It was the best radio station in the area, and one of the few that came in clearly in Southern Maryland. My fondest memories of HFS are, of course, the HFStivals I attended in high school and the first years of college; however, securing tickets to the HFStival was always an adventure. During my senior year of high school, my friends and I drove to the mall in Waldorf, Md., at 4 a.m. to camp out for tickets.

Unfortunately, the security officers at the mall had changed their policy and they were not allowing people to camp outside the Hecht's until the ticket counter opened. We waited in the mall parking lot for about 30 minutes until mall security kicked us out. We went to the strip mall across the street and napped for another couple of hours. Then we decided we were hungry and we went to the Denny's down the road. We drank coffee pot after coffee pot there counting down the hours until we could return to the mall to get our tickets. When we finally got back to the mall all super caffeined up, we saw hundreds upon hundreds of people lined up at the road next to the large mall parking lot. The mall security officers and Charles County sheriffs deputies were not allowing people into the parking lot until a specific time. My friends and I weren't willing to risk not getting tickets so about five minutes before the designated time, we made a run for it. As soon as we started running, however, hundreds of other people started running too. My friends and I were split up -- some of us were in the front of the crowd, while others, including myself, were near the back. (What can I say? I'm not a fast runner!) Those of us near the back of the crowd passed our money up to the friends in the front and amazingly, we all got tickets to the show. Sure, we could have purchased scalped tickets at the entrance to the HFStival, but that wouldn't have been nearly as exciting.