On its 30th anniversary, why radio station 102.3 BXR still sounds like Columbia to me

Long before I knew really anything about Columbia — how to order at Booches; the curve of my favorite MKT trailheads; that I would attend the University of Missouri for graduate school and stick for 16 years and counting — I knew about 102.3 FM BXR.

The station will celebrate its 30th anniversary next Sunday evening with a Grace Potter/The Cactus Blossoms double bill at Rose Park. It seems like BXR has always been here — in Columbia, and for me — but history tells a more faithful tale.

Moving to Missouri the first time from Arizona — near Springfield, as an 18-year-old college freshman — I depended on the kindness of friends and their families, taking me in over long weekends, celebrating minor holidays, ferrying me to airports in St. Louis or Kansas City so I could celebrate the major ones with my family.

Several called mid-Missouri home; one, like some human antennae, knew the exact highway mile-marker where BXR began coming in reliably through his car stereo.

First he raved about the station to me, then he turned the dial. The hype and the music both landed.

Being the early 2000s, BXR played our favorite artists, what old-school radio programmers might have termed adult alternative, with some alternative rock mingled in. BXR also played our favorite artists' favorite artists, the next layer of influence I was forever meaning to check out and now had hand-delivered to me.

BXR's sensibility immediately felt familiar, bearing resemblance to my favorite station growing up east of Phoenix. Moving to Columbia in 2007, the connective tissue only became clearer.

As a high-schooler, I set aside my Sunday nights for appointment radio. I remember flipping the pages of music magazines or sinking Nerf three-pointers while my favorite Phoenix frequency switched from already excellent programming to an hour-long block of British rock.

The show played household names we already knew through the second British Invasion of the '90s, and new-to-me acts that sent me straight to a bedside notebook, scribbling band names for future reference.

Settling into Columbia and tuning those first years to BXR, I found shows with similar purpose and philosophy. Each Sunday morning, Tony Barbis and his Acoustic Sunrise program display a thoughtful touch, a willingness to trace the guitar strings tethering generations of musicians.

Later, evening shows like The B-Side furthered this ideal: radio doesn't just exist to play the hits, but to show off music at its deepest and widest.

And each Thanksgiving, the station's B to X tradition — playing through its archives alphabetically, one song at a time — ensures safe and engaged passage down Highway 70 toward a St. Louis gathering with one side of my family or a flight to Arizona to see the other. The music changes, but the song remains the same.

If BXR deserves any criticism, perhaps the station's programming still relies too much on the songs soundtracking those early drives to mid-Missouri. You might hear Blues Traveler or Indigo Girls a little too regularly at 102.3 on the FM dial. But I love knowing there is still a station in Columbia that plays "Closer to Fine" and that, through proximity, shows how that song inspired and remains in conversation with music being released in 2023.

To live in Columbia for 16 years inevitably means meeting the voices that seal a treasured song. Now BXR personalities past and present — the likes of Simon Rose, Spencer Thompson, Mo Louis, Leslie Scott, Emily Larkin, Hillary Gordon and Nick Snyder — are not just people I hear on-air, but people I encounter at shows, around the True/False Film Fest, while on runs around my neighborhood. They aren't just DJs or former DJs to me, but people I catch up with on social media, people I count among my neighbors.

This presence, and the way it evolves, matters. Today, the act of taking in music seemingly experiences revolutions per minute, and can be almost effortlessly divorced from physical community. Listening options abound, many of them valid and satisfying.

But there's something about knowing the voices in your car, about struggling to guess what song comes next, about smiling at a moment of surprise, familiar or otherwise. The good but wide taste BXR still exercises drives home the human element of music-making. And it keeps the station sounding like Columbia — or, at least, a key facet of our city — to me.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: 30 years in, why radio station 102.3 BXR still sounds like Columbia