It’s hard to imagine Carbondale without Wick Moses’s impact. That’s the theme KDNK’s Luke Nestler keeps returning to this week when reflecting on the passing of Moses.
Nestler has been a DJ at KDNK since 1989—just six years after our founding—and was on-staff from 2004 to 2019, when he retired and handed the music director reins over to Cody Lee.
Wick leaves behind "a major legacy," says Nestler, having been involved in getting both Mountain Fair and KDNK off the ground.
Moses enrolled at Colorado Rocky Mountain School in 1963 as a sophomore. He graduated from CRMS in 1966, then went to Denver University, returning to CRMS in 1970 to teach for two years.
In 1972 he opened Main Street Music in Carbondale, later expanding to Aspen. The Carbondale shop closed its doors in 1980.
In 1983, Lee Swidler hired Moses and Pat Noel as co-managers of Carbondale’s soon-to-be first community radio station—KDNK. Here’s Moses talking about some of the early challenges with KDNK’s broadcasting equipment:
One of the other really funny things that happened was the original antennas that we had, the engineers said, oh, these are gonna work great. And you know, we got them in, put 'em up on the tower out here, on top of the building.
We had quite an episode doing that as I recall. It turned out that these antennas were designed basically to work in the desert, and anytime they got moisture on them, they reflected back power, which is what is called VSWR, voltage standing ratio, etc.
And so what happened was whenever it would start to snow, which it did quite a bit that year, or rain, the transmitter would start to go bonkers.
After a while I arrived at this clever solution of putting garbage bags over them. So every time the weather would start to get bad, I would climb up the tower with these garbage bags, and put them over the antenna elements to try and keep the moisture off of them, which was incredibly klugy.
And it actually sort of worked for a while until the wind came up and the garbage bags ripped. And I can remember being up there when there was a thunderstorm coming in.
That was really exciting too, because of course the tower is one of the most prominent things in Carbondale. And since I already had curly hair, I didn't want to get any curlier than it already was.Wick Moses
Moses told the Sopris Sun that 1967 was the last summer he spent back on the east coast, and he remained in the Roaring Fork Valley otherwise, with the exception of his time at DU and four years pursuing "love and money" in Denver from 1988 until1992.
Uncle Wickster/Uncle Wicked hosted a jazz show (Wicked Jazz) and worked in underwriting, production and engineering at KDNK until retiring in 2012.
In recent years, he was known to live a somewhat solitary existence—it’s said he preferred the company of cats.
This reporter's first interactions with Moses were at Independence Run and Hike, site of my first job in the Roaring Fork Valley. Our chats mostly consisted of deconstructing human romantic relationships—I was going through a painful breakup at the time with the person I’d moved here with in 2015—and talking audio equipment. Though Moses loved high-fidelity audio and reportedly employed a lengthy record-cleansing ritual before playing anything from his vinyl collection—which you were not allowed to touch—he was no luddite. He talked with me at length about the exceptional audio quality he was getting using various internet streaming services through a Digital to Analog converter (or DAC) into his stereo system.
Moses described KDNK’s first transmissions as a high unlike any other:
I think the single most exciting event with the station was when we got all the equipment in and started playing with it, and one night we fired up the transmitter. I think it was about a week and a half or so before we went on the air, and we put a test tone out.
Because of course we couldn't get on and talk, and it was actually somewhat illegal that we were doing this test-tone business. But we got on and I can remember calling up people I knew in Glenwood and up the valley and it was like, "Did you hear it?" And they'd tune their radios down and they'd come back and say, "Yeah. Oh, oh, wow!"
The little did we know, of course, that we were putting out a mono test tone, which of course had a great deal of carrying power. So when we actually started broadcasting with a stereo signal, it wasn't quite the same intensity.
But I can remember that night I got home—and I lived halfway between Carbondale and Redstone at the time—and I was walking my dogs along my dirt road, and I can just remember having this incredibly high feeling of just like, "Wow, I'm actually in the air! I mean, I can, you know, I'm, I'm there!"
You know, it's like, "Woah." You know, in the, in the ether as it were. It was really a very, extremely exhilarating day.Wick Moses
Wishing Wick Moses well out there in the ether. For KDNK News, I’m Morgan Neely.
KDNK’s DJs have been paying tribute to Wick Moses during their shows over the last week. You can still hear those by going to KDNK.org, hovering over the ‘Music’ tab, and clicking ‘Listen to Shows You Missed.’
Tune into KDNK at noon on Tuesday, March 7th, for a half-hour segment devoted to Moses during Luke Nestler’s show. A full obituary is in this week’s Sopris Sun, which hit newsstands Thursday morning.
