In 1992, the Red Hot Chili Peppers headlined Lollapalooza. Tori Amos and Rage Against the Machine released debut albums, and Nirvana's Nevermind displaced Michael Jackson from the top of the pop charts.

In Cleveland, what had been Power 108, a Top 40 pop station, launched into a 24-hour continuous loop of R.E.M.'s It's the End of the World as We Know It.

It was the beginning of The End.

Top 40 pop was out. Replacing it was a myriad of groups with weird names and a new brand of angst. In the next few years, the station would bring to the Cleveland area the suddenly burgeoning alternative genre, making it a point to give air time to both national acts and local bands.

"They were cool about playing new stuff and especially helping out local bands," says Katie Suzelis, a Kent State freshman mathematics major. "One of the best things was that they kept everyone so well informed of concert information and stuff like that."

A trip to the WSTB office wouldn't be complete without reading the notes. One stuck to a stack of water bottles, announces: "We need more cups for our wonderful drinking experience. Thanks!"

Another note, on the phone-fax combination, warns against taking collect calls.

"We had these guys at prisons that would call us collect because they couldn't make actual phone calls," says Program Director Matt Fredmonsky, a senior at Streetsboro High School. "You'd hear, 'You have a collect call from: Play Acid Bath or you're gonna die.' We'd go, 'This goes out to our friends who are currently incarcerated.'"

That was in the V-Rock days, when 88.9 played heavy metal. V-Rock was born in 1991, over pancakes - extra butter, no syrup - Long says.

"In 1989, pop music really began to splinter," he says. "Prior to that time, you could pick up the Billboard Hot 100 and play it. And almost every song fit."

Urban sound. Adult contemporary. Alternative. Heavy metal. As the music became more segmented, the station's then-pop format was threatened.

Long's program manager and operations director called him into a breakfast meeting. They wanted to change to a heavy metal format. Long, impressed by the preparation they had put into the potential change, gave them the go-ahead, as long as things stayed clean and decent.

The original title, Venom Rock, was scaled back to V-Rock. Long gave it three months. It lasted eight years.

With a name like "alternative," it would stand to figure the music is a little hazy - both in terms of genre and audience.

"The alternative format is a slippery beast," says Ben Whaley, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Kent State. "Almost by definition, if something is alternative it cannot be widely popular. This is counter to the commercial aims of radio or any business. Only college radio seems able to pull off this trick of riding the edge of the wave, and they are not hampered by financial pressures."

But, led by an initial explosion in the early 1990s of flannel-clad grunge rock, the alternative genre seemed to be the "in" music of the decade.

The numbers indicate otherwise. According to Arbitron statistics, urban music has always had a larger radio audience than alternative music, with more than twice the listeners as the modern rock format for much of the '90s.

But Long says Arbitron numbers miss a large part of the alternative audience - younger listeners.

"The way audiences are measured with Arbitron is they send you the little diaries, and you fill them out," he says. "Well, high school and college kids don't usually send those in because they lose them directly. And so as a result, it looks like, 'Gosh, this station doesn't have a big audience. All it has is an older demographic.' And this is one of the problems consistently. Arbitron skews to an older demographic because they're the responsible people who mail in the books."

Stations that appeal to a younger audience, Long says, don't do well unless they also appeal to an older demographic. Alternative does that, he says, so 107.9 had some good numbers, but they were not reflective of its true audience size.

But Whaley says audience size isn't the only factor in the success of a radio station.

"Any market can only support a limited number of formats," he says. "Audience numbers for any size have to be of sufficient size to be attractive to advertisers.

"Audience isn't just defined by size but by things like disposable income. The folks that own and run WENZ just didn't find those numbers attractive."

Beyond market share is the slow decline the genre has taken nationally since Arbitron recorded a high in winter 1996.