Calif. college kids leaned into '90s morning radio. It became a breakout hit.

It's half past noon on the second Friday in June, and most of the remaining students on the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus are loading up sedans with trash bags filled with dorm clothes. Others are strapping surfboards to their roof racks and greeting wobbly parents freshly arrived after a long drive, still massaging blood into their calves.

Another select few buzz through the heart of campus en route from the bookstore, carrying plastic-wrapped caps, gowns and sashes under their arms. Their expressions are a mix of jubilation, pensiveness and the thing you see on people's faces when they're attempting to take something in that they've taken for granted for so long.

In less than 24 hours, these students would be stepping across the threshold of the stage and setting foot off campus, emerging as alumni for the first time.

Inside the KCPR studio, the student-run campus radio station, veteran DJ Lulu David, otherwise known by her call sign Princess Lady, wrapped her tear-filled final set with Elliott Smith's cover of Big Star's "Thirteen," and Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road."

Before playing those songs, she gave shoutouts to her parents, friends and a found family of DJs at KCPR, acknowledging - like so many of her peers not only on this campus, but across the nation - the excitement, fear, trepidation and surreal nature of what's about to transpire. Only she got to do it on air.

Just after the set, David sat down and talked about what life working for the station was like. Did the long-running radio station define her time in college? "All of it," she told SFGATE. David said that she was originally hesitant to come to Cal Poly from her home in Redwood City. "I hadn't heard good things," she lamented. "I was really scared to come here. And also, I'm from the Bay - it was just a lot different."

But when KCPR came up on her initial campus tour, David recalls thinking, "'OK, I'm putting all my, all my eggs in that basket.'"

"I remember applying and they were like, 'It's really hard to do that.' I had no doubt about it. I was kind of cocky. I just knew it was going to work."

David is joined by Giselle Espinoza, aka Sugar Plum, who will be a senior next year and is the station's incoming general manager, and Felix Broach, aka Kvetchy Boy, two of her closest radio colleagues. The trio makes up three-quarters of a morning zoo-style a.m. drive time radio show called "Radio Party," which became a breakout campus hit and garnered listeners well beyond the comfortable Central Coast confines of Cal Poly.

The show was the brainchild of Broach. Born in Berkeley and raised in Piedmont, Broach said his first major influence was Kevin Klein, who was the drive time DJ for Bay Area-based Live 105 when he was in junior high and high school.

Broach became obsessed with the show and the format and followed Klein's career after he moved down to LA's KROQ and started another morning talk show called the "Klein. Ally. Show" with co-host Ally Johnson. In the summer of 2024, after his sophomore year at Cal Poly, Broach sent Klein a paragraph-long DM on his Instagram expressing his fandom and asking for an internship. To his surprise, Klein replied and told him to come down. By the time Broach arrived, Klein had forgotten all about his informal invite. But still, the young Broach managed to hang around the station that summer and eventually was taken into the fold at KROQ.

"It was just coming in every morning," he said. "But it was an incredible time, I learned so much from their producer Vanessa. 'Radio Party,' the whole segmentation, the structure, that foundation was built from that internship. That sarcasm, the way that segments play around local events and news come from something similar to how the Klein Ally show do [it] at KROQ."

"That's when we became friends, too," David said. "It's like a funny joke too, because he thought we were friends before that."

The group laughs, and it's easy to see right away how and why "Radio Party," with its big-market drive time DNA, was a formula that worked at (and then transcended beyond) a college campus radio station as streams were tracked globally and regular guests from near and far would call and DM their way into the fold. What started in the winter of 2025 soon morphed into a more human, more connected and much fresher version of the format that now itinerantly roams terrestrial radio like the last of the dinosaurs.

"I had issues looking too much at the stats," Broach said of the early moments when the show started to take off. "For me to have these little moments with someone randomly bringing it up, it feels good. It's less of trying to put this number up, it's more of like, emphasizes the community feel of it - keeps 'Radio Party' in the real world, something in front of me as I walk around."

The show was a well-choreographed mix of bits, interviews and live on-air mishaps that you'd expect from such a crew. There were hits, like when the morning crew broke down the fact that the $1 million spent by the university on a spring concert and campus security instead of allowing the annual "St. Fratty's Day" celebration to happen could've been better used to give every student free Chick-fil-A once a week for the entire school year. And, of course, misses - like a few failed '90s-style prank phone call segments, thwarted, of course, by caller ID, but not by lack of trying to make it go.

"... What's funny is usually, when the failures stack on top of one another, it creates, for, like a depth in the content that at least we get a lot of response from," Broach said. It's the connection to the listener, and each other, that made "Radio Party" a hit.

"Felix and I frequently find that we yin-yang a lot on a lot of different things," Jeremy Okmin, aka Buckbrush, the fourth in the "Radio Party" quartet, told SFGATE.

Okmin, who was raised in Santa Monica, said the friendship he and Broach formed outside the station and the spoken (and unspoken) rivalry between Broach's Bay Area and his LA, resonated on air for Cal Poly students, who are physically thrown together smack-dab between both. "Around here, it's a huge viewpoint and the point of people coming together. I think it worked out well."

With this kind of repartee, all four of them adding their points of view and backgrounds - Broach the morning zoo evangelist and group organizer, Okmin the sketch writer and the foil, David the public health major and Espinoza, the Central Valley-raised future program director who currently helps run the station's news component - they played off one another in a way that kept the station on its toes and listeners filled with "expectation and anticipation," said Patti Piburn, an associate professor of journalism at Cal Poly and the KCPR adviser.

Pilburn said this group of seniors about to graduate was a little bit different. For one, they were the first class to come out of the pandemic, when the station had shrunk down to about 11 DJs doing shows from their homes. The popularity of KCPR on campus continues to surge year over year, with more than 100 students working for the station now (even as they're about to graduate 41 seniors). She believes the success of "Radio Party" both on campus and well beyond is attributed not just to the quartet involved but to the culture that has evolved in the radio station in the time she's been there, starting with the 2013-2014 school year.

"When I was first the adviser, I was told this is an island of misfit toys," Pilburn told SFGATE. "Students who came here from other places and landed in SLO and found a kind of alternative space, whether it was love of music or wanting a little bit of culture in SLO. It's not entirely different now. We're self-described as 'Where different matters.' Now, these students are really leaning into that. We embrace diversity, we represent the queer community, anyone who feels other. We're launching Spanish-language journalism; the students have taken that motto and made it into something more meaningful."

As a result, getting a job at KCPR has also become ultracompetitive. Both Espinoza and Broach recalled not making the cut the first time they auditioned, getting denied and then coming back with a more truthful, genuine story about who they were and why they wanted to be on the air.

But once they did, a kind of notoriety followed, especially because of "Radio Party." They each admit that some of the world's outside pressures - usually ones that bypass most students - occasionally came crashing in. And part of those creeping existential fears, the four admitted, are the big things that are awaiting them imminently, beyond the four walls of the station.

Each said they are constantly reminded of the rolling disaster of an entry-level job market, the hellscape of affordability and the social gloom of a modern Dark Age, ruled by tech oligarchs disconnecting users from everyone else. Then there's the oversold guillotine blade of social media and AI dangling above all that, threatening to end it all.

In ways big and small, these forces penetrated even the seemingly innocuous "Radio Party" bubble.

"There's times when I've been doing so much of our social media stuff for us, when we're really on top of the social media and it's like going and going, saying this did this well, this did this," Broach explained. "And I'll come on the radio and I'll think so ... that mindset that comes from this other platform and medium will bleed into the on-air performance," and it just will crush my self-esteem on air for half a quarter.

"I can look at episodes and think: You're so locked in on social media and the perception of how you're doing, and, you know, the idea of an algorithm or some kind of formula to follow, [you're] not doing what you're supposed to do."

David agreed that when the group tried to feed some kind of algorithm, that's actually when the "Radio Party" lost traction. As a public health major about to depart to Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University in the fall to pursue an advanced degree in cancer epidemiology, David says that she'll continue to lean into the uncomfortable instead.

"I feel like with algorithmic content, you're fed so much of what you exactly like, forcing engagement, not having any contention with it," she said. "I like it when there's contention. I kind of want, when I listen to something, for it to piss me off ... I think it's interesting to me, it engages me in a way that like chill, whatever, content wouldn't."

The four "Radio Party" hosts did their last show this week and, like so many other students saying goodbye this month, expect to go their separate ways. But for a brief, important window of life, they will each have this silly morning show that somehow was streamed around the world. They agreed that this return to an analog morning-zoo program, in the middle of a studio surrounded by stacks of vinyl, was a bubble within a bubble, and unlike any experience they'll ever have.

Yes, they'll still be asked to embrace tech. Yes, they'll always prefer the pop sizzle of a record or the scratches on CDs. But they made a pact to support one another on and off air, not only during their experience in college, but wherever life takes them. And that, they said, can't ever be forced - or forced out.

"We always judge an episode by how good we feel after," Espinoza concluded. "We never judge by how well it does on Spotify or how many callers we got. It's just like, 'Wow, that was a good episode.' If it's bad, we say, 'Tomorrow it'll be better.' It's all about whether we had fun or not."

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