Dustine "Dusty" Frances Street (October 19, 1946 – October 21, 2023) was an American disc jockey. As one of the first women to work on-air in FM radio on the West Coast, she was associated with station

KROQ KROQ-FM (106.7 MHz) is a commercial radio station licensed to Pasadena, California, serving Greater Los Angeles. Owned by Audacy, Inc., it broadcasts an alternative rock format known as "The World Famous KROQ" (pronounced "kay-rock"). The sta ...

in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and was inducted into the

Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame The 'California Historical Radio Society'' (CHRS) is a non-profit organization centered on the history of radio and radio broadcasting, including related technologies such as vintage TV, amateur radio and HiFi. The focus is on the history of earl ...

in 2015.

Early life and education

Street was born in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

, the daughter of Emerson Street, a journalist and labor organizer, and Mildred Ruth Sutherland Street, a journalist. She graduated from Cubberley High School in 1964; she attended but did not graduate from

San Francisco State College San Francisco State University (San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a public research university in San Francisco, California, United States. It was established in 1899 as the San Francisco State Normal School and is part of the Califor ...

.Ohanesian, Elizabeth
"Modern ROQ: The Oral Histories of Former KROQ DJs Dusty Street and 'Swedish' Egil Aalvik"
(2007), master's thesis, California State University, Northridge.

Career

Street began her radio career in San Francisco, where she worked with Tom Donahue at

KMPX KFAA-TV (channel 29) is an independent television station licensed to Decatur, Texas, United States, serving the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. It is owned by Tegna Inc. alongside ABC affiliate WFAA (channel 8). The two stations are based at ...

in the late 1960s and at KSAN from 1969 to 1979. She worked at KROQ in Los Angeles from 1979 to 1989, with a year away at other stations in the city. She was credited with being one of the first women DJs on West Coast radio and with introducing several major artists and genres to American commercial radio, including

Billy Idol William Michael Albert Broad (born 30 November 1955), known professionally as Billy Idol, is an English singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. Idol achieved fame in the 1970s on the London punk rock scene as the lead singer of Generation X ...

and

Siouxsie and the Banshees Siouxsie and the Banshees ( ) were a British Rock music, rock band formed in London in 1976 by vocalist Siouxsie Sioux and bass guitarist Steven Severin. Post-punk pioneers, they were widely influential, both over their contemporaries and later ...

. "Nobody in the country was playing what we were playing when we started," she recalled, in an oral history interview about her time at KROQ, conducted by Liz Ohanesian in 2007. "It was all about the freedom. It was never about the money, it was never about the acclaim, it was all about the freedom." She was known for her sign-off slogan, "Fly low and avoid the radar." From 2002 to 2022, Street hosted on

Deep Tracks Deep Tracks is a Sirius XM Radio channel featuring lesser-known classic rock music selections such as album tracks, one-hit wonders, concert recordings, "forgotten 45s" and "B-side" tracks created by George Taylor Morris. Carl Kranz is Deep ...

and Classic Vinyl, channels on

Sirius XM Sirius XM Holdings Inc. is an American broadcasting corporation headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, that provides satellite radio and online radio services operating in the United States. The company was formed by the 2008 merge ...

, from her home in Cleveland. She and her longtime colleague

Raechel Donahue Raechel Donahue is a rock radio pioneer generally associated with her husband Tom Donahue (DJ), Tom Donahue, who died in 1975. She was the original entertainment reporter for CNN, briefly served as VJ for the short-lived Cable Music Channel and a l ...

were part of the Moonlight Groove Highway radio project of the

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (RRHOF), also simply referred to as the Rock Hall, is a museum and hall of fame located in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, United States, on the shore of Lake Erie. The museum documents the history of rock music and the ...

in 2004, and part of

NPR National Public Radio (NPR) is an American public broadcasting organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It serves as a national Radio syndication, syndicator to a network of more ...

's Airplay documentary project in 2011. She also had a podcast, the ''Fly Low Show''. In 2023, she appeared in the documentary ''San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time''. She was inducted into the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame in 2015.

Personal life

Street died in 2023, at the age of 77, in

Eugene, Oregon Eugene ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Lane County, Oregon, United States. It is located at the southern end of the Willamette Valley, near the confluence of the McKenzie River (Oregon), McKenzie and Willamette River, Willamette rivers, ...

References

External links

A 2023 interview with Dusty Street
from the Jake Feinberg Show, on YouTube {{DEFAULTSORT:Street, Dusty 1946 births 2023 deaths American radio DJs People from Palo Alto, California American women radio personalities