By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, December 2011
In early December 2011, longtime LA classic-rock DJ Jim Ladd — who had been unceremoniously dumped from KLOS 95.5 earlier in the year and then given a farewell show by KFI AM 640 — landed a nightly slot on SiriusXM’s Deep Tracks (Channel 27) starting in January 2012. The original FishbowlLA framing was admiring: Ladd was a brand name with a substantial national following, and his free-form-radio register had a natural home in the satellite-radio ecosystem.
Then
Jim Ladd’s LA-radio career stretched back to the late 1960s. His free-form classic-rock register — substantively built around DJ-curated playlists rather than programmer-imposed rotation — had been one of the most-cited examples of the kind of curatorial AM-and-FM radio that the post-1990s consolidation of American radio had systematically eliminated. His KLOS run had been the most recent significant terrestrial-radio anchor; his departure from KLOS in 2011 had been part of the broader Cumulus-era consolidation of the station’s programming.
The KFI farewell show — afforded to Ladd by AM 640’s management after the KLOS exit — had been one of the kinder professional gestures in LA-radio of that period. The cross-station courtesy was structurally unusual: the major LA-radio operators were not generally in the business of giving each other’s exiting talent on-air sendoffs.
SiriusXM’s Deep Tracks channel was, in late 2011, one of the more substantive classic-rock-deep-cut audio properties on the satellite-radio platform. The channel had been programmed around the kind of album-rock-and-classic-rock material that Ladd’s free-form register naturally fit; the channel’s broader subscriber base included the demographic of music-history-curious listeners that Ladd had been serving across decades of LA-radio work.
The original FishbowlLA framing — by Richard Horgan — was warm. The piece treated the move as a substantive late-career landing for one of LA-radio’s most distinctive on-air voices.
Now
Jim Ladd continued at SiriusXM for years after the 2011 landing. He died in December 2023 at 75. His Deep Tracks tenure was substantial — running across more than a decade — and ended up being one of the longer late-career runs of any LA-radio-trained DJ on the satellite-radio platform. The Tom Petty connection — Petty had been a longtime Jim Ladd advocate and his 2002 album The Last DJ was substantively about Ladd’s free-form-radio register — continued to be one of the most-cited cultural acknowledgments of Ladd’s career.
KLOS 95.5 has continued operating under Cumulus Media ownership. The station’s classic-rock programming has continued to be one of the LA-region’s anchor rock-format outlets. The free-form-DJ register that Ladd had embodied has not been substantially reconstructed at the station; the broader category of free-form curatorial American FM radio has continued to be effectively absent from major-market terrestrial radio.
KFI AM 640 has continued under iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel) ownership across the same interval. The 2011 farewell-show gesture that the original FBLA piece celebrated reads now as a small documented moment of inter-station LA-radio professional courtesy that the broader consolidation has made progressively rarer.
The 2011 piece reads now as one of the small documented transitions in LA-radio’s broader free-form-DJ-to-satellite-platform migration. Ladd’s death in 2023 produced substantial subsequent obituary coverage; his SiriusXM tenure is now part of his broader career record as one of the foundational figures in American free-form rock radio.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.