97.1 The Eagle Rocks announced itself back into existence with a Megadeth track and four words on the air: "97.1 The Eagle Rocks Again." That relaunch, on April 29, 2024, ended an eighteen-month experiment that had briefly turned one of Dallas-Fort Worth's most storied frequencies into a talk station, and it did it with endorsements from Metallica's James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich waiting in the wings.
A Frequency That Has Changed Its Mind Five Times
The station signed on June 7, 1959 as KFJZ-FM, playing standards, jazz and classical music as the simulcast partner of an AM sister station, according to its documented broadcast history. It became KWXI with an easy listening format in 1969, reverted to KFJZ-FM in 1976, then took the KEGL call sign in 1981 and launched as a rock and Top 40 hybrid called Eagle 97. From there the format kept moving: active rock through the 90s, adult contemporary as Sunny 97.1 in 2004, Spanish-language oldies as La Preciosa in 2005, then back to rock as The Eagle from 2007 until 2022.
Eighteen Months as a Talk Station, Then a Return
In October 2022, iHeartMedia pulled the rock format and relaunched the frequency as 97.1 The Freak, a hot talk and sports format built around veteran Dallas host Mike Rhyner coming out of retirement. According to coverage of the station's return to rock, the talk experiment never found its audience, and iHeartMedia pulled the plug after roughly a year and a half. The station came back on April 29, 2024 with a playlist built around AC/DC, Foo Fighters, Pantera and Guns N' Roses, and an on-air announcer who described the years without a classic rock outlet in Dallas as a "sonic vacuum" in the market.
A City That Had Been Without One
What made the relaunch notable wasn't just the format flip itself but the gap it filled. Dallas-Fort Worth, a market big enough to support dozens of formats, had gone without a dedicated classic rock station for nearly two years, and the station's return leaned into that absence directly rather than treating it as a routine programming change. The station carries the legacy of on-air names like Kidd Kraddick, Russ Martin, and Lex & Terry, voices that built the Eagle brand across its earlier rock years before the frequency wandered through easy listening, Spanish oldies and talk radio and eventually found its way back.
Five format changes and one AM simulcast later, 97.1 The Eagle Rocks is back to doing what the frequency did best in the first place, playing the kind of rock a Dallas crowd apparently never stopped wanting.