Either Curtis Media Group has something against music, or the company is  determined to make the commercial airwaves around here even ghastlier than they were before. Whatever the reason, Curtis has deep-sixed my two favorite commercial radio stations recently.

First it was country oldies station WQDR, 570-AM, which last month dropped its "Country Legends" format for a standup-comedy format called "Funny 570" that is quite frankly funny in name only. And now, the axe has fallen on WKIX, which used to broadcast pop oldies at 850-AM.

No more. Tune in 850-AM now, and you'll find a station called WPTF doing news-talk -- to go with Curtis' other WPTF at 680-AM, which does straight-up news. At least 850-AM will still broadcast music on the weekends, with deejays Pat Patterson and Charlie Brown. But the other five days, it's gonna be all yammering all the time.

Fortunately, the Triangle has ample college-radio options. Having a couple of quirky oldies options on the AM dial sure was a nice change-of-pace option, but nothing decent seems to last where commercial radio is concerned. It was fun while it lasted.

Well, the good news is that 570-AM is back on the air after a 10-month hiatus. The station signed back on late Wednesday afternoon with no fanfare -- the first broadcasting on that signal since last April's tornado took out its broadcast tower.

Now for the bad news: 570-AM is no longer playing country oldies. The WQDR call letters have likewise disappeared, and going to the station's "Country Legends" website now takes you to a generic page for station owner Curtis Media Group.

Now for the really bad news: The station has been rechristened "WFNL, Funny 570." And the new format is...comedy. Seriously? Apparently so. This is, um, not what I had in mind when I said I wanted 570-AM back.

Alas, another target date has come and gone -- and Raleigh's "Country Legends" oldies station has yet to return. WQDR, 570-AM, has been off the air since losing its antenna to a tornado back in April. Last month, station owner Don Curtis was saying that he expected it to be back in action by mid-December. But the latest update is that it should be sometime next month.

"They're telling me Jan. 15 now," Curtis said on Thursday afternoon. "It wound up taking a lot longer than I expected, and also costing a lot more than I thought it would. But in the end it will put out a better signal, so that's good."

If you tune in 96.1 FM on your radio in the Triangle today, you might notice a somewhat different playlist that leans toward a different chunk of classic rock than the station usually plays -- part of a "rebranding" from 96 Rock to the more generic new name, Radio 96.1. But perhaps the most notable thing about the shift is what isn't on the air at 96.1 FM anymore: deejays.

Reports indicate that the station is going jockless, although general manager Mike Hartell said that WBBB might have deejays again down the road. But for at least the next few months, there will be none. Among the on-air personalities that would leave out in the cold are Bob "The Blade" Robinson, a fixture on local rock radio for three decades.

"It blindsided me," Robinson said Monday afternoon. "Completely out of the blue. There was no word ahead of time, and that's hard to do in radio -- to keep something like that under wraps. Right now, like everyone else who's ever been fired from a radio job, I'm wondering whether or not I'll stay in the business. So who knows. In the meantime, I'm wandering the earth."

The news was greeted with lots of feedback on the 96 Rock Facebook page (plus the obligatory Bring Back 96 Rock Facebook page, which started up on Monday). The spin from station management is that this change came about as a result of listener surveys in which respondents reportedly expressed a desire for "A LOT more music, without a whole bunch of useless talk."  Maybe it's entirely coincidental, but this should also lower the station's overhead by a good bit, although Hartell said that budgetary concerns played no part in the decision.

"Less talk and more music is the national trend, and the response was overwhelming," Hartell said. "We hope to have live deejays back at some point. But for now, we're following the lead of our listeners. We'll probably re-evaluate after five or six months."

Today marks the halfway point of November -- the month that Raleigh's "Country Legends" oldies station WQDR AM was supposed to be back on the air after losing its broadcast antenna to a tornado back in April. Alas, there's still nothing but dead air at 570-AM, which will probably remain the case for at least another month.

"Mid-December is my best guess right now," says station owner Don Curtis. "We're waiting on one last piece of equipment for it, which we were supposed to have in mid-September. But we still don't, so we're still not back on the air."

Well, there's good news and bad news about Raleigh's local "Country Legends" oldies station, WQDR 570-AM, which has been off the air since a tornado took out its broadcast tower back in April. The bad news is that it probably won't be back in business until November -- but the good news is that it should return with a new, improved and more far-reaching signal. That's because station owner Curtis Media Group is going to broadcast the country-legends signal from WPTF-AM's taller antenna in Cary. Curtis got approval for that last Friday, and parts are on the way to make it happen.

Stay tuned...

Back in late May, owner Don Curtis was hoping that "Country Legends" oldies station WQDR 570-AM -- off the air since the tornadoes that struck Raleigh in April took out its broadcast tower -- might be broadcasting again before the summer ended. The latest update finds that timetable moving back a bit, to the middle of September.

"I had said I thought it would be back by Sept. 1, but now I'm thinking it will be more like Sept. 15," Curtis said on Friday. "Our engineers have been working on a new design this week. We miss that station, too. Especially the revenues."

Saturday will mark six weeks since the tornadoes hit Raleigh and tore up a bunch of real estate -- including the broadcast tower of the "Country Legends" oldies station at 570-AM. And it's still going to be another month or two before the station is back on the air.

"We're probably 30 to 60 days away," owner Don Curtis said on Friday. "It was in a swamp, so there's a lot of zoning and engineering issues to rebuilding it. We're also looking at another site that would give us more reach into Durham. But we do hope to have it up and broadcasting by Sept. 1, maybe sooner."

A summer without country oldies? I'm not sure I can handle that...

There's been a gap on the local radio waves this week: "Country Legends," the Curtis Media Group-owned country-oldies station at 570-AM, is off the air. But it wasn't victimized by a format switch. Instead, Saturday's storm took down the station's 270-foot-tall broadcast tower.

"It was about two blocks from Earp's Seafood, so the same puff of wind got our tower," says station owner Don Curtis. "It's all twisted and torn up, and it will be about a month before it gets rebuilt because it's in a swamp. It takes a long time to rebuild something in a swamp."

It's been great fun the last few months to have WKIX for pop oldies on the AM dial. Lo and behold, now there's a country equivalent to go with it. Curtis Media Group has changed the format and call letters at 570-AM from WDOX and news talk to WQDR-AM and a format called "Country Legends" -- old country hits from the 1960s through the '80s. I heard Johnny Cash on there the other day, which was mighty grand. Who would've guessed that the AM band was going to be where music went?