Reel Big Fish will help Radio Free celebrate its rebirth.

"Find A Need And Fill It" is a credo straight out of Business 101. "Sheriff Norm" Winter applied it to Honolulu's over-saturated radio industry and created Radio Free Hawaii.

The fledgling radio station was voted one of the Top 5 in America by Rolling Stone readers before going off the air in '94, and returned as eclectic as ever on April Fool's Day, 1995.

Winter, "Deputy Dan" Siedleki and the Radio Free staff are commemorating the resurrection with a two-night party featuring Reel Big Fish at the Fast Zone this weekend.

"Reel Big Fish is a good example of a band that gets no air play anywhere else, but they're hot in the marketplace, " Winter says.

"Nobody was playing Dance Hall Crashers when we were playing them in 1991. Now MCA has picked them up. Local (non-Hawaiian) bands are also doing much better since Radio Free is on the air but it isn't (pre-arranged) station support, it's listener support."

Most contemporary radio stations go through the motions of taking listener requests, but how many people really want to hear the same three songs by Boyz of Paradize, Boyz II Men and Lorie Salvatera every other hour on the hour? Radio Free's playlist encompasses classical (Bach and Mozart) and pre-rock Big Band and jazz, as well as just about anything that could be considered "alternative."

"We play whatever people vote for. We get votes for MTV acts and we get complaints that we play too much MTV music, but the point is that we don't play only MTV music. We play whatever is hot in the marketplace at the street level as well," Winter said.

Bring on the cake

What: Radio Free Hawaii Birthday Weekend, with Reel Big Fish. Grapefruit, Broken Man and B.Y.K. also play Friday; Dread Ashanti and Ira Hayes play Saturday
When: 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday
Where: Fast Zone, 1154 Fort Street Mall
Cost: $10 at the door
Call: 296-1027

"By the time something surfaces it's already popular in the market place through word-of-mouth. Reggae was selling before KCCN-FM but you didn't hear it on the local stations.

"'Alternative' is not alternative any more, and in the last four or five months there has been a major shift in what's really considered hot music. Our chart right now is totally flooded with punk, ska and a lot of what I call lounge music."

All-request radio works both ways. Radio Free also tallies votes for artists that listeners don't want to hear.

"A lot of times they vote against stuff that they feel is being shoved down their throats by the other stations. We've sledgehammered Mariah Carey (songs) several times, and we just sledgehammered Joan Osborne," Winter says with a chuckle, adding that no matter how many votes something gets it won't be played more than once every five hours. "Some of our listeners think it's more often but it's not.

"We used to have an eight-hour rotation but we lost the kids. Kids like to hear things more often than adults so we compromised."

Conventional radio lives and dies by ratings which ad agencies use in buying commercial time. Radio Free has generally not done well in the ratings.

"I don't care what the ratings tell you, in the 18-24 age bracket we're No. 1," Winter says. "The reason we're surviving are the things that we help support - the music, the concerts - and (because) we get results. Independent retailers that don't have a lot of money to spend may come to us as a cheap place to advertise but they get a big enough response to be happy.

"Surf stores defy the agencies to advertise with us because we're so connected to the surf community. We don't get ad agency business very much, although there are exceptions because we get response."