WXKS-FM (107.9 FM), branded as Kiss 108, is a commercial top 40/CHR radio station licensed to serve Medford, Massachusetts, and covering Greater Boston. Owned by iHeartMedia, the WXKS-FM studios are in Medford and the transmitter sits atop the Prudential Tower in Downtown Boston. History The station first went on the air September 1, 1960, as WHIL-FM, a simulcast of sister station WHIL (now WKOX), and broadcasting its own programming after sunset when WHIL signed off. For much of the 1960s, WHIL and WHIL-FM were country music stations, but in late 1972, both stations switched to beautiful music as WWEL and WWEL-FM ("Well"). The calls refer to Wellington Square in Medford, where the station studios were located. Despite moving the FM transmitter to the top of the Prudential Tower in 1972, WWEL-FM was not very successful as a beautiful-music format. In 1978, WWEL-FM broadcast the night games of the Boston Red Sox as their flagship station (WITS, now WMEX) delivered a poor night signal in much of Metro Boston. The stations were sold to Heftel Communications, operated by Cecil Heftel, in early 1979. Heftel changed the call letters to WXKS, adopted "Kiss 108" as an identity, and changed to a disco format in January 1979. The first song played under this new format was “At Midnight” by T-Connection. Under Heftel, the station soared to near the top of the Arbitron ratings, and forced WBOS (which had been first in Boston with a full-time disco format and had a short period of huge success with it) out of the format in early 1980. Sunny Joe White, a young programmer (who had previously programmed WILD in Boston) came aboard at "Kiss 108" upon its shift to disco and had much to do with the station's early success. At the end of 1979, WXKS' AM station dropped disco to adopt an adult standards format, while WXKS-FM slowly evolved into urban contemporary when disco's popularity crashed. By the end of 1981 and into early 1982, the station evolved into a Top 40/CHR with a heavy rhythmic/R&B/dance direction under the guidance of White, and in turn, became one of the most influential Top 40 stations in the nation, in part due to their reputation for breaking songs that did not fit the traditional Top 40/CHR model, and given that Boston lacked an urban contemporary FM outlet during this period (since WILD was an AM daytimer), it