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Linda Thompson Smith was a driving force in defining the cultural landscape of Phoenix in her dual role as DJ and music director at free-form progressive-rock radio station KDKB-FM in the ’70s.
Born Linda Kay Bentley, she was known as Linda Thompson at the time, having married Tyler Thompson, her first husband, in 1972.
The previous November, Smith had taken "the best job of my life," as she once told me — working the front desk at KDKB in Mesa, where the station had been broadcasting since August from a former Safeway building on Country Club Drive.
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In three years, she managed to work her way up from the front desk to become one of the Valley's more popular DJs and music director at a station known for breaking artists in the Phoenix market, from Buckingham Nicks to Bruce Springsteen.
And the only reason she was even in that building is because she couldn’t find a teaching job after earning a degree in education from Northern Arizona University.
As she explained years later, "When I started college, there was this huge need for teachers. By the time I got out, there wasn't. I came back to Phoenix and was having trouble finding a job. So I thought, 'Well, if I can't do this ... what else would I really like to do?'"
Linda Thompson Smith died peacefully at home in Oro Valley, a town just north of Tucson, on June 10, 2026.
She was 78 and was diagnosed with cancer 18 months before her death.
The legendary DJ was 'the best big sister anyone could have'
Her younger sister, Connie Owings, says, “It was a shock to lose her because my parents lived into their 90s. We thought we had at least 20 more years. But she'll be well remembered and she's in our hearts.”
Owings has fond memories of her sister taking her to concerts starting at the age of 12 or so.
“She was my best friend all my life and the best big sister anyone could have,” she says.
“She took me to see the Monkees, which was probably torture for her, but that’s when I was young and that’s what me and my best girlfriend loved, so she took us. She took me to see The Dave Clark Five. We saw them arrive at the airport in their limo. We also went to the airport to see Paul Revere and the Raiders.”
Smith was into music for as long as Owings can remember,
“It started with Elvis in the ’50s,” she says. “She would go to Bill's Records in Christown and buy the 45s. She was always the first on her block to know new music that was coming.”
As a teenager, Smith did some writing for "Teen" magazine.
“And she was great at it,” Owings recalls.
“She loved the music scene and she was right at the forefront. She got to see the Beatles in Las Vegas. She even had video footage from Vegas where you can actually see Paul waving out the window of the limo. She went to San Francisco to see them with her friend, and they went out to dinner with the Turtles. Things just always seemed to work out for her.”
Smith helped Owings get a job as secretary to the general manager at KDKB, where, as she says, “I saw magic happen. It was the time of our lives.”
'She was incredibly smart, but she led with her niceness'
Russ Shaw, who did comedy shows and commercials at the station as Wonderful Russ, remembers Smith as a beyond-beloved presence there.
“Honestly, Linda, was one of the nicest people ever,” he says.
“And she was incredibly smart, but she led with her niceness. I can’t imagine anyone not liking Linda. She was just so nice. And it wasn't a fake thing she was doing to get people to like her. She was just really (expletive) likable. She was so nice, people didn't even comment on how nice she was. It wasn't something like, ‘Let's all agree.’ That’d be like, ‘Let's agree gravity works.’”
In fact, he says “If someone did say they didn't like her? I wouldn't need any other information. I would know here's something wrong with them.”
Danny Zelisko started booking concerts in the Valley during KDKB's heyday. He got to know Smith through the station as a listener and a friend.
“She was so into music,” Zelisko says. “As much as anyone I’ve ever known. I would talk to her about shows that were available for me to book. She always had a really good opinion of what might work and what wouldn’t.”
She was also something of a pioneer in Phoenix radio, where female voices weren’t exactly common before KDKB brought in Smith and fellow DJ Nina Joy.
As Lee Powell, a fellow KDKB DJ who stayed close to Smith and spoke to her by phone a few days prior to her death, says, "It’s hard to imagine. But before Linda got her shift and they brought Nina in from Tucson, you just didn't hear women on the radio. But she made that big of an impression. She knew her music. She knew the Valley growing up here. And she just had a real relatability about her.”
Her adventurous spirit led to a wild hot-air balloon ride
She also had an adventurous spirit and a take-charge personality that Powell admired, once convincing him to join her in trying to broadcast live from a hot-air balloon that ended up coming in faster than expected for a landing that dragged them both across the desert.
“You could see the ground going by real fast and dirt and brush and this and that,” Powell says.
“It threw Linda to the bottom of the basket. But the first thing Linda said when we finally got out of the balloon is ‘I just ruined a brand new pair of blue jeans.’ The acid from the dry cell battery we’d taken up with us had burned holes into her jeans. But that was Linda. She was just very adventurous, very, ‘This is what we're gonna do.’”
Smith did her best to catch the acts they played in concert.
“Linda was one of those people who liked to jump in and be part of it,” Zelisko says.
“She always went to the shows, loved talking to the audience. Beyond that, she was just the coolest. Super gentle, caring, understanding. One of the nicest people you could ever meet. She made a lot of people happy and she had a great life.”
Linda Thompson Smith turned Danny Zelisko on to Dooley's
It was Smith who turned Zelisko on to Dooley’s, a Tempe club he started booking in the ‘70s.
“It was the summer of ’76,” he recalls. “Dooley’s opened around the time school went back into session. She was working at KDKB at the time and she called and said, ‘I went to this place. It’s kind of a jock place, but it’s really nice. You ought to have shows there.’”
Zelisko arranged a meeting with the owner of the club.
“I talked him into giving me a job booking it,” Zelisko says. “But it was Linda’s urging that led me to doing that. And Dooley’s became the alternative to the Celebrity Theatre, which had enjoyed an incredibly great run with KDKB.”
Zelisko said he loved to listen to her show.
“What a calm, knowledgeable, experienced, reassuring voice that with confidence showed you some really great music,” he says. “She had exquisite taste.”
Smith worked closely with program director Bill Compton, for whom Compton Terrace was named.
“They got along together so well because they were very much alike,” Zelisko says. “They both had a very zen quality. And you should have that at a radio station. You shouldn’t be a numbers person or a money person. That was an amazing time. Between Compton and Linda, they had one amazing ship they ran there.”
Zelisko sees what Smith and Compton did at KBKB as the “foundation” of the concert business that was taking shape in Phoenix at the time.
“What they put in place and their ability to promote and be able to share their enthusiasm as opposed to ‘How much are you gonna pay us for every mention?,’ it made a huge difference,” he says.
“It was more ‘We’re genuinely into this group. We want to break them.’ That’s the mentality that made the music business happen. If it wasn’t for those people at that station — especially Linda as music director, Bill as the program director, it wouldn’t have happened. It was a special time. They played everything that you could want to hear.”
KDKB was one of the happiest times in Linda Thompson Smith's life
Those were heady times for Smith and everyone involved at KDKB.
“She was my hero,” Owings says. “Musicians loved coming to Arizona because of Bill and Linda. They made magic happen. And the country followed what she reported to Billboard Magazine to break new artists. They were right at the forefront of it. It was just miraculous to see.”
That was one of the happiest times in Smith’s life, Owings says.
“She was in heaven on that one.”
Compton left the station in late 1976. Some say he was forced out; others say he quit. Whatever happened, though, it was the end of an era.
Six months after Compton left the station, Smith was one of several people KDKB fired. By that point, Compton was on the verge of launching a new station.
As Smith recalled in 2021, "Bill told me, 'Just stay home. I've just about got this station ready to go. You're gonna be my music director.'"
In June 1977, the night before Zelisko says he was supposed to sign the papers to purchase his new station, Compton was killed in a car crash.
“He died in the car crash, and everybody's lives kind of stopped,” Owings says. “It changed everything.”
Smith went to work in the promotion department at KPHO-TV, taking people on tours, a job she called a “dead-end situation.”
She also briefly worked in sales at Phoenix New Times before returning to radio as the music director at KBBC-FM, a light-rock station. When that fell through, she took a job in sales at MCA Universal Studios and worked there until 1980, when they offered her a job in California.
She decided she would rather stay in Phoenix, get her teaching credentials and focus on raising her daughters, Josie Thompson and Chelsie Davidson.
Linda Thompson Smith spent 20 years shaping young minds as a teacher
As Smith recalled in 2021, “By that time, I was ready to be a mom that had time for her kids, which, had I stayed in radio, those hours are kind of brutal for families. So I started teaching school."
She taught for 20 years at Orangewood Elementary School in Phoenix, mostly fourth grade, approaching her work there with the passion and commitment that had once defined her work at KDKB.
She choreographed school musicals, brought science and history to life in the classroom, and took her students on educational field trips across the state.
As second husband Curt Smith says, “She was, I think, a pretty significant influence on the lives of a lot of young people. Her enthusiasm and positive attitude was passed on. And she took a lot of pride in that, rightfully so.”
It was the same school she’d attended growing up in Phoenix, where the Bentley family owned a 2.5-acre property on 15th Avenue, which was a dirt road at the time, and kept multiple horses for riding around the neighborhood and exploring the surrounding desert trails.
After graduating from Washington High School as class salutatorian, Smith attended Glendale Community College and later Northern Arizona University, where she earned her B.A. in Education.
“She always had perfect grades,” Owings recalls. “At three years old, she would read to my brother, Jim. And it wasn't that she could read the book. She’d memorized it from my dad reading it to her. So she knew when to turn the page and everything. She was a hard act to follow. But I never felt like that. She always included me in everything she could.”
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'Linda was one of the most vibrant, alive people I had ever met'
Having earned her doctorate in education, Smith was managing a branch campus of Western New Mexico University when she met her second husband in 2008.
“Linda was one of the most vibrant, alive people I had ever met,” Curt Smith recalls. “There was just this boundless energy and enthusiasm. And she was a wonderful person. How do you not fall in love with somebody like that?”
The couple married in 2013 in New Mexico and moved to Tucson three years later to be closer to her family and the desert she adored.
Although she had been out of radio for nearly 50 years, her love of music never faded and she took a lot of pride in having played a role in breaking artists as iconic as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty in the Phoenix market.
“They set a high standard and it did have an impact,” Curt Smith says.
“That was before the internet, Spotify, and all the other things that commodified music. It was a time, a fleeting moment, that there was a lot of creativity and a lot of questioning of norms, and we could use some of that today.”
Although she loved to reminisce about those days when she and friends she’d made at KDKB would get together, it wasn’t something she and Curt Smith talked about in depth that often.
“But we were just going through some of the scrapbooks, and I was looking at pictures of her in the studio, cuing up records. She was really in her element.”
Smith still loved the artists they played on the station but her ongoing passion for music demanded that she do her best to stay abreast of newer acts as well.
She also loved to travel and was especially fond of Hawaii.
“She just couldn't get enough of the islands and the ocean,” Curt Smith says.
“I don't know how many times we went out whale watching. It was something that really motivated her. She had a lot of concerns about the environment and was a pretty strong advocate to all her friends and family, trying to keep people aware of things like climate change and habitat loss. The more she learned about it, the more she came to care about it.”
Her obituary reflected that concern, encouraging, in lieu of flower, a donation to the Pacific Whale Foundation (pacificwhale.org) or World Wildlife Fund (worldwildlife.org).
“I think Linda would want to be remembered as somebody who had a positive influence on everyone around her,” Curt Smith says.
“She expressed that through her love of music, her love of the environment, her love of her family and her daughters in particular. Linda was a force of nature. She was just so positive and so determined. And once she set her mind to a goal, there was just no stopping her except this final blow of cancer. I just don't know how you replace somebody like that.”
A Celebration of Life will be held from noon-3 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 3, at the Mesa Red Mountain Community Center.
Ed has covered pop music for The Republic since 2007, reviewing festivals and concerts, interviewing legends, covering the local scene and more. He did the same in Pittsburgh for more than a decade. Follow him on X and Instagram @edmasley and on Facebook as Ed Masley. Email him at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Iconic Phoenix DJ who drove the music culture of the '70s remembered
