When news broke that the region’s most famous music festival would be rising from the dead this month, it was greeted with jubilation by a generation of fans who saw some of the biggest names in alternative rock during its heyday, decades ago. But perhaps no one is looking forward to the return of the HFStival more than Crownsville resident Bob Waugh, pictured above.

After years in commercial radio, Waugh joined 99.1 FM WHFS in 1991, when the beloved station was broadcast to a cult-like following throughout the Mid-Atlantic. It’s been said that “HFS,” as it was colloquially known, was the first to play progressive bands like The Cure and R.E.M. on local airwaves, and at the time of Waugh’s arrival, they’d also launched an all-day concert in Fairfax, Virginia. In 1992, it moved to a racetrack in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, and was rebranded the HFStival. The rest is music history.

In Upper Marlboro, “It was a clusterfuck, because the access roads weren’t adequate and a lot of people couldn’t get in,” recalls Waugh, who eventually became the station’s program director. “After it was over, these guys came to us and they said, ‘You ought to think about moving this to RFK Stadium.’ And we were hesitant about that, because it held 55,000 people.”

The next year, in Washington, D.C., Waugh convinced INXS to headline, and the festival sold out in a matter of days. Over time, a single stage grew into several, with the station promoting “17 bands for 17 bucks.”

Most HFStivals were held at RFK, but other venues like M&T Bank Stadium were used occasionally, always with legendary lineups that included the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, and Baltimore’s own Lake Trout. Along the way, for many Maryland music fans, these became a rite of passage.

“If you turn to a stranger at a bar who looks to be around 40, ask them about going to an HFStival, and chances are, they’ll have a story about losing a shoe in the mosh pit or seeing Jewel get hit by a frisbee on stage,” says Sam Sessa of Baltimore Public Media, the company that runs WYPR and WTMD. “These festivals are core memories for a whole generation.”

And evidently, they’re not easily forgotten. A casualty of a changing industry, the HFStival ended in 2004, a year before the station as we knew it went off the air, too. But now, after nearly two decades and multiple attempts at revival, it’s ready to rock again.

Earlier this summer, it was announced that the HFStival will return on September 21 at D.C.’s Nationals Park, featuring bands many of its original festivalgoers grew up on: Bush, Garbage, the Violent Femmes, Incubus. Plus Death Cab For Cutie, the Postal Service, and Jimmy Eat World. Tickets now start at $150.

The festival’s savior is I.M.P, the Bethesda-based concert promoter behind venues like the 9:30 Club and Merriweather Post Pavilion. After the Nationals approached them with the idea, I.M.P. was able to secure the rights to use the festival name.

“There’s this opportunity to bring all of these fan bases together for a night of music that people just love,” says Jen Hass, I.M.P.’s co-director of booking, who put together this year’s lineup. “That was really exciting for everybody.”

Which brings us back to Waugh. Now a consultant for radio stations, he is working with I.M.P. on the new HFStival. Among his responsibilities is helping arrange appearances by former HFS deejays, including Gina Crash, Rob Timm, and Pat Ferrise. But moving forward, he doesn’t see the festival as just an exercise in nostalgia.

“My feeling is that really you can’t go home,” he says. “If I was I.M.P., I would want to make HFStival mean to [the Baltimore-D.C. area] what Lollapalooza currently means to Chicago. And just the way Lollapalooza evolves every single year, so too should the HFStival.”

The first time Mahala Morefield met Weasel, aka Jonathan Gilbert, she was a law firm receptionist posing as a music writer from the Lone Star Dispatch. It was 1975. Morefield had relocated to Washington, D.C., from Austin and stumbled across a high-pitched nasal voice spinning records on an eclectic midnight to 6 a.m. show at a 3,000-watt station with the call letters WHFS (“High-Fidelity Stereo”).

Little Feat, the Stones, Frank Zappa—a Romani-French jazz guitarist named Django Reinhardt with only eight good fingers—somehow it all fit together each night. “I had a musical crush on Weasel,” recalls Morefield. “I set up a phony 5 a.m. meeting and held on to the cassette tape of that ‘interview’ forever.”

Fast-forward almost 45 years. The WHFS days—including the later years when the station moved to Annapolis and blasted its new 50,000-watt signal toward Baltimore—are long past. The station’s epic HFStivals, of course, are gone, too. But Weasel, whose nickname was bestowed by an American University classmate who thought he resembled the creature on the cover of the Zappa-produced 1970 album Weasels Ripped My Flesh, is still on the air, spinning now for Towson University’s WTMD.

Because Gilbert doesn’t drive—he still lives in the same Bethesda building where the old WHFS studio was located and where its transmitting tower remains impaled on the roof—a revolving band of 50-plus volunteers, fondly referred to as Weasel’s Wagon Train, takes turns transporting the unlikely D.C.-Baltimore cultural icon to Towson to record his once-again, organic, free-range shows on WTMD. (Passionate, engaging, witty at the microphone, Gilbert isn’t quite a recluse off air, but he’s not on Facebook or other social media, either. “Why would I do that? I want to listen to music and I want other people to listen to music.”)

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A Long Island native, Gilbert’s extraordinary curatorial gifts begin with a great natural ear, followed by a deep curiosity and impeccable memory. “It started with a transistor radio when I was 10 years old,” he says. “I’d stay up all night, covers pulled over my head, not wanting to miss a thing—sometimes that was one of the great jocks from WBAI in New York, sometimes it was a baseball game—on a good night you could get Bob Prince from Pittsburgh. I listened to Chuck Thompson from WBAL long before I came to Baltimore.”

An older brother introduced him to Chuck Berry and Little Richard. He heard the records his uncles, aunts, and parents played, their personal interests skipping from folk to jazz to Sinatra and big band. Singing in the school choir, playing clarinet through 12th grade, and graduating high school in 1967 when album-oriented rock was transforming radio, Gilbert absorbed everything.

To this day, his playlists pop with surprises and style as he juxtaposes songs in the same key and effortlessly raises and lowers the tempo. “You create a narrative, an emotional journey,” he says, thumbing through a tattered notebook during a recent set that spanned gospel, early civil rights-era, and black-power soundtracks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “Music is visceral first.”

In between, he provides the kind of nuggets and backstories that music lovers geek over. “When I hear something new that I like—and it could be something that’s old—I’m still that 10-year-old kid,” he says. “I want to hear it 10 times. And, like a guitar player figuring out the chords, I want to slow it down and see how they did what they did.”

By coincidence, Morefield, who moved back to Texas in the late ’70s, returned to the area shortly before Gilbert joined WTMD nine years ago. After not conversing since her “interview” when both were in their mid-20s, she’s now a friend and occasional Wagon Train driver. A whole lot and nothing has changed. “He plays your soul, your heart,” she says of his Weasel Wild Weekend shows. “A maestro of the radio. One song vibrating off the next.”