Former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, best known to Angelenos as the longtime host of "Jonesy's Jukebox" on Indie 103.1 FM, will be returning to the terrestrial airwaves via L.A. rock powerhouse KROQ-FM (106.7). The news was first reported this morning on buzzbands.la.

Jones, known to his listeners as "Jonesy," lost his daily daytime show when the beloved Indie 103 went off the air in 2009. His gig on KROQ will launch on Sunday and will air weekly from 7 to 9 p.m.

Since Indie moved to online only, Jones has been the host of a version of "Jonesy's Jukebox" on the website iamrogue.com, a project funded by independent film financier and upstart studio chief Ryan Kavanaugh of Relativity Media. That stint recently ended.

Jonesy's arrival at KROQ has long been speculated, though with his quirky, loose-cannon interview style and wonderfully refreshing disregard for dead air and the fundamentals of radio announcing, the question has been whether his approach would work on a station with such a wide reach. On Indie, there was no telling from day to day what a listener would be getting, which was part of the show's charm. The big question is whether that would work on a more mainstream station.

"Wherever I go, I will still do my show the same; I wouldn't change it," Jones told The Times' Geoff Boucher in February 2009, a few weeks after he left Indie 103. "I don't think I should, and I hope any of these people that are thinking of hiring me aren't going to try to mold me into something else. I'd be bored out of me brain. I'd last two weeks if they had me reading some nonsense. If you want someone to read a piece of paper, just hire someone else. There's loads of people that do that."

-- Randall Roberts

Photo: Steve Jones, shot in February 2009. Credit: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times