George Gimarc — with 40 years on local radio, or several lifetimes in square-job years — is upfront about his new endeavor, about which there's technically very little that's new.

"This is not the project I thought I'd be working on," he said Thursday as we sat in a conference room in a building off John Carpenter Freeway that used to house CBS Radio. "But there was an opportunity here."

It's in this old building that a webcaster is now poised to relaunch a Dallas radio station that debuted in the fall of '73 and went off the air 16 years later. That station is KZEW, call letters almost mythic to those of us who came of age in Dallas in the 1970s and '80s.

Look no further than the rear bumper of my Jeep, decorated with the winged, iconic "Zoo Freak" advertising the "Home of Rock & Roll" that shuttered during my senior year in college. Once a week, at least, someone pulls up at a stop light and shouts the nostalgic woo-hoo of solidarity. The bumper sticker is but one piece from a larger stash of Zoo memorabilia I've assembled since the late 1970s and early '80s, when John LaBella, John Rody and Mike Rhyner kept me company on my way to school every morning.

KZEW, which for years shared its ownership with this newspaper, wasn't the first album-rock radio station in town, nor was it the last. But it was the best — something for everyone during those long-ago, faraway days before consultants and mergers and corporations sterilized the fertile format. For some of us, it was our first and last exposure to radio when playlists hazily, lazily loped from prog to country to jazz to folk and disc jockeys spun whatever they dug — the longer the better, because, you know, "smoke" breaks.

And now, almost unbelievably, it is set to return beginning this weekend, via something called VOKAL Media, which, on Saturday, will soft-launch a 24/7 music stream on its website that within two weeks will be available via app in its final form with the jocks. It will be known only as The Zoo, because there's a station in Whitehead, N.Y., currently using the old call letters. And besides, "we're digital, so we don't need the call letters," said John Ritchie, VOKAL's founder and the man responsible for The Zoo's resurrection. (Updated Saturday morning: You can access the stream here, but be patient -- it's a bit up and down during this test launch, in large part because of the overwhelming number of people hitting the servers, per Ritchie, who said via email that "we have to keep expanding server space -- a good thing.")

What you will hear on this new Zoo is an amalgam of yesterday and today: Gimarc has rounded up several original Zoo jocks — among them Ira Lipson, the station's founder, as well as Jon Dillon, John Rody, Beverly Beasley, Nancy Johnson, John Wells and The Ticket's Mike Rhyner — to voice the station, introducing songs that come almost exclusively from KZEW playlists dating back to September 1973. The jocks have been given the lists and asked to intro what they wanted. Gimarc and, eventually, former Zoo music director Chaz Mixon will fill in the rest, including newer music that would have sounded in place on the original station. (You can listen to an hour-long demo here.)

John Ritchie, chief executive officer of ZOO Vokal (left) and former KZEW DJ-turned-radio consultant George Gimarc at Vokal studios in Dallas on Thursday. (Ben Torres/Special Contributor)

"It makes me feel good knowing some folks are going to be punching up the station again and bringing up good memories," said Lipson, who was inducted into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame in 2011. "When you start a station, never in your wildest dreams would you think 45 years later people would be hankering to be able to hear it again."

"It is amazing that people still remember it and are as into it as they are," Rhyner said Friday. "I get it all the time. People come up to me all the time with some Zoo artifact I've seen a million times, just because it's important for them to show it to me. After all this time, they remember."

The station will also air old concert promos and local commercials Gimarc rescued from the dustbin during a housecleaning in the 1980s. He's also got mountains' worth of live performances that first aired on KZEW, including locally recorded concerts by Blondie, Joe Jackson, the Ramones and Peter Frampton's 1975 January Sound Studios session featuring the version of "Do You Feel Like We Do" that became a national hit a good year before Frampton Comes Alive was even released.

"This is not a time machine," Gimarc said. "But it's not an oldies station either."

"And it's not a Pandora playlist," added Ritchie.

1 / 3KZEW founder Ira Lipson and Joan Baez at the old Zoo digs((Courtesy Ira Lipson)) 2 / 3George Gimarc brought in one of his old KZEW keepsakes -- appropriately, a checkered flag -- during a sitdown with Vokal's COO Thursday, March 23, 2017. (Ben Torres/Special Contributor)(Special Contributor) 3 / 3The original Zoo Freak((Courtesy Ira Lipson))

"There were, over time, five different Zoos, and this will address all of them, shoulder to shoulder, mixed up together," Gimarc said. "The Zoo in 1985 would have never played Carole King or Willie Nelson or Freddie King. But this will. No matter when you grew up loving the Zoo, your favorite era will be represented, oh, every quarter hour."

For the foreseeable future, the station will stream gratis over the app; Ritchie's hoping to lock down corporate underwriters who'd keep the stream from being chopped up with ads. Eventually, some content might go behind a paywall — say, entire episodes of Gimarc's old Rock and Roll Alternative, the Sunday-night show that introduced a generation of Foghat-listening locals to punk and new wave imports from the U.K.

There will be other channels, too, on the VOKAL app: a comedy stream curated by Gimarc, one devoted to nothing but red-dirt Texas country and another all-local-music stream from Mark Schectman, the former KDGE jock now hosting The Local Ticket Sunday nights on The Ticket.

"We're trying to mainstream digital," Ritchie said. "The last great bastion of radio is what's driving up and down that road right there," he said, pointing toward the traffic roaring past on John Carpenter. "I don't know anybody who has a radio in their house anymore."

This is not the first time someone's tried to resurrect The Zoo over the internet. Jon Dillon attempted it more than a decade ago, when the web streamed audio like molasses. But if memory serves, the audience dwindled to the point where Dillon had to charge listeners who couldn't yet turn their cellphones into high-def transistor radios and car stereos. It didn't last long. Neither, for that matter, did the original KZEW — 16 short years, the last few of which were spent in the hands of consultants who slowly killed the station.

"But this is not just nostalgia," Ritchie said. "The Zoo was like the famous rock star that was at the peak of his career when died. We woke up one day and we had Christmas music, and everyone went, 'Oh, what happened?'"

Twenty-eight years later, we're about to find out.