Wisdom of the ages 

Links of the day 

Screenrolling 

Red herring salad 

Post-oink blues, cont'd 

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I remember the brief miracle of FM radio in the 1967-197x period: KSAN in SF, WBCN in Boston, etc. No playlists, no boundaries, just a love of great music. KPIG continues to carry that banner, and does so proudly.

Oh: also: there's a bug in your link to the Santa Cruz Sentinel article. Here's the correct link:

http://www.santa-cruz.com/archive/2002/July/20/local/stories/01local.htm

Anyone else got the feeling that the corporate attempt to corral and own the internet has the same feel as the British attempt to control those unruly colonies back in the 1770's ?? There's a new space, and the same old assholes wanna own it. We colonists ain't gonna let that happen.

In Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", a computer that developed a sense of humor facilitated the revolution. Thanks for the roadmap, Unca Bob.

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The Tsunami BLOG 2002 registration page will actually be on the University at Sea web site, (http://www.continuingeducation.net/coursedetails.php?program_number=67), rather than the Just Cruisin' Plus Wi-FI 2002 page. Same cruise ship and dates but better rates for Blogger's who just want to spend one or two weeks in the Caribbean, and perhaps not attend seminars all of the time they are on the cruise ship. (Alan Reiter would appreciate it if someone would come listen to him give a keynote speech.) As is typical these days, the University at Sea site for MOUStech.NET needs to be updated with more information. I need to stop volunteering for so many community projects and work on my web sites.

The original idea for the BLOG cruise is all Doc's, although he is too busy to get involved with this one. However, I expect this to be a regular cruise offering with MOUStech.NET: to get bloggers onboard to take advantage of the wireless Internet access, even if they do not want to attend seminars, which will be offered for cruise seminars with other names, such as Wi-Fi 2002 or Project CREWS. (Do I assume there is a slacker blogger subculture that can afford to take two weeks off for a cruise?) I am trusting that Doc will be the keynote speaker in 2003 or 2004 at one of the BLOG cruises. I'd even let him name the cruise theme. (Tsunami is the default SSID for all Cisco access points.)

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I keep waiting to read something, anything, about the possibility that all the CARP/LOC ruling will achieve, is driving all the Internet radio business off shore. I have started going to some european stations to get my Internet radio fix, and I wonder how long it will be before that is the only option for interesting music.

Rod

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I was brought in to WBCN in 1978 to help the station find itself. WCOZ had come along and siezed the majority of WBCN's listenership with a carefully honed playlist, and a warmer attitude toward the station's audience.

WBCN, while by all means the Rock'n'Roll "Legacy Station" in the area, had gotten tired and sort of self-reverential. Laquidera had been gone (one of many absences over the years), Maxanne was playing music known mostly to no one but herself and a dwindling group of ardent fans. The rest of the station was, to be blunt, in disarray.

It was resting on laurels. But that meant the ratings had gone way downhill, the ad revenues were plummeting, and the owner, a wonderful and visionary man named T. Mitchell Hastings, wondered how could he keep the staff on salary and maintain the level of employment and benefits if the revenues were dwindling? This was a man who cared deeply for his employees.

The feeling, sadly, was not mutual. He was perceived as a doddering old fuddy-duddy by many (dare I say, most?) on the staff. They felt that they'd built 'BCN, and they knew what to do, and Mitch was just the old man in the office who owned the place. Little did most of them know that Mitch developed the concept of vertical and horizontal polarization...that which enables FM to be portable, to be heard in a car. That Mitch worked with Armstong, the so-called "father of FM," that Mitch was a fearless renegade who allowed his beloved Concert Network station to go the route of "Progressive Rock" because he was touched by the sensitivty of the children of the sixties, the music that had passion and was inventive and not the norm, and because he was no stranger to what many others might have considered, well, rather strange.

Mitch was a colleague of Edgar Cayce, among others. He'd had an offer to become the Head of the Occult Studies Department at McGill. He was a bohemian, a beatnik, even a hippie of sorts. But Mitch wore a Harris Tweed and was a gentleman from an earlier era.

The staff at WBCN was largely a bunch of spoiled brats, wallowing in the riches of their lavish "alternative lifestyle." THey lived high, got high, and were high on themselves. And the station suffered. Along came a competitor, and WBCN went to second in the category, and then became an also-ran, and then became a pretty poor excuse for a radio station.

I did a study of the listenership, of their likes and dislkies, and it became clear that the incredibly broad array of all sorts of music made it easy for a station with more focus (WCOZ) to be the leader.

WBCN received more "legacy mentions" than actual listenership. We found that those who had once cherished what it had been were unable to spend any real time with what it had become. So we made a number of changes, including bringing back Laquidera. We put in a policy of having the deejays select a quote of tunes from current popular albums. We gave the unstructured asylum a semblance of structure.

We returned the station to a stronger position and made it competitive with WCOZ. We also maintained the 'cachet' of what it had once been. It was a long struggle, and we were successful. Mitch then sold the station to the nascent entity known as Infinity Broadcasting. That group is now the second largest broadcast chain in the country.

I worked with a number of early "album rock" or free form stations. It was a wonderful moment in time. The memories of then are often stronger and more durable than the actual "on air product" those stations broadcast. The egos of many of the air personalities, the, ahem, "favors" the deejays received from record companies...back in the day when a deejay could actually pick the tunes....were the downfall of many of these stations.

Of course, a good thing in the electronic media will always fall victim to some sort of commercialization and dilution. A consultant with a pretty simple forumla came up with the "Elton John is hipper than anything" format and a slew of radio stations adopted his format. The result: a ton of "corporate rock" stations, with minimal creativity, highly defined, similar, and comparitively tight playlists (when compared with the free form or progressive rockers, with no limits), with almost no personality among the disc jockeys.

Sure, morning shows could be cute, but the rest of the day the jocks merely had to sound laid-back and cool. They had no say in the music, they were more like cue-card readers.

So free form went corporate. End of a special time in radio for that music, that pop culture's listenership.

Later on the AAA stations sprang up (Adult Album Alternative) but few were successful for any enduring period of time. Some college stations, KPIG, and a scant few commercial stations hold the mantle, but there were a good many nails in the overall coffin of the genre.

Ah, the memories of the good old days...

--Dean

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