1.
On a warm and
sunny day in Southern California, a man is sitting at a table, across from him
is an earnest young woman with a tape recorder. It begins
“I have no idea
why anyone would be interested in any of this or what I think about what’s
happened to the radio business.”
“You spent
most of your life in it, your opinions and thoughts matter. They’re a part of
the history of the business. You were there at the beginning, as a participant.”
She said.
“I wasn’t
there at the beginning, when I showed up
and got involved it was a few years after it began, So I wasn't a pioneer, that’s for damn sure." The man lighted a cigarette, an American Spirit Yellow.
"The opportunity
for change was there, the big guys, the smart money, just couldn’t see it.
Think of it this way, the fire was ready to burn and a few of us showed up with
the matches, all you had to do was strike one and light the kindling. The smart
guys didn’t even think the stack of wood would burn, to the point of denying
that it was even burning, after it started. Some couldn't even feel the heat.”
“What do you
mean?” She asked.
“It was
obvious at the time FM would work, there were beautiful music stations on FM
all over the country generating huge listening audiences, some of the money men
and the smart guys, the big companies, owned the damn things, who knows what
they were thinking? A company has a facility. Let’s say in San Francisco, the fucking
thing is number one or two in the market. At that point in time, almost nobody owns an FM receiver, but somehow the station is generating a huge audience. I
used to wonder what the hell went on in the board meetings. I had dinner one
night with the father of beautiful music, the guy they were paying to create
the programming. I asked him, you know what he said?”
“I haven’t a
clue.” She said.
“He said nothing,
he just shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know either."
“So what
happened?”
“The music
changed for one thing, that was the catalyst. The music needed an outlet. It
sure as hell wasn’t going to get it on sixties era Top 40. Stations at the time
tried to play an edited version of “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan. The
listeners revolted and forced them to play the song unedited, all 5 minutes and
56 seconds of it. That happened in the mid 60’s and it was a big deal in an era of record companies
editing songs down just for radio, shit they used to cut old Beach Boys songs to under 2
minutes. I can’t remember which of the Beach Boys songs it was, whatever it was, I think the original was 2
minutes 36 seconds long. They cut it to 1:56." The man took a long drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke up in the warm air.
"Capitol actually put out radio
only albums called “short cuts”. Really, really stupid and the listeners wouldn’t put
up with it anymore. The people running the radio stations at that time couldn’t understand
what was happening. Actually, the silly bastards didn’t want to understand, they
couldn’t get their heads around the fact things were changing, that they could
no longer dictate musical tastes or control it anymore. Neither did the record companies."
"Our
generation certainly wasn’t having or taking it anymore. There had to be a medium where
what the listener could hear what they wanted to hear, demanded to hear. The un-loved, underutilized
step child FM signals were the solution. Somebody once called them, the funny
little stations down the hall.”
“Only took
about 5 years for them to stop laughing. A few of them never got it.”
“Want
another cup of coffee?” The man asked.
The woman
nodded, yes.
