Thursday, March 28, 2019

Radio Waves


Radio Waves, by Jim Ladd
No month stated, 1991  St. Martin's Press

I never listen to the radio – I can’t imagine why anyone would, these days – but I’ve always been interested in what is known as “progressive free-form” rock radio, ie the radio format that briefly flourished in the very late ‘60s to the very early ‘70s. Where DJs approached their shows in a “free-form” style, playing whatever they wanted, saying whatever they wanted.

I always wondered what such a broadcast might sound like, but other than modern CD recreations like The Golden Age Of Underground Radio volumes 1 and 2 I figured this would be impossible. Then I discovered Let The Universe Answer, where you can stream actual vintage recordings of rock radio; “airchecks,” as they’re officially known. The recordings from ’68-’72 are by far my favorite, and listening to them you can hear everything from avante garde sound paintings to waterbed commercials – not to mention rock songs they still don’t play on today’s so-called “classic rock” radio. It really is a window into another era, and a big thanks to Javed Jafri for making it available for us to listen to.

After listening to hours of vintage airchecks, I decided to learn more about free-form radio. There are serveral books out there, but this one by Jim Ladd, a famous LA jock from the day, struck me as the most interesting, as it opens with the beginning of free-form and shows how corporate radio finally killed off the genre. Also Ladd has chosen to write his book in a pseudo-novel style, which I thought was interesting. Others would disagree, though, particularly in how he’s changed the names of known radio personalities and even radio stations. So if you’re looking for a straight-up factual report of rock radio, this might not be the book for you.

Ladd opens the book in ’68, with Tom Donahue and his wife Raechel starting a San Francisco radio station that actually played rock music. Donahue by the way was the creator of what is still thought of as rock radio; he had 20 years experience doing AM, got sick of the banalities, and hit upon the idea of a radio station that played current music, hip music, and wasn’t as much worried about ad revenue. Donahue by the way is the “star” of the first Golden Age Of Underground Radio, which features vintage airchecks by him throughout – it’s a great listen, as is the second volume, which features B. Mitchell Reed.

The format follows that of Dakota Days; Ladd relays history via fiction, complete with expository dialog. So we have Tom and Raechel sitting around one night and listening to the first Doors album and Donahue wondering why you never hear music like it on the radio. From there he begins calling FM stations until he finds a number that’s out of service, which is sign that they’re in trouble and not paying the bills. He has a meeting with the mousy manager, who keeps the office lights off to conserve the energy bill, and from this the first free-form rock FM station is born.

Ladd changes not only the names of people but also the names of stations. I can understand the former, but the latter decision is truly strange – is he afraid he’ll upset the actual radio stations? At any rate Donahue’s first station was KMPX, but Ladd changes it to “KFRE.” Later on KMET will become “KAOS.” All this robs Radio Waves of being a legitimate history of free-form radio, while making it seem more like fiction – goofy fiction, at that, particularly given the goofy fake names Ladd saddles his real-life coworkers with (ie, KMET DJ Mary Hart becomes KAOS DJ Mega Turnon).

Tom and Raechel (and here Ladd is using their real names, which only adds further confusion to the text) meet with instant success, the hippies of the Bay Area freaking out that you can actually hear The Jefferson Airplane and the like on the radio. Soon they’re running a sister station in LA, presented with this almost herculean task by management that doesn’t even offer them greater pay. Actually I thought all the stuff with the Donahues warranted its own book; soon they jump ship to KMET, aka KAOS, the San Francisco free-form station they would become most associated with. Throughout the first half of Radio Waves Ladd tells us of all the crazy things happening over at “KAOS,” and you wish there was more detail about it.

Because at this time Ladd himself has gotten into radio, in the Bay area, but works for “KASH,” a station that runs by a strict format. Be prepared for some serious format-bashing in this book. Basically this is when upper-management (insinuated as being nothing more than bean-pushers who listen to Lawrence Welk if they listen to anything at all) comes up with an index card database of what songs to play and when. And DJ personalities are to be kept to a minimum. This is all interesting, because we’re here in the golden days of free-form radio, ie when it started, and despite the image of DJs being allowed to, uh, “free-form” to their heart’s content, Ladd states that it was a battle against “the formula” from the very beginning.

At least this was so at KASH. The book would’ve been a helluva lot better if Ladd had quit and gone over to KAOS, but sadly (for the book, at least) he stuck at KASH. This is because he had a family to support and KASH paid more – and also was beating KAOS in the ratings. This would imply that the formula does work, which would render most of Ladd’s complaints moot. At KASH we get more of Ladd’s goofy fake names for real people, like station manager “Hai Ku,” who browbeats his DJs to stick to the formula but at the same time is cool enough to insist they come to work stoned if it means they’ll get better ratings. Speaking of which this features the best part of the book when Ladd, doing a late night program, goes outside for a joint and locks himself out of the station.

Unfortunately, Ladd skims over the glory days of free-form; we get some minor topical details about 1969, then before we know it, it’s June of ’73. And even in the ’69 stuff I think he’s misremembering things, as he relays a story purportedly from this year in which a fellow DJ plays “Star Star” by the Stones, in brazen disregard of FCC policies against on-air cursing. The only problem is, the Stones’s Goat’s Head Soup came out in ’73, not ’69. Anyway that whole ’68-’71 era was when free-form was at its peak, so I would’ve preferred a whole book just about those years. But thanks to the website above we can actually hear the real thing and not just read about it.

While at KASH Ladd comes up with a show called Innerviews (his name for it, at least) which would feature in-depth interviews with rock stars. His biggest deal in this is with John Lennon, and Ladd devotes several pages to his 1974 interview with him. However I never understood if this was actually broadcast; Ladd has it that some screw-ups in the office might have prevented the interview from ever going on the air. Innerviews ultimately causes Ladd to leave KASH, as one of those stupid goddamn suits back in the New York home office deems that Ladd can’t be a KASH personality and and independent personality, which he is given that Innerviews is syndicated.

So Ladd quits and heads over to KAOS, but unfortunately it’s well after those free-form glory days. Tom Donahue has passed away, dead of a heart attack at 46 (the dude was so big even Orson Welles would’ve considered him fat), and his widow Raechel doesn’t run the place like you’d expect. Even here it’s the damn suits in charge and the internecine infighting of the other stations. Also, all the wild stuff is years past, like the SLA using “KAOS” to broadcast their messages about Patty Hearst – again, a book all about KMET would’ve been so much better, as we read all this stuff from the perspective of a guy who was working at a rival station.

That being said, I do like Ladd’s conviction that radio is like a mystical communion with fellow spirits, or “banging the tribal drum,” which is a recurring phrase throughout. This only further serves to illustrate how underground radio was once so vital to the youth movement. Today it’s a haven of asshole “personalities” and obnoxious commercials. Or at least that’s what it was like the last time I listened to a radio station, at least two decades ago. Ladd however seems to be under the impression that all radio listeners feel the same way he does, and includes a bit in the late ‘70s when a young guy called into the station to complain about all the political ranting Ladd was doling out (he’s a left-leaner, of course; the latter half of the book breaks into arbitrary Reagan-bashing). To his credit, Ladd states that this was an eye-opener to him…not that he was wrong, per se (he feels that he’s entitled to say whatever he feels on the radio), but that the listening audience was changing. Note the distinction. It’s never the jock who is in the wrong, folks.

I wasn’t as much into the late ‘70s/early ‘80s portion, which unfortunately is the meat of the book. Most of it’s annoying, like run-ins with Mega Turnon and the stupid bean counters in the home office. And, just like with Donahue, important characters are kept out of the narrative: for example, B. Mitchell Reed, who also works at “KAOS,” but has the morning shift whereas Ladd has the night one. So the two rarely if ever meet. As for Raechel Donahue, she too disappears from the narrative, victim of infernal office policies and let go from the station she and her husband brought to prominence. Otherwise this part features memorable events like Ladd kicking off a call-in protest to the Carter White House to complain about chemicals being sprayed on illegal shipments of marijuana.

Overall Radio Waves is mostly entertaining, though as mentioned the goofy fake names bring it down a bit, and some of Ladd’s pseudo-dialog comes off as phony and forced (again, just like in Dakota Days, but not as bad). I would’ve preferred a whole book about the Donahues and KMET in the ‘60s.

Finally, I just finished a long book that slowed down the reading schedule, so I’ll only have one post next week – it’ll be up on Wednesday.

8 comments:

Kurt said...

This is a fascinating subject to me. Oh man, if you thought radio was bad two decades ago, I can tell you it's only gotten worse. I can't imagine why anyone would want to be a DJ now. Radio (and commercial TV shows like American Idol and The Voice) is a response to demand. As much as I dislike the thought of suits and bean-counters calling the shots, in the end they're bowing to what the masses (now the Boomers?) always wanted. They want familiarity and comfort. They actually want to hear "You Shook Me All Night Long" by AC/DC or "Life in the Fast Lane" over and over. Look at the biggest money making rock tours now and they're just the same warmed over crap that was showing its age decades ago. For example in rock it's KISS (who may or may not be lip-syncing), Jimmy Buffett and the Stones, etc. In pop it's just rotating lip-syncing dance acts. Instead of the pungent odor of pot, arenas probably smell more like Bengay. That "free form" playlists got killed in the early 70s makes sense masses of music buyers stayed true to form. That's my rant on pop culture for now.

Javed Jafri said...

Thanks for the nice words about my site Let The Universe Answer. I came upon your blog when I saw the referrals to my site. Keep in mind that my site while covering mainly free form radio also veers into Classic Rock and old Top 40 radio as well. One can use the search function and type in terms such as WBCN, CHUM FM, WUWU, KMET, WMMR etc to find the best of the free form content.

Zwolf said...

I worked as a DJ for pretty much all of the 90's. I was never into radio much (I'm a punk/metalhead and they don't air that stuff around here), but I needed a job and a friend of mine was the program director at an album-oriented rock station where the overnight DJ kept smoking pot and falling asleep. He'd do shit like put on "Mountain Jam" by the Allman Brothers (which is like a half-hour long) and just leave for a while. My friend knew I knew a good bit about music and never used substances, so after a few weekends plugging commercials into NASCAR races (yes, people listen to freakin' NASCAR on the radio... it's murder), I got the overnight shift. I didn't even talk for the first several years of doing it -- didn't want to and overnights didn't need it. We weren't really "free-form," although we did get a good bit of freedom on what to play, especially between midnight and 6. As long as I didn't abuse the privilege, I could take my own CDs up there. I'm still probably the only person in Mississippi who's actually put an Obituary song over the airwaves. One night I played Fudge Tunnel's version of "Sunshine of Your Love" just to make Cream fans think something was wrong with their radio. :) Metallica's "Master of Puppets" actually became one of our most-requested songs, and the station didn't even own it... it was mine. Saturday nights we'd play five whole albums in a row, uncut. One night, just to do it, I played an hour with only four songs -- live "Do You Feel Like We Do" by Peter Frampton, live "Freebird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd, "In-A-Gada-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly, and "Sheep" by Pink Floyd. I made up for it in the next hour, playing a lot of short stuff ("Psychotic Reaction" by Count Five, that kinda stuff), mostly off our Gold Discs. Gold Discs were great -- they were like mix CDs with just the good stuff, but they were expensive, and the station couldn't own them, just rent them. But every month or so we'd get one, and it'd have around 15, 20 songs on it, stuff like "Rooster" by Alice In Chains or Radiohead's "Loser" or whatever, so we wouldn't have to buy a band's whole album. Although we often did. I know we had that Alice In Chains, 'cuz I played "Rain When I Die" a lot and that was never a hit.

I didn't do a whole lot of air checks, but I probably have a cassette tape or two of 'em around somewhere.

I eventually worked up to being program director, before it all faded out and went sports-talk and automation and shit.

There's hardly any live radio left. Listeners *think* the D.J. is live because he's telling you what time it is and stuff, but those breaks are usually recorded in an hour or so at the beginning of each week and plugged into time slots in an Arrakis system... which is basically a big Ipod. They probably have something more advanced than Arrakis now, but that's what we were using in the 90's. Before we got one of those to put all our ads in it, we still had cart machines, like 8-tracks with ads on 'em. Hard to make a living as a DJ now, 'cuz your voice-talent for the week's knocked out in a couple hours and then it's just plugged into slots. Pretty much a dead art form...

Javed Jafri said...

My latest upload to the site is very relevant to this Blog post. WKNR FM ( Detroit) from 1969 and the DJ pontificates about underground radio at one point and says something that is unheard of now and that is that he expounds about their main competition WABX FM and mentions some positives and negatives about them.

Joe Kenney said...

Thanks for the comments, guys!

Kurt -- Loved the imagery on modern arenas. Speaking of the Stones I saw they were coming through here so for laughs looked up ticket prices. Cheapest was like $175 or something. I'd only pay that if the tickets magically took me back in time so I could see the Stones performing in '69. Funny you should mention American Idol. I've never seen a single second of that show...until this past Saturday, when I came across it. I noted how the three judges constantly put down various contestants for doing their own material. So it's like a cover versions show.

Javed -- Thanks for your notes, and I'll be sure to check out that new upload. My favorites of the free form ones you've posted are the Boston WCBN airchecks with Charles Laquidra and his various personalities -- blows my mind that you could turn on the radio and hear the stoned ramblings of "Captain Squid."

Zwolf -- Thanks for the awesome post on your own radio days. Also the notes on how sterilized its now become. What a joke! That would be cool if you found some tapes of your airchecks and switched them to MP3 for upload on your blog. I got this tape player gizmo off Amazon a few years ago that made tape-to-MP3 conversion simple. I was able to upload a couple tapes my buddy and I made in the '90s of our two-man "rock group" The Fake Shaggies, after which the tape-MP3 gizmo thing broke, as if it couldn't take it any more.

Dan said...

To clarify: KAOS was KMET Los Angeles. KASH was KLOS Los Angeles. The bulk of content regarding The (San Francisco) Bay Area is confined to the earlier part of the book if I recall. The names of the cities were not changed to protect the innocent (or potentially litigious) parties.

Joe Kenney said...

Hey Dan, thanks for the comment and the clarification. Very ironic that you'd post this today, as just the other day I discovered that "Radio Kaos" is an in-joke, given that Ladd appeared as "himself" on Roger Waters's much-maligned 1987 solo album "Radio Kaos." Ladd portrays the DJ for the titular radio station, linking together some of the tracks with his on-air spiel. He might've mentioned this in the book, but if he did I'd forgotten it.

Felicity Walker said...

About 15 years ago I saw a TV series on the history of popular music and among other things they covered the change in radio from free-form to strictly-formatted. Per this documentary there’s one man in particular who killed free-form radio, as he went from station to station and sold them on the idea that at any given moment, when a channel-surfing listener is on your station, they should be hearing something they recognise and like, and that will make them stop and listen. If not, they move on. And the problem is, it worked. Every station that did this saw ratings go up.

This has led to our modern age of automated radio. It’s depressing. I don’t listen to the radio any more—too many ads—but when I did, it was to discover music I hadn’t heard that I would like. This would have been up until about five years ago. Mostly I listened in the car, since I had an old car and the tape deck didn’t work, so it was the radio or nothing. I’d channel surf and when I heard something that I liked, I’d pull over and jot down the lyrics just in case I’d already missed when the DJ said the name of it, then search for those lyrics later.

I think those analog-to-digital devices must be lemons. I had a USB VCR that was supposed to be able to transfer VHS tapes over to my computer (the text on the box winkingly suggests this is just for your “home movies” and not to preserve movies you own on VHS). It worked at first but then one day it just wouldn’t work. The computer couldn’t talk to it anymore.