Fm: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio - Hardcover

Neer, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679462953 ISBN 13: 9780679462958

Verlag: Villard Books, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

A behind-the-scenes history of the golden era of free-form rock-and-roll radio traces its origins, growth, and fall; discusses radio's influence on the early careers of such artists as Bruce Springsteen; and explores the role of DJs in influencing the music world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Neer started in radio while attending Adelphi University and pioneered progressive radio on Long Island after graduation. In 1971, he joined the staff of WNEW-FM and worked there as a disc jockey and programmer for over twenty-eight years. In 1986, he became a sports talk-show host at WNEW-AM. He moved to WFAN in July of 1988, where he is currently a weekend personality and pre- and postgame host for New York Giants football. He is the sports editor for <i>Talkers </i>magazine and appears regularly on various syndi-cated radio and television shows. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Vicky, and their willful golden retriever, Lindsay.

Aus dem Klappentext

It was all so honest, before the end of our collective innocence. Top Forty jocks screamed and yelled and sounded mightier than God on millions of transistor radios. But on FM radio it was all spun out for only you. On a golden web by a master weaver driven by fifty thousand magical watts of crystal clear power . . . before the days of trashy, hedonistic dumbspeak and disposable three-minute ditties . . . in the days where rock lived at many addresses in many cities."</i><br>–from <b>FM</b><br><br>As a young man, Richard Neer dreamed of landing a job at WNEW in New York–one of the revolutionary FM stations across the country that were changing the face of radio by rejecting strict formatting and letting disc jockeys play whatever they wanted. He felt that when he got there, he’d have made the big time. Little did he know he’d have shaped rock history as well.<br><br>FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio chronicles the birth, growth, and death of free-

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The Promise

I lay awake for a sunrise that never broke through the clouds. I hadn’t slept much the night before. Most of the weekend I had been awake, preparing for today—the most important day of my life—all twenty-one years of it.

Not every day you think is going to be pivotal toward your future turns out that way. How often do life-changing days happen with no warning, no chance to prepare? An anonymous driver swerves into your lane. An unknown IRS agent decides that you are the one to be audited. The results of a PSA test come in. Or on the plus side—the lottery calls your number. A major headhunter hears from an old college chum that you are the perfect candidate to head a large corporation. The dot-com stock you buy early is unexpectedly acquired by Microsoft.

But this Monday morning in March of 1971, I was sure that in a few hours the course of my life and that of my best friend would be changed. Michael Harrison and I lived in a small apartment above a bakery in Oceanside, Long Island, and had shared many adventures together. For the past two years, he and I had put in sixteen-hour days at WLIR-FM, a small suburban radio station. We’d slept at the station more nights than we cared to remember, sometimes because we were working late, sometimes because we had no place to live. We’d missed meals, desperately trying to make it until the next paycheck with only change in our pockets. We’d often devote hours to meticulous strategy planning, designed to convince our boss at WLIR that we merited an extra 25¢ per hour.

We made these sacrifices for one ultimate goal: to get a job at WNEW-FM—real New York radio, with studios in Manhattan, where the stars of every type of showbiz lived and played. And now this day could be the payoff for those months of deprivation, or it could sentence us to a longer term of penance before we could deserve another shot at nirvana.

In 1971, the absolute coolest place to work in radio was WNEW-FM. The disc jockeys had total freedom to play whatever records they chose. They could say what they wanted, whenever they wanted. They didn’t need to put on ballsy radio voices; they spoke like real people, with regional accents or immature timbres. Some were intelligent, others sexy or funny. They brought themselves to the airwaves unvarnished—what you heard was what they were.

They made comfortable salaries, although not the megabucks of AM radio superstars. They came from different places, different experiences. Some were veterans of the Top Forty wars who’d tired of the battle, some were freshly out of college and idealistically striving to reinvent a medium that had grown old and irrelevant. A couple were entertainers from other fields who had sought to be actors or poets, but found a haven in a darkened studio behind a microphone. Some were handsome, some had been cursed with faces made for radio. But collectively, they formed a dream team that the cognoscenti acknowledged as the industry’s pinnacle. And due to a unique set of circumstances, Harrison and I had talked ourselves into believing that we were ready to join their ranks.

We’d had two opportunities over the past year, but they’d proven ephemeral. There was our unsuccessful attempt to get to WNEW-FM through a side entrance by beseeching Metromedia Group president George Duncan for a job at one of the company’s out-of-town outlets. Duncan presided over several stations, in places like Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well as New York. We figured if we could impress the company at one of its far outposts, we might earn a ticket back to WNEW-FM within a reasonable period of time. But we’d blown the interview with Duncan.

At the time, John Lennon had released a song called “Working Class Hero.” It was a bitter, self-deprecating view of his life and the whole idea of being known as an ex-Beatle. It contains the line, “You’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.” Many underground stations were playing it. Some bleeped out the offending lyric, some reversed the word, and a few played it uncensored.

The FCC was not happy with progressive radio: Richard Nixon was constantly vilified and its strident antiwar political bent chafed the administration. As we now know, the president didn’t hesitate to punish his enemies with whatever means were at his disposal. The FCC issued warnings that licenses could be at stake if lyric content was deemed objectionable—either obscene or condoning illicit activity, mainly drug use. In fear of governmental discipline, George Duncan had banned innocuous songs like Brewer and Shipley’s “One Toke over the Line,” or the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band” (containing the phrase “Goddamn, well, I declare”). Though he could be profane himself, he didn’t want anything to endanger the Metromedia broadcast empire.

But we weren’t aware of this conservative approach and when Duncan casually brought up “Working Class Hero,” asking how we were handling it at WLIR-FM, I blurted out, “We’re playing it uncut. Our audience deserves to hear an artist like John Lennon as he intends to be heard. And the song’s message is far from obscene.”

The interview continued for a few minutes thereafter, but my impulsive answer troubled me the rest of the way. Duncan graciously said that changes were always happening at Metromedia, so that even though nothing was available now, he’d consider us in the future. Several months had passed and we hadn’t heard anything, so we assumed we were out of the running.

We’d also interviewed at CBS, another company that controlled radio stations, although none so desirable as Metromedia’s stable of progressive stations. CBS held on to vestiges of conventional AM radio: a more upbeat, insincere style with music that was programmed by one director; the individual jocks holding no sway over what they played. Our strategy was to take over one of their less profitable stations and build it up to the point that Metromedia would have to take notice and hire us away.

Those attempts had proven fruitless; we were seen as too independent to work within the buttoned-down CBS corporate structure. Harrison and I were beginning to lose faith, feeling condemned to work in radio’s hinterlands forever, never tasting the sweet freedom that WNEW-FM offered. But the preceding Friday night, we heard Rosko, the station’s star attraction, resign on the air. Bill “Rosko” Mercer was a fixture on nighttime radio in New York, a spiritual black man who read poetry and spoke eloquently against the war with words and music. At that moment, however, we put the cultural significance of his resignation aside and concentrated on what it meant to us: There was an opening at WNEW-FM! As we listened to subsequent shifts, it became apparent to us that no successor was imminent.

So Michael and I spent the entire weekend at the WLIR studios in Hempstead, Long Island, honing audition tapes and crafting résumés for an all-out assault on New York. We planned to camp out on program director Scott Muni’s doorstep at 230 Park Avenue in Manhattan by seven that Monday morning. From there, we’d improvise our way in to plead our case. Muni is another broadcasting legend, who had worked at both WMCA and WABC, New York radio’s Top Forty giants, before alighting at WNEW-FM. He had a deep gravelly voice, and knew the Beatles personally (as well as every other top musician of the day). We feared that he’d laugh at our hubris and throw us out on our ears, but we were naïvely determined to try.

Since our interview with George Duncan, we...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Villard Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0679462953
• ISBN 13: 9780679462958
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 367
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar