Radio Daze : Station-Swapping, Automation and Other Seductive Fantasies of Radio Riches

NOW THAT THE Berbers have been talked, or coerced, into settling down, the only true nomads left are radio people. For every Robert W. Morgan or Gary Owens who finds a sinecure in a big city, there are thousands of “pieces of talent” crisscrossing the continent, being Jim Christopher on Lite 107 in Memphis one month and Chris James on Power 93 in Seattle the next. Oddly enough, there can be big money in this life: There are radio guys pulling down a yearly million, just for spending four hours a day telling the traffic-report lady that she should shave her legs more often. But even these fellows lease more often than they buy.

The last thing you might think this little world needs is another jolt of instability. But the deregulating Reaganistas abolished the requirement that radio licenses be held for at least three years following a change of ownership. Accordingly, people began to trade stations more briskly than rookie Mickey Mantles at a baseball card convention. Prices skyrocketed since, hey, each buyer had to make a decent killing when, six weeks down the line, he became a seller.

Thus it was that KFAC, a station that earned a few million dollars’ profit each year playing classical music, got sold twice in five years. Could Mozart draw enough people to induce advertisers to pay high enough rates to enable the new owners to cover the stupendous debt in which they were bathing? No way, Bizet.

We were now a big city without a commercial classical music station. The retooled KFAC, stripped of its embarrassing call letters and decked out in a rock format direct from market research, plummeted downward in the ratings faster than a wayward Wallenda.

Meanwhile, in the kind of marketplace magic that the Czechs and Poles might well study, other stations began to perform cosmetic surgery on themselves. A Valley station that had featured “roots” country music (not the slick Nashville sound) went classical. Then the jazz station migrated to the AM band, so saxes now have to honk through static to be heard, while its former FM home became--how cultural can a wasteland be?--classical.

At this point in the square dance, the totals are these: Net increase in classical stations: 1. Net increase in rock stations: 1. Net decrease in roots country stations: 1.

Unhappy Hank Williams fans have been writing to the local weeklies about conspiracies of the well-heeled to perpetuate the “music of a dead European aristocracy.” Otherwise, the invisible hand just stirs the soup faster than ever.

The old KFAC was no audio Acropolis. I grew up in a family where it was the house station. I even got my boyhood haircuts in a barbershop three doors away from the studios where KFAC’s announcers vied with the tenors to see who could vocalize more fulsomely and at greater length. It became even more unlistenable when it joined the rush to automate.

What rampant station-swapping is today, automation was to an earlier era: a seductive fantasy of radio riches. You bought a roomful of expensive equipment, almost sophisticated enough for the task at hand. You then gave half your staff their walking papers and put the other half to work making tapes that would simulate the sound of someone actually sitting at a radio station playing music. These tapes, combined with tapes of the music, were computerized, randomized, customized and, presumably, listenerized.

It was a great idea, as long as you didn’t have ears. The systems always suffered from odd pauses, hisses and time announcements that you could sing along with because the same little pieces of tape were replayed every day. KRLA, where I worked for a spell, set the standard for bad automation. Every day, the “air personalities” (the approved euphemism of the day) would take their turns taping intros and--there is no other word-- out ros to records, never hearing the music, always trying desperately to sound spontaneous. At its best, deejay chatter spoils faster than raw cream. This stuff sounded as if it had been left out in the sun all day.

The point of the automation fantasy was not just to send some talent back into the nomadic herd; it was to develop programming that poorer, smaller stations across the country could buy, thereby unemploying their talent as well. That noble goal had to wait for satellite technology before it could be fully realized. In the old days, a cumbersome array of tape machines sent dog-hearing-level electronic signals to each other to manufacture a simulation of liveness. Now, a real guy sits in a real studio in Dallas and plays music, and people from Cairo, Ill., to Chico, Calif., listening to him at the exact same moment, bask in the comforting illusion that he’s just down the block.

Big-city radio, of course, is above such amiable subterfuge. Our stations have big talents, big budgets--and big debts. And the last entrant in the station-swapping daisy chain may wind up like the thrift industry, facing a brisk little chapter by the name of Eleven. But whoever tumbles into bankruptcy first can console himself with the knowledge that there’s a roots country format waiting just on the other side.