Station’s New Format Exiles Listeners to Generic Radioland

So, the owners of KORG-AM in Anaheim are changing the format from all-talk to satellite-fed music programming of some sort, and Orange County radio, such as it isn’t, is losing one more shred of its microscopic local identity.

Have you tuned in lately? The format change isn’t complete, but already we are getting a good indication of the Airwaves Yet To Come: Programs are being beamed from who-knows-where, into time slots from which local talk-show hosts recently were cut loose.

It’s clearly a move to slash overhead, to maximize the profits of Win Communications, which bought KORG and sister station KEZY-FM last year. It’s the kind of move we’ve witnessed time and again in the post-Reagan era of deregulation, when broadcast airwaves are treated like any other commodity: a product to be bought low and sold high, the public good be damned.

Now we can hear, via satellite, callers from Tallahassee, Fla., or Canton, Ohio, on generic talk shows (discussing, to cite an example from one recent installment, whether rapists should be castrated) or offering generic dedications to the generic deejay before he/she plays another generic record. All of it, as Stan Freberg used to say, “untouched by human hands.”

OK, maybe the plucky Anaheim station, which has changed formats numerous times--from rock to all-news to religious to talk--never has been certain of its identity. But at least it has tried nominally to exert one. Now one thing seems clear: Any glimmer of individuality is past.

Satellite broadcast services sell themselves to countless stations throughout the country by boasting that they can sound like they originate from anywhere. Of course, they always wind up sounding like Nowhere: “Hey there, everyone, how ya doin’ out there? It’s half past the hour.” You never get a clue where “out there” is, or which hour it’s half past.

Periodically, they cut away to news reports courtesy of CNN. That’s great when you want to know what vegetable President Bush is going to “just say no” to today, but it tells us nothing about who’s going to lose in a new round of county budget cuts or the next target of the Malathion Avengers.

This will be a far cry from KEZY-AM in the ‘70s--a mouse that tried to roar in the overcrowded jungle of rock stations by proclaiming, through bumper stickers and on-air pronouncements, that “KEZY Kicks Ass.”

Crude as that was, it had panache. And it was uncontestably different from the pack. What’s the new slogan for the ‘90s? “KORG Offends No One”?

The big problem with programming supplied by satellite services is that no matter how much advertisers would like us to believe the contrary, people in Orange County don’t have the same interests, backgrounds, local history and cultural interests as folks in Tallahassee or Canton.

We have beaches, smog, freeways, Disneyland, Southeast Asian refugees, palm trees, Robert Schuller, South Coast Plaza, the Medfly, art appearing soon in our airport and oil disappearing not soon enough from our surf. Maybe, just maybe, we even have our own musical tastes.

Back before radio programmers became slaves to demographics experts, stations in Southern California frequently would play records distinctly different than those played in New Orleans, New York or New Jersey.

While most of the rest of the nation was making a Top 10 hit of “Gloria” by the Shadows of Knight, in the Southland heavier airplay went to the meatier, original version by Them. Dick Dale was a major star in Southern California at a time when folks in St. Louis thought surf music meant Elvis singing “Blue Hawaii.” We were Watusi-ing to “Land of 1000 Dances” by East L.A.’s Cannibal & the Headhunters more than a year before Wilson Pickett charted his first Top 10 single with the same song.

That kind of regional diversity was exhilarating. You could develop a kinship with a particular disc jockey’s musical taste, and a sense of pride when a favorite regional hit made the national charts.

But that doesn’t happen anymore, a sad fact of life reiterated in the surrendering of local control at KORG to the faceless Wizards in some far-off satellite Oz.

Now, records are “targeted” and “test marketed”: their popularity demonstrated to radio programmers nationwide before they stand the remotest chance of commercial radio airplay. Forget about hearing anything not in the upper reaches of the national charts.

And that means one deejay is as good (or bad) as the next, because play lists are predetermined by statisticians. The type of deejay who defined rock-and-roll radio--some Joe with a great voice and great ears--couldn’t get arrested in today’s world.

If there were dozens of commercial radio stations operating in Orange County, one fewer might be no great shakes. But KORG is one of only two AM stations here (the other, KWIZ-AM, is a Spanish-language station). There are a handful of FM stations, some of which nominally call attention to their point of origin, mostly via their traffic and weather reports.

Once KORG’s owners decided to change the format back to music, they had a chance to be different, to create an entity that really spoke to and about Orange County--something that might actually give listeners a reason to tune in. Instead, the station merely becomes one more pushpin on the national subscriber map hanging in the offices of a satellite radio service.

How ya doin’ out there? It’s half past later than you think.