Is Anyone Still Listening to The Radio?

[sleepy]

I mean old school broadcast radio for your music. With the 6 minute commercial breaks every 12-16 minutes for everything from heart medication with the list of deadly side effects to lawyers to viagra/cialis? Or, talk instead of songs?

Or is that only happening on the classic rock stations in L.A.?

I tune in to The Sound (Album Oriented Rock classics and moldy-but-good deep grooves) on very rare occasions, else for a night or two I listen to K-OST FM when they're playing the annual month-long Christmas songs 24/7.

Jim Ladd (the D.J. that Tom Petty's "The Last D.J." is about) was layed off at KLOS and went to Sirius , which is where I quit listening to KLOS.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

about ten years ago i was still listening to airwave radio. WXPN (U.of PA for folk rock, international pop), WKDU (drexel U. for punk, indy, reggae), oldies station du jour, temple U for jazz / classical, WDRE (defunct) for alt-rock.

university radio was always more experimental, less commercial, and sometimes genuinely hilarious. widener U's station even got me hooked on rap back in 1988 - 1989, when rap was still playful and creative. (what a steaming load of excrement it turned in to later on)


fast forward to today... thank the cosmos for somaFM, magnatune, skyFM. pure streams of magic that enhance me all day long. even in my meditation. :)

 

[sleepy]

So you now listen to music mostly on the Net?
Radio for me is like t.v. I got tired of waiting for what I want to look in to.
I'll still give an airwave station a listen, like KKCR, but online.
It has to be playing something that is not available here.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

mostly? well... i can't even remember the last time i turned on a radio to listen to it. i probably have done so in the past ten years, i just can't remember when, exactly.

but streaming radio is --all about-- hearing something that you can't hear locally. it's like some visionary new way to enjoy music, only it's right here, right now. the lower-sampled music also plays fine over dialup IME. lower K-rates also sound jolly good to me, even played over my nice bose and all.

anyway, thousands of really swell stations from all over the world await the curious-minded. it's like an eclectic dream, made real.


it's like that, or it is that?
- garrison keillor joke i always liked, usually spoken to a ditz.


EDIT: in particular, i wonder how you would like the "secret agent" station on somaFM. it's a shitload of fun... and never heard any kind of mix like that, before.

 

[sleepy]

That reminds me. Garrison is on a concert tour doing, I guess, Home Prairie Companion or similar. He's playing at The Greek some time this year. Have to look it up.

 

[StevOz]

I usually have the ABC on hear @ work...

http://www.abc.net.au/radio/

 

[faralos]

I used to but recently my favorite station went belly up
and is now only playing the recent pop crap instead of the old rock they used to
so it's back to my collection of cd's when I am in my car
and Pandora the music site when I am home
but there seems to be more than I thought that play rock
near to me
http://www.ontheradio.net/metro/philadelphia_pa.aspx

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

That reminds me. Garrison is on a concert tour doing, I guess, Home Prairie Companion or similar. He's playing at The Greek some time this year. Have to look it up.

prairie dog companion.

no rush, either... each show is pretty much the same, although the topicality deviates a bit. you can also listen to decades-worth of the shows online.

 

[Coil_Smoke]

Yes Broadcast Radio.....

Yes I listen to broadcast radio about 25% of the time music is on around here.. We are lucky to have several decent radio stations scattered around the Baltimore area. WTMD comes from Towson State University. It's not the underground wonder that used to come from Towson State. They do get better every year. It's a nice mix of old and new alternative music. Below is a link where you can get a listen.

http://www.wtmd.org/player/index.html

WRNR is an alternative radio station out of Annapolis Maryland.

http://player.streamtheworld.com/liveplayer.php?CALLSIGN=WRNRFMEB&playnextauto=true#Main

We also have 98 rock from Baltimore they have decent classic rock on HD 2. On 100.7 we have classic rock and they play RUSH(Coming To Town In May) I almost forgot the most recent incarnation of WHFS. For over 25 years that station was the bomb. They changed from an underground rock format to a mainstream yuppie alternative format in the 90's and the station died a lingering death after 10 years. Now after about six years WHFS is back on the air in Baltimore but that is some suck ass alternative radio and an abomination compared to what they used to be.

 

[yogiholzer]

I listen to this radio station each day in the morning and when in car:
http://www.deltaradio.de/Livestream.html
I usually don't use the live streams.

 

[mrschultz]

widener U's station even got me hooked on rap back in 1988 - 1989:)

How weird to see that, I was a student there in the early 80's, still working there. If anyone was watching 6ABC news a few weeks ago you would have seen the back of my head when they did a 1 minute segment about our special high school teachers night at the observatory.

The campus station was kicked off the air by new FCC rules a while back, when they killed off stations under 10 watts, but they are back on the air and streaming:

http://wdnrfm.org/

As for the question, I don't listen to the radio for music anymore, with all the mp3 players I've got. I do listen to the radio in the car for news and traffic, and I listen to the Phillies games on the radio even if they are on TV, can't stand the TV guys, love the radio guys.

 

[sleepy]

Television has become too detached, too nationalized, too secular.
Local television is no longer local or relevant. It is trendy, but who uses that?

I remember way back (Warning: Old Fart Remembering Things) when local television and radio featured personnel who were truly believable as being one of the people
in the community. They were personable and personal and polite and friendly and informed.
Anymore, the news on t.v. is manned by either CNN rejects or
they're from The Smiley Morning Shows, behaving both Airheaded and Snarky at the same time. Like Tabloid Readers.

In the west, the local Los Angeles t.v. was The West, promoting Farmer John Hot Dogs and Oscar Meyer Smoky Links and local car dealerships, Cal Worthington, etc.
And Cal financed the All Night Movies on KTTV Ch. 11, and they were worth watching.
Anything from Caine Mutiny to Laura to Peckinpah's "Major Dundee", and an emphasis on horror films, the early gothic Mario Bava with Barbara Steele and "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" and "Eyes Without a Face, a.k.a. (I think) "The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock" (love those).

And Ch. 13 featured the mexican horror films like "Curse of the Aztec Mummy".
The horrors were typically the ripping out of a heart, like a certain Indiana Jones movie, but in black and white with low production values and a quick stop at the meat market for props.
Some of these were funny as they often featured a wrestler as the hero.

Now, Everything is decentralized and Metro Mod, except for the low budget Spanish, Asian, Vietnamese, Armenian, etc. subchannels.

One of the Spanish channels runs late model Hollywood A films, but in Spanish-Only due to contract restrictions. Read that as "English Distribution Contracts for Digital Cable Channels for $$$", but if you can understand Spanish, the same films are there, gratis.

 

[Coil_Smoke]

Lost In Translation...

All Spanish Broadcasts should be closed captioned in English.:deal:

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

marty, hey!

i know what you mean about the broadcaster thing. kalas / ashburn were pure magic when i first started listening in the 70's, but there were many permutations across the TV / radio thing... many 'best case' scenerios to grab hold of... just as many to avoid. wheeler, silverman... um... gary maddox a bit? it's been decades for me. so many names i can't remember.

much the same with the sixers broadcasts, years later.


much the same when bob tried on his first diaper, a couple decades earlier... a topic we deliberately try to avoid around here. :)

 

[LeeVanCleef]

I quit listening to commercial radio the minute I quit working in commercial radio. Once you've done time on the airwaves, it pretty much kills any urge to hear the same old crap over and over again. I really got out while the getting was good, in the mid-90s. If you're even listening to a station that has a live morning show, chances are they're the only "live" people on the air. Everything else is just pre recorded breaks that a computer pops in between the songs. For all intents and purposes, radio,as most of us knew it growing up, is dead.
However, I am quite the NPR addict... mostly All Things Considered and This American Life. And for music, there's always World Cafe, a pretty decent alternative music show on most public radio stations. There does seem to be a wider range of cool public radio stations here in Madison, I just haven't had a chance to give them a listen yet.

 

[sleepy]

So ruby, do you have any stories to tell about "the request line"?
Did they even pay attention to it?
And...what about the gophers who answer the phone?
Instead of the D.J.?

In the heat of the Hazing...you know that one...way back when I thought it was about a girl I knew in high school...
One night on K-RTH FM, the station that the hazers were channeling through so to speak, with phony and sometimes insulting 'dedications', well, one night they got hot and heavy and I had previously been told that 'the girl' had been living in Hawaii as an actress. The phony dedications began for the evening and there was a particular emphasis on the song "Two Tickets to Paradise" and...oh, I might have needed about a month's worth of sleep by then, but I suddenly got the brilliant idea that, after all the distant ass chewing and haranging that I had been through without provocation, including "the one yard-long turd" that was left in the toilet by someone while I was assigned to maintenance duties at Warner Bros. Records, well shit, that I must go to K-RTH and pick up my plane tickets to fly to Hawaii and her...

Well...no. That wasn't it. But as I drove to the station, the D.J. is "on-the-air", right? Taking requests and dedications. And 'being one with the people'.
But when I walked into the station and the control room, there was no one there at all, but for this one girl who wasn't her. What I saw was wall-to-wall studio racks of gear and players and VU meters and digital meters, and that one girl who wasn't her.

So they were already doing phantom broadcasting in 1978-79 in L.A. At least RKO/Hughes (then owner of K-RTH) was.
And it dawns on me that, this means that all of the insulting personal flames in my direction were also pre-recorded, though the locals were capitulating in real-time.

But I hated K-RTH in '78. They were one of the (floundering) goody-good top 40 stations at that time. I was strictly free-form/AOR with some folk and a very small amount of classical.

 

[sleepy]

And yeah! The Anglo stations often provide Spanish on the S.A.P. and on the closed caption, but the Spanish stations never provide English in any form in L.A.
Again, as for movies, it's likely the cable t.v. contracts with the movie distributors that are the culprit, but not for original programming. None of the other language stations do it either, no matter their language of choice.

It might help to know that the Spanish stations are largely owned by the same Big 3 or 4 American Networks. For instance, Telemundo is owned by NBC Universal and they show English language movies that never air on NBC El Norté.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Yeah, "requests." Here's how we worked requests; if someone called in and requested a song that was part of our programming, we'd play it. And, of course, we taped and played the request on the air, to make it sound like, yeah, of course we play requests! But if the request wasn't part of our programming... let me just say that there were a lot of very disappointed Metallica fans who didn't get to hear "Enter Sandman".
BTW, sleepy, my program director at the time was once a big muckity-muck in LA radio. His name was Sherman Cohen, or Jeff Ryan on-air. Don't know if you ever heard of him or not. He was Wolfman Jack's... I guess "caretaker" would be the best word... during the Wolfman's post-Grafitti heyday. He told me about a time Wolfman Jack and Robert Plant were partying together. I immediately called bullshit. And then Sherman pulled out a picture of the Wolfman and Robert fucking Plant. Probably one of the strangest rock pairings I've ever seen.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

this thread is starting to get psychedelic.

earlier i aborted a post on wolfman jack so as not to bring a cliche' element in to the thread, then WJ gets mentioned from out of nowhere!

meanwhile in my favorite podcast of all podcasts, the "whadya know, michael feldman show," do you know who the loveable caller is who keeps badgering the host? i mean, the person he sounds exactly like, in any case?

yes, wolfman jack! i mean, i already loved him anyway from long ago, so this was just bonus points, reflections and redirections along that comfortable pathway, and.... score!

and do you know where feldman typically broadcasts his show from?

yes, madison, WI

and do you know where one of our good friends here is currently living? yup, you guessed it!

so then... basically just a roundabout way of saying that i love your radio / DJ anecdotes when you care to share them, bill.

whenever you hold out on us, you know you're just an asshole who hates elvis, right? ok then, just wanted to remind you, nothing more. :)

 

[sleepy]

I'm sorry to say that Mr. Cohen passed away ten years ago.

http://www.laradio.com/wherec.htm

He was at my former favorite station KRLA which I listened to up until the early 70's when I finally got my own FM and could tune in to K-MET. By the time of his PD there, KRLA was in the A.M. slumps. In L.A., the Boss Radio KHJ AM was the king until AOR and KMET took over. KRLA was the cool choice and did very well until the 70's. By the time of his PD, KRLA dropped their coolness factor and became a Boss Radio clone to little avail. It floundered as a copycat.

The nail in the coffin for top 40 AM came in the form of KIIS FM. KIIS took over for top 40 and secured their position with the hiring of Rick Dees. I can't remember if that was during his tenure or not, but by then and for sure, KIIS was No. #1 for Top 40 hits, even besting local legend "The Real Don Steele" who worked at KIQQ FM to little avail.

Something that many people are not aware of is that Led Zeppelin lived in L.A. in the late 60's/early 70's. At the start in the late 60's they were playing weekly gigs at The Whiskey-A-Go-Go. Which is where the song "Goin' to California" probably comes from.
The Beatles owned a house in L.A. by 1966.
And Supertramp lived in L.A. up until '77. Roger Hodges' brother Nick lives somewhere in California. And Mick Fleetwood owns a restaurant and tavern here, and was unsuccessful in trying to resurrect Laserium at The Vine Theater, trying to do it as a movie theater experience on a standard movie screen instead of doing the glorious Griffith Observatory Experience in the Surround.

And my foggy memory. Elsewhere I linked Wolfman Jack to "The Mighty 690"
but apparently that should be "The Mighty 1090"

And I'm still trying to place the significance of the VHS dupe of Rod Stewart's "Hot Legs" which I delivered (while working at Image Transform)...to the Warner Bros. Home Office, being told that "it was the air print for that week's "Midnight Special". And yes, "Hot Legs" aired that week and I didn't question it at the time, but would they actually use a Stock Home-Grade VHS Cassette for a network broadcast?
Why wouldn't it be a pro cart/ U-Matic cart or pro-reel?

Image Transform was a video shop specializing in pro color correction and noise reduction using electronic and video transfer schemes for film, even for films such as "Apocalypse Now!"

They were best known for processing the blue screen FX for NBC's short-lived series, "The Invisible Man" starring David McCallum.

 

[Itchigo]

I used to listen to George Noory all the time when I worked nights.
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Yeah, I knew about Sherman's passing. Kinda broke my heart... I never would have been on morning drive-time without him. Scary thought... of the five DJs that were on that station when I started, only two of us are still alive. Hope the frequency modulation radiation doesn't catch up with me, too!
Actually, "Going to California" is sort of an "answer" to a Joni Mitchell song. I don't know which one because I have testicles and don't own any Joni Mitchell.
@Nic: there's a Wolfman Jack guy calling into Whaddaya Know? It's been awhile since I heard the show. Kinda stopped listening after I stopped getting up before noon on Saturdays!

 

[sleepy]

I was pushing Joni Mitchell while at WB/Creative Services, and was it "Free Man in Paris"?

And did you receive your DJ copies from Warner Reprise/Creative Services?
Because sometimes the help would five-finger the DJ mailouts somewhere on the way to the post office, behind Mr. Benson's back, and they would often end up at Aaron's Records as "used". the help was often unreliable...
EDIT: Compare that to the time at Image Transform when I delivered a Peter Frampton video at A&M in Hollywood, at his peak in '77, and the lone guy in the front room screamed, "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT?"
I told him, "ummm...I'm here to deliver the Peter Frampton video". "Oh" he said and was then oh so mellow...

Oh...and if you had said "Dory Previn"...ARGHHH!

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

@bill,
yea, the guy's a scream, although i haven't heard him for awhile. don from don's fish shack i think is his name. something like that, anyway.

everyone always loved him, but he called so often that feldman eventually got tired of him. every time the dude calls now, michael hangs up on him a little faster. which is also not his style, so that's kind of fun right there.


and have i got a brooklyn bridge to sell you. MP3 player?
http://feeds.feedburner.com/whadyaknow

 

[sleepy]

I have to defend something here.
Joni Mitchell's "For Free" is one of the finest recordings that I have ever heard.
She does have a few really good ones.