• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Airplay: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio

H

hambone007

Guest
This Best Documentary Award Winner will be playing as a part of the Memphis International Film Festival this weekend. You can read about it in Friday's (04/24/2009) entertainment section. Or click the link at the bottom of this post.

If you want to see how America works, look at what happened to rock radio.For 50 years, it was our revolutionary medium. Radio had the power to move people then. And deejays seized it. In the 1950s, a handful of AM pioneers introduced white America to black rhythm and blues. Then New York deejay Alan Freed changed the course of American history by branding it 'rock and roll.' In the glory years of rock radio, personalities like Cousin Brucie, Murray the K, Dan Ingram, Jerry Blavat, Dick Biondi, Casey Kasem and Wolfman Jack ruled the airwaves.But from its earliest roots, rock radio had powerful enemies. In 1960, prodded by big-business interests, Congress held 'payola' hearings to target the deejays guilty of breaking down economic and racial barriers. Deejays like Alan Freed were booted off the air. Program director and radio consultants took control. Deejays could no longer play their own music. Rock radio became bland and predictable.Then came a new wave of deejays who set up shop on the FM dial. 'Top 40 is dead,' Declared Tom Donahue in San Francisco. 'And its rotting corpse is stinking up the airwaves.' They discovered bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, igniting a cultural revolution that helped end the Vietnam War. Until FM, too, was silenced by FCC intimidation and corporate greed. And 60s rock became 70s disco.When rock radio lost its soul, a flame went out. 'Airplay' pays tribute to those unsung heroes--and the promise of a rebirth on satellite radio. It's a story of love and war, told by the deejays and the artists they made rock stars. It celebrates a time when we all listened together and it changed our lives.

http://www.onlocationmemphis.org/olm/Default.aspx
 
Freed was in Cleveland, I believe. Other than that...b..o..r..i..n..g. I guess I'm past caring. Sorry 'bout that.
 
You're suggesting the payola hearings were not what they appeared (payoffs to DJ's/PD's for playing certain music) but rather to cover booting people off the air who were straying from White-only artists?

Never heard that one before.
 
Very interesting movie. The first half was about the beginning of rock and roll radio in the 50’s. There were lots of interviews with Memphis radio people: Rufus Thomas, George Klein, Dewey Phillips, Rick Dees, etc. WDIA was discussed prominently along with the crossover of teenage whites starting to listen to “black” music. They talked with many of the radio personalities of the 50’s. The dj played the songs he liked and talked as much as he wanted to. After the payola hearings, pd’s were brought in and chose the music. Top 40 began and consultants told the djs to shut up and play the hits. Any of this sound familiar to you? In the 70’s, experimental radio moved to the FM band. When the corporations discovered that there was a profit in it, they moved in. The film ended by implying that the hope of the golden days of radio was now in the hands of satellite. It was a well produced movie, but it has a noticable left-wing bias.
 
BTW, Alan Freed worked in New Castle, PA, Youngstown, OH, and Akron, OH before playing r&b records on WJW in Cleveland, OH. Following his success there, Freed moved to New York City where he turned WINS into a rock and roll radio station. After departing from WINS, Freed for a time was employed in New York by WABC 770 AM. Freed was fired by WABC (1959) during a dispute where he refused to sign a statement certifying that he had never accepted payola.
 
hambone007 said:
The film ended by implying that the hope of the golden days of radio was now in the hands of satellite.
Click to expand...

I guess whoever made this movie was either a) someone who's never heard the bland and plentiful rock selection of one 'Sirius XM' or b) bankrolled by Uncle Mel Karmazin. Whatever change satellite had to make waves vanished with the so-called merger and the elimination of (IMHO) all the better music programmers from the XM side of things.

I quit listening to the music long ago on the service and for some reason pay $13/month just for Opie and Anthony. With them now stuffed into a closet at the Sirius World Headquarters building I dunno how much longer they or I will last.
 
XM is now as bad as FM since the merger. Same songs over and over again and it sounds like an underwater 8 track player with bad broken heads that need to be adjusted. with blown speakers.
 
I know everyone has their own theories and their own agenda, and it's easy to pick on radio owners, but it seems to me the thing that killed rock radio was the splintering of rock music. I often mark the moment as the Run-DMC duet with Aerosmith on Walk This Way. It marked the entre of rap music on MTV. Rap and rock have some common ground, but not a lot. In the early 90s, music became even more polarized than it was with Disco. You could empty a room with just one song. That made it harder to program a radio station. You play Nirvana and you lose the Nick Lowe and Squeeze fans.

Musical tastes became carved in stone, and no one wanted to sit through music they hated for a song they might like. MTV realized it at their annual Music Awards. So they started shifting their time away from polarizing music and more towards lifetsyle reality shows.

The splintering of rock music made it tougher to get enough listeners to make the format sellable. It's led to multiple subformats like Classic Rock and Soft Rock. Even Jack and AAA. All that eats away at the single sellable rock format. The country folks realized that 15 years ago. That's why they work hard to keep the format unified, even if it means loosing the extremes like the more traditional and alternative stuff. As a result country radio is among the most popular in the US.

To me, I've always loved all kinds of music. In one sitting I can go from Big Joe Turner to Mozart to The Clash to the Carpenters to Clint Black. It's all good to me. But I know I'm in the minority.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom