Varulven said:
Lost & Found with Lawrence was fantastic on WMBR today.
As I was moving to our new Varulven Office space
http://myspace.com/varulven at 12:25 PM Lou Reed's "Sweet Jane" from Rock & Roll Animal played - intro & all! Also "Nantucket Sleighride" from Mountain and "You Keep Me Hanging On" from Vanilla Fudge. Amazing radio - WZLX should take not. I'm sticking with WMBR!
Joe, that was Larry Miller, not Lawrence (Azrin). Lawrence unfortunately left the area last month due to personal reasons, and is no longer on WMBR.
Larry Miller, now in his mid-60's and retired from commercial radio, was one of the first FM AOR jocks in the country back when it was "FM underground" radio on KMPX in San Francisco in early 1967. He was a pioneer in the format, the first on the west coast (before the late Tom Donahue).
From there, he went to help establish Detroit's premiere FM AOR station WABX in the late 60's, then back west for a stint on early album rocker KLOS in L.A., back east to AOR WPLJ New York City in the early 70's, progressive rocker WBAB on Long Island, and then finally to AOR WCOZ in Boston in 1977.
A few years later when WCOZ went heavy metal Larry didn't feel like "kicking ass" and he went to the old folk-rock WCAS-AM 740, then he played country on the old WDLW 1330, and he ended up playing classical (which he had originally done in Detroit before he went to California) on WCRB, WBUR (before it went all-news), and WBOQ in Beverly (before it went jazz, then oldies). He actually had applied at WZLX when they came on in the mid-80's, and they had no interest in him. They told him they "lost his demo tape", and he felt he was being treated disrespectfully.
Larry then retired from commercial radio in the early 90's, and is teaching communications at the New England Art Institute in Brookline, along with Jerry "Duke of Madness" Goodwin.
In September 2005, he joined volunteer WMBR at MIT as Tuesday host of the "Lost & Found" 60's/early 70's show as a lark, recreating his days on early "FM underground" and AOR radio. He sort of replaced me, because I was doing that format on that show from 1982 until I chose to quit doing the show (on a regular basis) in September 2004. It became tough doing weekly volunteer radio in today's economy.
If WZLX could have continued making money playing those tunes, they would have. They used to play most of them many years ago. But, the audience they go after is actually a different (slightly younger) generation than those of us fifty-ish folks, and they're not really afficionados of deep cuts from 35 to 40 years ago. Nowadays, their listeners want to hear the hits and just a few of the most popular album warhorses.
If they tried programming to us folks who want AOR like it was in the early 70's, they would get a small "cult following" like WMBR's "Lost & Found" (a non-profit volunteer station with low overhead which doesn't need ratings), but WZLX's ratings among the mainstream majority listenership would tank.
That said, Larry just asked me to fill in for him on my old show on WMBR in two weeks, and I'll have fun recreating late 60's/early 70's AOR for our little cult of old hippies. I can afford to sub for volunteer radio once in a while.
