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by R. C. (RCat) Arquette
Back in the day (I'm so trendy and hip!) we had AM radio that played the Top 40 Countdown each week. This format was the same for rock, R&B, or country. Whatever was popular was put on a list and played to death! If you liked a new song, it wasn't long until you couldn't get the damn thing out of your head and you ended up hoping you never heard it again. The songs you hated from the start could cause fits of insanity when played at the wrong time on the radio and led to breakups, fist-fights, and cars leaving the highway at high rates of speed. The signal on AM always was terrible. If it rained the lightning would create all kinds of static in the sound. When there was sunspot activity, we picked up the English language propaganda programs out of Cuba creeping in over the latest tune by Roy Orbison or Del Shannon. If you traveled up the road to the next town, by the time you got there, half the time the signal had faded to nothing but a lot of hiss and crackle. All this was annoying, but at least the disk-jockeys that spun these bits of vinyl could pick what they liked to play and not what they were told to play by some mega-company. A lot of hits were generated through local air-play, a local group might catch on and move up to regional air-play, and if the gods were with them, national air-play and hit records. We got to hear bands and artists from our area or state on the radio and in several occurrences they ended up going national, but, the point is, the music was picked by the jock and verified by the listening public. The stations just raked in the revenue from ad sales and stayed out of the music. FM came along somewhere big in the late 60's. It was a clean signal almost all the time and offered the option, in some areas, of actually having stereo sound. The sales of AM/FM radios soon took off and the old AM only sets disappeared. FM spawned a new era of radio. The most obvious newcomer was the 'underground sound' stations that played album cuts and songs by groups that weren't ordinarily or necessarily on the play-lists at the Top 40 Stations that had moved over to FM. The jocks were cool, stony, and laid-back as opposed to the rapid fire DJ's from Top 40. We hippie types of the era relished the heavy sounds of the underground and tuned in, turned on, and dug the grooves. We were hipped to the likes of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, Spirit, The Mothers of Invention, The Bob Seger System, The Steve Miller Band, Ultimate Spinach, Chocolate Watchband, Rotary Connection, Iron Butterfly, and a hundred more groups that were mind-blowing musical giants or mind-numbing flukes that passed quickly into the cut-out bin at the local record store. The concert idea had been born in New York with the old 50's shows of WABC and WNBC and Allen Fried, but they reached a wider audience with the advent of 60's FM radio and the underground. Even the smaller towns across America were soon sponsoring the likes of The Vanilla Fudge and Blue Cheer at the local Municipal Auditorium or the National Guard Armory. The clothes and hair and ideals followed the acts from one town to the next, like a psychedelic Johnny Appleseed, planting the seeds of a new, more informed, and vocal generation. It was at this time that big business, the evil empire that all non-conforming hippies and youth of the time were continually battling, saw a way to make a bigger buck off the phenomena and jumped in with all four of it's corporate greedy feet. It's been downhill ever since. The only radio left in America that is still playing a true mix of music, based on the tastes of the disk jockeys, is Public Radio or stations affiliated with the college campuses. There may be a few independents out there that practice an eclectic selection of music for air-play, but for the most part radio play has all fallen under the direction of a single minded corporate entity. They base what is played on demographics. Simply stated, demographics are surveys done to determine who makes up a particular radio stations listening area. These stations sell air time and in order to justify the cost of these ads, they have to know who is listening, how many are listening, at what time they're listening, what their age group is, what their income is, what they drink, drive, eat, brush their teeth with and want to be when they grow up. Sounds like a lot; it is. In old radio you spun a tune that sounded good to you. Today you weigh all the variables to determine the maximum number of people you can get to listen to your station and then you play what you feel that demographic wants to hear. Notice I said, play 'what you feel' they want to hear, not 'what they want to hear,' because often this scientific approach to second guess your listeners fails. If it were 100% accurate, a true science, you wouldn't have as many changes in station ownership, format, and personnel; both on-air talent and the sales team needed to pay for it all. People might tune in to hear a particular jock's show because they know the guy plays the sort of stuff they like to hear. If he plays something new, chances are they're going to like it too. This is the way it used to be, it could be that way now, but the guys in the suits and ties are too deep into paying for big homes and fast cars to let up and let the jocks do their own thing; it wouldn't be good for the bottom line. That is the pity of it all. So now, if you want to find out about new artists or new releases by old artists that you like, you have to hit the internet. Check out those music sites that can keep you informed as to what is up and coming, maybe even sample some cuts so you can tell if you want to invest in the CD. Or if you just want to hear something different turn on Public Radio and let the jock take you for a musical walk through some of the stuff that's turning them on. You may not like all of it, but then who ever really likes all of what they hear anyway? And if you happen to come across something cool, something incredible, something that you just can't keep from sharing, let me know. I'm so burned out on the mindless repetition of 'clone radio' I need to find something to keep my musical brain from shriveling up. For those who came in late, I'll sum up my rant by simply stating, in the vernacular of the day, 'radio sucks.' I wish it weren't so, I miss the underground sound with the wind-chimes and the soft music playing under the DJ's voice and the entire sides of albums dropped on a turntable and left to play out their magic on the airwaves. Where are you guys now? Jack E. Rabbit, Cousin Brucie, Arnie 'Woo Woo' Ginsberg, and all the other jocks that spent hours hunched over a microphone talking about and spinning the music that unlocked our minds. We need you guys more than ever. Now if we could just figure out some way to separate the big business and the almighty buck from the radio equation all would be right with the world. Will it happen? There is always hope, but being the curmudgeon that I am, I'd have to answer that by saying, 'Nah! No way, no how! Kiss that time goodbye and hope we don't sink any further into the musical morass of modern day radio sameness. An iced coffee and a little personal time with the old CD collection is in order. Think I'll start by playing Edgar Winter's White Trash, "Give it Everything You Got." Yeah! That ought'a kick out the jams! Your faithful
reporter - RCat Who is this Guy RCat? Currently, his duties include acting as the head of a family consisting of an overworked wife, a vibrating teenaged son, and an over stimulated housecat. An elder daughter resides at some distance with her own family; a husband, two sons, and a daughter. As head of this merry band of pranksters, the illusionary aspects of his carefree life are played out on the stage of daily routine. RCat is a self described "survivor," having lived through the "flower power" promises of the 1960's with the goals of world peace, universal brotherhood, free-love, and the legalization of certain organic herbs. Contrary to what others might say, he can still remember parts of it quite vividly. Sadly, those cosmic issues have now been reduced to the cliché. He now, more realistically, understands the world has gone quite mad and no longer cares to be a part of the continuing descent into oblivion. The thought of putting on a loincloth to venture forth and live out his days meditating in a tall tree in a distant forest sounds appealing. Of course, he isn't kidding himself. Chances are a noisy bunch of cretins will quickly invade the tree next to him. Ah well, such is the way of this planet we call home. In the meantime, he scribbles poetry, short stories, and essays, as well as a choppy stream of drawings, cartoons and works of art. All done with a grin as meditative mental therapy in an effort to hold onto what little remains of his sanity. Enjoy him while you can, he is the quintessential endangered species.
For more from RC visit his columns: February, January, Decmeber, November, October; and his poetry or his home. |
Nothin' Better
Songs
of
I read a statistic a while ago, can't remember
where, that says 80 some percent of the radio stations in this
country are owned by about 3 or 4 major corporations. I was wondering
why everything on the dial sounded like it was coming from the
same play list, now I know why. It doesn't seem to matter that
you're listening to a country station, a pop station, a rock
station, or whatever, they all have that same sound; spin across
the channels, and short of a different jingle, call numbers,
or call letters, you'd be hard to tell what you were listening
to. Maybe the manufacturers of radios could save money on each
new unit by only putting one button on it for channel selection;
if they all sound alike all you really need is one channel, right?
R.
C. Arquette, "RCat" to friends and fellow writers,
is an aging hippie and practicing curmudgeon. He was dragged
into the world, kicking and screaming, back in the middle of
the last century; 1950 to be exact. His outburst clearly showed
his disdain for reality at the earliest of stages. He grew up
living in the sub-tropical splendor of the "Sunshine State,"
Florida, US of A, where he attended Jr. College and after twenty
years received his AA degree; what can I say, life kept getting
in the way.
