Radio betrayed me

I never listen to the radio anymore. Never. When I was young I listened to the radio all the time. That’s how I found out about new bands. That’s how I heard new music. Certain songs would get stuck in my head, certain bands would become my favorites, and I would buy their records. I would always have a favorite radio station and usually a favorite DJ.

When I was in college, I listened to WLBS. They played great stuff, Adam Ant, the Clash, the B-52’s, Fun Boy 3, Bananarama, Boomtown Rats, Peter Gabriel, X, Eurythmics, the list just went on and on. They were wonderful. They had a lot of great DJs, but Mike Halloran was the best. I listened to ‘LBS day and night. And then one morning my clock radio came on, and...and...it was playing...’60’s music! What? Had someone changed the station on my radio? No. WLBS had changed format. In the middle of the night. With no warning. I felt sick. I went to work, and a coworker who was a fellow ‘LBS listener and I just stared at each other. He said, “they were playing the Doors.” I nodded sadly and said, “yeah.”

I was part of a group of listeners that protested outside the station two weekends in a row, asking them to bring back our old format, but it was futile. We were a bunch of poor 19-year-olds. People who listened to their new format were a wealthier demographic and brought in more advertising dollars. It was strictly a business decision. Radio, I learned, has nothing to do with music at all.

My coworker said he heard that Halloran got out of his contract by playing “Taps” for every other song until the management fired him, which didn’t take very long. Halloran was so cool.

For a long time after that I didn’t have a radio station to listen to. It was frustrating. I’d search up and down the dial and find nothing. Eventually I found Dave Dixon’s show on WDET. WDET is a public radio station, and the format varies greatly depending on whose show you’re listening to. I think that’s a good thing, but I really didn’t like some of the other shows that much. I liked Dave’s show though, and I liked Dave. He played an eclectic mix of rock, folk, new classical, and world music. I’m not sure, but I think Dave introduced me to They Might Be Giants. I remember him playing Suzanne Vega, Jane Siberry, Philip Glass, and some really cool African musicians whose names have long since escaped me. I listened to Dave for a couple of years. And then one day, he was gone. I read in the newspaper that he had been fired, but there was no further explanation. Huh? They just up and fired my favorite DJ?

I never did find out what happened. Dave Dixon is dead now. I saw his obituary in the paper some years later. You were good, Dave.

Again I was without a radio station.

For the next couple of years I just gave up on radio. The few times I tried listening to it, everything sounded like someone had turned on a drum machine and started singing but forgotten to do anything else. It was just too painful to listen to, and I quickly turned it off. It wasn’t music.

A few years later I was desperate enough to give it another try. I was working in the most mind-numbingly dull job ever, so I brought in music to listen to on headphones to keep from going mad. I had a limited supply of tapes though, and they used up the batteries faster than the radio. So I gave the radio another try. Up and down the dial I went. And what did I find? A station out of Windsor, 93.9 “The River,” playing...what’s this? B-52’s? The Clash? Eurythmics? Can it be?! I kept listening, and they kept playing stuff I liked! Music I remembered from the early 80’s and loved, and occasionally music I had completely forgotten about and was just so incredibly happy to hear again. And they occasionally played stuff from the 70’s that was just good to hear, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley...just really great stuff. And then occasionally they would play new music, but it was actually good! They introduced me to artists that had come on the scene since my exile from radio, Tori Amos, Natalie Merchant, Crash Test Dummies. I listened to the River all day. I liked the music they played, and the DJs were likable people. My favorite was Jeff “Zippy” Crow. Zippy got me through the morning. He talked enough to wake me up, but he wasn’t obnoxious. He seemed like a genuinely nice person.

Then one morning Zippy was just gone. They had gotten rid of him. No explanation. (Are you out there, Zippy? Can you drop me a line and tell me what you’re up to? Can you tell me what happened? See my home page for contact info.)

And then they changed their format. At first they kept playing the same music, but they started adding oldies to the mix. It was a small percentage, but it gradually increased. The music I liked became a smaller and smaller percentage. I wanted to listen to the Boomtown Rats and Tori Amos and They Might Be Giants. I didn’t mind some oldies. I like a few Aretha Franklin songs now and again. But I don’t ever want to hear the Rolling Stones. Ever. They suck. They kept playing the Rolling Stones.

I felt betrayed. How many times is radio going to do this to me? I couldn’t listen to the River anymore. I couldn’t stand to listen to the Rolling Stones every hour, and I couldn’t stand to listen to a station that I knew had fired Zippy.

So off I went in search of another station. I still had the mind-numbingly dull job, so I still needed a radio station to listen to. I found 96.3 “The Planet,” which played mostly the same music that the River had played before their format change, though there were some differences. No Stevie Wonder or Bob Marley. And since the River had been in Windsor while the Planet was in Detroit, the Planet wasn’t bound by Canadian content laws. I really missed Crash Test Dummies, the Tragically Hip, Jane Siberry, and lots of other Canadian artists who just aren’t recognized on this side of the border. But the Planet was mostly a good substitute. They played lots of music I liked. So I listened to the Planet all day long. The only DJ that sticks out in my mind was “Johnny in the morning.” He eventually became my favorite over time. And so I wasn’t surprised when they fired him. Becoming Riin’s favorite DJ seems to be a fireable offense. And I wasn’t surprised when the station changed format shortly thereafter. Oldies. What a shock. I was just happy to finally get a different job where I can use more than two brain cells so I don’t have to listen to the radio to keep from going insane.

For the next few years, whenever I wanted to listen to music I listened to my CDs. Eventually I realized I was listening to They Might Be Giants (TMBG for short) more and more. I realized...these guys are geniuses! They should have gotten WAY more airplay! I hardly ever heard them on the radio, and when I did, it was only a couple of songs. One would think a couple of songs was all they ever did, when in reality, they are so amazingly prolific I have to wonder if they ever sleep (they do drink a LOT of coffee...).

I started wondering, if radio had kept so many wonderful TMBG songs from the public ear, what else had it been hiding?

At http://www.tmbg.org/band-info/faq/ one of the FAQs is “I like TMBG, what other bands might I like?” Hmm. Many, many bands are listed in the answer. Some of them I’d heard of, but many I had’t. I wanted to hear the ones I hadn’t. I asked a friend how to download MP3’s, and she explained how Audiogalaxy worked. I got it set up and started searching for some of these bands I had never heard of, but some fellow TMBG fans thought other TMBG fans might like. For each band name I entered, a bunch of song titles came up, sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds. I picked four or five with interesting sounding titles to download.

Once they were downloaded, I listened to them. Some of them sucked. I didn’t like those bands at all. No need to keep those files. I just deleted them. Others were alright to listen to once, but I didn’t need to ever hear it again. Nothing to write home about. Some, though, were just so amazing cool, I felt myself of two minds; on the one hand, I was so happy to hear this wonderful music. Shonen Knife’s music is just so insanely catchy, so amazingly happy, they’re a joy to listen to! On the other hand, how come nobody ever told me about them before?! I have NEVER heard them on the radio! NEVER! They’ve been around for 20 years! How come I’ve never heard them on the radio?! Once again, radio has betrayed me.

The recording industry thinks that people downloading MP3’s will be the death of the music industry. No, the music industry is killing itself. I’m not going to buy music I’ve never heard or never even heard of. They just keep playing the same sorry stuff on the radio and don’t give other artists a chance to be heard. Once I started downloading MP3’s and hearing new artists, I got excited about new music and started buying CD’s again. After not buying any CD’s for about two years, I bought about 30 CD’s in two months. I bought 5 Shonen Knife CD’s, 3 by Soul Coughing, 3 by Cub, 4 by TMBG, 2 by Mono Puff, 1 by John Linnell and many more. Out of all the songs on all the CD’s I bought, I remembered hearing one of the Soul Coughing songs on the radio.

The recording industry is short-sighted and greedy. They’re not looking at the big picture at all. They talk about downloading MP3’s for a fee now, as if that’s the answer to everything. So it will be the same limited selection as what’s on the radio, only I’ll have to pay for it? I didn’t choose MP3’s over radio because I preferred that format. I chose MP3’s because that was the only way to hear artists I would never otherwise hear.

Audiogalaxy is dead. For a while Kazaa was a decent replacement, but now the recording industry is doing everything it can to kill it. I read recently that the industry is now suing individual users of Kazaa. Fine. Be that way. I’ll stop using it. I’ll never hear music by a new artist ever again unless the artists are smart enough to realize that they’ll have to find a way to promote themselves because the recording industry sure isn’t going to do it. Fortunately some are and give away free MP3’s on their websites. Anyone with more than two brain cells realizes that nobody is going to buy music they’ve never heard. But I suspect not all artists are so entrepreneurial, and so the result is I’m buying fewer CD’s than if the recording industry weren’t such short-sighted, greedy money-grubbers. And I’m likely to buy those CD’s directly from the artists, putting more money in the artists’ pockets, not in the recording industry’s filthy claws. I’ll give my money to people who’ve earned it. Greed should not be rewarded.