Turn your radio on

Radio is not dead, but radio’s effect on music is nothing like it used to be. If we want to think about the evolution of music over the 20th century, that has to be part of the discussion.

Commercial radio began in 1920, and before television became the core broadcasting entity in the 50s, radio was the mass market. It wasn’t just music, of course. There was drama and sitcoms and news and just about everything you can think of. I tend to connect the rise of Swing music with the preeminence of radio in the 40s, “coming to you live from the Yadda Yadda ballroom.” Even in my lifetime, dramatic radio was a presence; my mother would be doing her chores in the kitchen when I was knee high to the proverbial, and she’d be listening to Gunsmoke. The radio was always on, and there was a lot of talking coming out of it. As everyone knows, early television in the late 40s and 50s was as often as not the visual version of an existing radio program, i.e., radio with pictures. All the dramatic structures, and commercial breaks, were already in place. They just shifted the medium.

Radio did not die, replaced by television. Old media don’t necessarily die when new media are born; if they want to survive, they adjust. AM radio adjusted, becoming mostly a news and music medium, which makes sense when you remember that, along with a television in every living room following World War II, there was a car in every garage, and a radio in every car. One didn’t listen to the radio because it was 8:00 and your show was on; one listened to the radio because one had a ten minute drive to the store. News and songs, the sort of thing it doesn’t matter when you jump in, worked perfectly. Not to mention that AM radios became cheap and portable (transistors), accessible to the growing Baby Boomer market. AM Top Ten Radio eventually ruled the airwaves. And in some markets like New York, it wasn’t just one station. There were some serious contenders out there battling it out. They were playing those 45 rpm records, and kids would buy those records as a result of hearing them played over and over. (The payola scandal was about bribing DJs to play certain songs.) As far as popular music was concerned, AM radio was it. AM was the medium of Motown, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Louis Armstrong’s “Hello Dolly” and “The Monster Mash.” I have no idea who was buying the father-daughter “Something Stupid,” but when it came out it was inescapable and became one of Frank’s biggest hits ever. Really. “Strangers in the Night” was no doubt up there as well; at least Nancy sat that one out.

Listening to the radio in the car was one of the memes of the times. A song would come on the radio. You would decide in an instant whether to listen to it or not, and as quickly as that, if the decision were negative, you’d press the dial to the next station. Again, the decision. Again, if negative, the next station. There were times when you would hear one great song after another, although not necessarily the whole thing, via the clicking of the dial. There were times when you would click and click and click and click, and it was nothing but something stupid, or worse, “Something Stupid.”

“Don’t touch that dial!” we were warned. Something good was coming. If we ever listened to a commercial, it was a miracle. “Can’t you just leave it on one station?” the parent would inevitably moan. Parents listened to radio stuff like the news where one station would suffice, whereas kids clicked away the minute the news came on. There was plenty of good radio, of course, that had nothing to do with any of this, like Bob & Ray and Gene Klavan and Jean Shepherd, but they were the exceptions. For my generation, it was about the music, and on AM, the music was all about the hits. And the hits were Soul, British Invasion, Blue-eyed Kid-Pop and oddball stuff like Sinatra and Armstrong. And all of it was singles, 45 rpms, if we wanted to hear these songs at home.

That was the nature of free music until roughly the mid-60s, when FM hit its stride. There was suddenly, although I don't think it wasn’t called that yet, Album-Oriented Rock. This was music beyond the hits, although over the subsequent generation a lot of it became hits, now known as Classic Rock. Now you could hear music that was, perhaps, less commercial, and discover new music. FM was the breeding ground for Classic Rock. Everything starts somewhere. WNEW-FM in New York was the main station around here. Hendrix, the Doors, CSN, Cream, Traffic, Airplane, etc.—AOR is where we first really learned about them, until someone bought their albums and we sat down and listened at home.

Radio was important for a long time for my generation, first hooking us into pop aimed at us with AM hits, then taking us deeper into what rock could do with musicians who would ultimately become iconic, and whose music is still listened to. We got all of this initially from the radio.

I’ve never stopped listening to rock, but nowadays it is only one of the kinds of music I enjoy, and no one would ever say that I keep up with what’s going on. Rock got sort of boring in the early 70s and I began to get serious about classical music and theater music and then jazz and cowboy swing and various “world” musicians, until by now my iPod is something of a marvel even to me. Random play for me is really random. In the 70s, FM radio helped me out with all of this, because there were solid commercial stations playing just about anything you might want to hear. Most of which, as far as I can tell, has gone away, and I’m not quite sure why. Certainly in the present environment, internet music has replaced the radio, but the falling off of radio predated the arrival of ubiquitous internet music by many years. Part of this may have to do with the nature of music itself, at least popular music. Rock fragmented into pop and country and punk and hiphop and so forth, and instead of one mainstream music from different founts, now if you liked X you listened to X and the hell with the rest of it. This has always been true, of course, but people who listen to classical not listening to bluegrass is quite different from people not liking country rock listening to punk rock. The former are both music, a broad base, but the latter are both rock, a narrow base. Whatever. The narrowing of interests in our present culture goes a lot further than just music. Our technologies progressively allow us to more easily stay behind our particular firewalls, because apparently that’s what most of us want. And so we do. It’s absolutely true of television, where literal broadcasting is apparently on its last legs, and its true of music.

Curiously, I started all this thinking because of my belief that movies lately were too broad, i.e., too much concentrating on the biggest potential income earners in a saddening display of non-creativity. Maybe that’s just an example of the lowest common denominator visible in all mass entertainment. The most popular movies aren’t the most interesting or creative; the same is true of books and music and theater. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by it, and what’s most interesting is that any mass market survives at all, given all the firewalling technologies mitigating against the broad and pushing toward the narrow. Our challenge in all of this is to keep moving and to avoid falling irretrievably into the trap of the familiar and the comfortable. If you eat nothing but macaroni and cheese every night you end up eating nothing but macaroni and cheese. Watch nothing but Hollywood blockbusters and you watch nothing but Hollywood blockbusters. Listen to nothing but pop hits and you listen to nothing but pop hits. Read only bestselling pulp fiction and you read nothing but bestselling pulp fiction. The resulting deadening of the soul is predictable and, perhaps, irreversible. Please don't try this at home.