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Introduction to Radio Waves Don Henley Music
changed my life. Radio, the vehicle for that music, was my connection to
the world that lay outside my small hometown. During those difficult,
adolescent years, it was a friend in the dark; a messenger to a lover; a
magic carpet; a ticket out. Rock and roll was coming of age and hormones
were rattling all over the globe. The
latter half of the sixties would see thousands of young people head
west, drawn by the power of the music and the cultural revolution that
was springing up around it. The Beatles had invaded the States, Elvis
was making bad movies and San Francisco and Los Angeles were fast
becoming the gathering places for long-haired kids who wanted to
reinvent themselves and merge into the strange and wonderful
metamorphosis that was taking place. Jim
Ladd and I were fellow travelers on this rock and roll caravan, although
our paths would not cross until 1973 when he interviewed the Eagles just
after we had released the Desperado album. He struck me then as an
anomaly in his profession. He was serious, intelligent and thoroughly
prepared. He displayed a respect for, and a knowledge of the
music—especially the lyrics—that I had not previously encountered.
The heady days of the early seventies were wondrous, confusing and
scary—filled with tremendous highs and lows—but Jim, in his
empathetic way, got us to open up—serious young men that we were—and
talk with candor about what was on our minds. It was a refreshing change
from the bluster and fatuousness to which we had been accustomed. Music
had changed and so had radio—at least on the FM band. It
seems odd to think that rock and roll FM radio has only been with us
since 1967, but it was born that year in San Francisco—the year I took
my first acid trip and listened to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band (coincidentally enough, in the Eagle Apartments in Dallas,
Texas). Los Angeles and Boston followed in short order and soon the
emerging counterculture had its own personal medium. Moreover, FM was
superior to AM in sound quality and it came in stereo! This, however,
was not the greatest difference between the two. The main difference was
the music and the way it was presented. Listeners were given credit for
having a brain, a conscience and a sense of humor above that of a ten
year old. DJs often played songs in sets of two or three according to
their topicality or, as Ladd put it, “They knew the music and how to
relate it to the social issues of the day.” In
1975, Jim committed what many believed was career suicide by leaving the
number-one rated FM station in LA to take a lower-paying but more
fulfilling job at the scruffy, second-rated FM station. By 1978,
however, Ladd and the iconoclastic family of DJs at RADIO KAOS had
resurrected and redefined “free-form” FM rock radio. KAOS ruled the
airwaves of Southern California. They had survived the aberration called
“Disco”, but music and culture were mutating once again. “Punk”
was gnawing its way out of its shell and “new wave” was in the
germinal stage. Fate and bad helicopter maintenance were about to deal
Jimmy Carter a devastating blow; the country was getting ready to swing
to the right. The
story of radio in the eighties is basically the story of American
culture. We went data crazy. Words and phrases like “format,”
“Research,” “Marketing campaign” and “demographics” became
ensconced in the radio lexicon. Disc jockeys were slowly being stripped
of their autonomy. They could no longer say and play what they pleased.
Radio, like television, was becoming a corporately programmed conduit
for comforting entertainment and mindless escapism. But the real problem
was more insidious. Greed was back with a vengeance. Jim Morrison said
it best, “We want the world and we want it now.” The laissez-faire
policies of the Reagan administration made opulence and shameless
acquisition fashionable. National unconsciousness was the order of the
day. Radio stations became mere investment properties for the new
generation of “me decade” entrepreneurs who wanted to turn a neat
profit quickly. Ratings was the name of the game. Consultants were
brought in to restructure and program the stations in the hopes of
boosting ratings, not over an extended period of time, but as soon as
possible so that the station—or chain of stations—could then be
sold. Hence the data freakout and the pandering to every musical fad
that came down the pike, regardless of quality or value (record
companies were just as guilty). Jim Ladd would be the first to admit
that there is nothing inherently wrong with data. But, since we, as a
culture, are now addicted to immediate gratification, due, ironically,
in large part to electronic media, the American entrepreneurial mind
thinks in terms of immediate profitability rather than long-term
domination of markets as practiced by the Japanese. This mind-set is
destroying our society—especially the arts and the environment—from
the inside out. The dog is eating its own tail. Radio, in many instances, is no longer controlled by people who truly love and appreciate music. In fact, a great many of America’s products, treasures and traditions are in the hands of those only concerned with quantity, not quality; those who would mortgage the future in favor of the present. This is the legacy of the Reagan years—capitalism run amok. Jim Ladd has told not only the story of FM rock radio. He has, with an admirable amount of humor and affection, chronicled the US of A as it slides into the twenty-first century.
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