For today's post, your humble narrator heroically listens to some "classic rock" - so that you don't have to.
I have a couple of questions for those who listen to FM rock radio:
(1) When's the last time you heard Procol Harum's "Whiskey Train", Joe Cocker's "High Time We Went", Roxy Music's "Out of the Blue", or Jackson Browne's "The Fuse" on the radio?
(2) Are you familiar with these songs?
I spent my high school years listening to the long-gone KMET, which was based in Los Angeles but whose strong signal easily reached my home in North San Diego County. KMET aired a reasonably satisfying mix of 'hits' and deep cuts from the world of rock music, broadly defined. KMET wasn't that adventurous - I can't recall it ever playing "21st Century Schizoid Man" or "God Save the Queen" - but it was nonetheless a good place to begin one's musical education.
Fast-forward to the present: What is FM rock radio like today?
To research this question, I listened to WKBU, "New Orleans' Only Classic Rock!", on the Web for about an hour and 15 minutes last Friday afternoon. During this time I was treated to 15 songs, about 20 commercials, various forms of station identification, two traffic reports, and a very small amount of chitchat from Kat, the station host.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Don't Do Me Like That" was playing when I tuned in. Here are the other artists/songs I heard, in chronological order:
The Police: "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"
Lenny Kravitz: "American Woman" (the Guess Who classic)
Scorpions: "Rock You Like a Hurricane"
Fleetwood Mac: "The Chain"
Led Zeppelin: "Black Dog"
Don Henley: "All She Wants to Do Is Dance"
Pink Floyd: "Another Brick in the Wall"
Lynyrd Skynyrd: "Simple Man"
Def Leppard: "Bringin' on the Heartbreak"
Journey: "Faithfully"
Metallica: "Enter Sandman"
Van Halen: "Unchained"
Stone Temple Pilots: "Plush" (unplugged version)
Free: "All Right Now"
Pretty standard fare, eh? Not a deep cut in sight. The closest we get to a 'surprise' is the Stone Temple Pilots selection: STP came out of the 1990s alt-rock era and IMO does not really count as "classic rock", at least when compared with Free and Led Zeppelin. (Don't get me wrong: I am definitely not faulting WKBU/Kat for playing STP.) You might also find the Journey selection a bit surprising in that "Faithfully" is now a staple of "soft rock" radio - I know for a fact that WLMG plays it.
WKBU's "Listen Live" widget features a Song History page that maintains a running log of the songs that are aired. For whatever reason, "American Woman" and "Plush" were not entered into the log - make of that what you will.
History-wise, the oldest of these songs is "All Right Now", which dates to 1970, whereas the newest is the "American Woman" remake, which dates to 1999, which by my arithmetic was 15 years ago. Most of the above artists have released one or more studio albums during the 1999-2014 period: Lynyrd Skynyrd has made five such records, for example. Have you ever heard any of this new music on the radio? I haven't. Maybe WKBU should call itself an oldies station, à la WTIX.
With no deep cuts and no recent material, WKBU offers a listening experience decidedly inferior to that provided by KMET back in the day. How can this be?
In her station bio, Kat says that her musical favorites include David Bowie, U2, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Van Halen, and Frank Zappa. Left to her own devices, could Kat put together an interesting set list of songs from these artists on the spur of the moment? Has she ever played "Dinah-Moe Humm" during her program? Intriguingly, Kat also says that she's a fan of Patsy Cline and Frank Sinatra. What response would Kat get if she played "Strangers in the Night"? (C'mon, Kat, let's do this...)
Of course, it is extremely unlikely that Kat is left to her own devices: almost certainly someone higher up is telling her what to play. Let's assume for the moment that Kat is indeed a bona fide music fan and is not just a 'personality'; for all I know, she may own hundreds or even thousands of records and have a comprehensive knowledge of popular music. Whether or not this is true, however, it is clear that the shot-callers at WKBU and other stations of its ilk are NOT music fans, and THAT, my friends, is the real problem that plagues WKBU and FM rock radio more generally.
Actually, I can't say with absolute certainty that KMET's management/DJs were music fans either, but they were at least willing to take some musical chances, and a willingness to take risks goes a long way in determining the quality of a commercial music radio station.
Ah, but what about WKBU's advertisers? Does WKBU's management worry that those advertisers would bolt if Kat and her fellow hosts 'went rogue', so to speak? Is sheer cowardice to blame here? My listen featured ads by Terminex, New Orleans Audi, the Silver Slipper Casino, and Progressive Insurance (at this point in my life I think I would rather hear "Flo" sing than hear "Another Brick in the Wall", but that's another post for another time): Would these businesses really be scared away if Kat were to play Bruce Springsteen's "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)", or the title track of Heart's Little Queen, or something from U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (a 2004 release that song-for-song is much better than The Joshua Tree)? I highly doubt it, although their representatives are welcome to contact and correct me if I'm wrong about that.
FM rock radio does not have to be as bad as it is - diversifying its output would attract new listeners and maybe even more advertising revenue, who knows? But it is really bad, and that's why people like me are driven to streaming services like Grooveshark, which I'll discuss in the next post.
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