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Remembering the Joys of Regional Radio
“You turn me on, I’m a radio…Call me at the station, the lines are open” – Joni Mitchell (“You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio”)
Local radio went the way of the Bank of Boston. The Bank of Boston was taken over by Bank of New England, which was taken over by Fleet Bank, which was devoured by BOA. Regional radio markets, especially commercial broadcasting ones, suffered a similar fate. A sad but scintillating example of this phenomenon was “the rock of Boston,” WBCN, which went from being the number one station in New England to dead air. It was a case of bad decisions that led to a corporate takeover. All local flavor and provincial charm got snuffed out in favor of syndicated programming.
There is a terrific article by reporter Jim Sullivan that reviewed the rise and fall of WBCN and career of their #1 DJ Charles Laquidira. In his review, he interviewed Oedipus, the WBCN program director. Oedipus pointed out that, “The Telecommunications Act of 1996 destroyed radio…Corporations were now allowed to own multiple stations in the same market and across the country. Stations were no longer programmed locally.”
Any sense of regional flavor is sadly a thing of the past. Nowadays, commercial music programming from coast to coast is predictable and homogenous with little variation. But radio was not always like that.
A disc jockey in Cambridge, MA, has created a “way back machine” show that explores what was. Alex McNeil, a DJ on MIT’s WMBR, hosts 88 Rewound every week. Each program focuses on a regional broadcast. He picks a particular radio station and plays that station’s weekly playlist. It’s a celebration of what was played at a particular time and place. The playlists are often quite eclectic. For example, in April 1972, WBOK New Orleans, Louisiana featured music from familiar artists, such as Michael Jackson, James Brown, Isaac Hayes, and Gladys Knight & and The Pips. But right alongside these giants, there’s Little Milton, Tyrone Davis, Shay Holiday, and Love Unlimited.
Or check out March 1965, KNUZ, Houston, Texas, which featured The Kinks, Dave Clark Five, Shirley Bassey, and Roger Miller. But also, there are The Newbeats, The Tradewinds, Shirley Ellis, and Sue Thompson. These playlists show how stations catered to their regional tastes and particular market. An additional bonus was for the hometown bands and artists who got precious airtime. If you drove from state to state, you heard different songs that suited different tastes.
If you were lucky enough to be in Boston from 1972-1995, you were fortunate to hear Charles Laquidara on WBCN. He was irreverent, quite different from a shock jock. It might seem like a minor distinction, but it’s not. He was quirky, clever, and fun. His morning show, The Big Mattress, was a favorite. He started the show at 6 AM with playful crank phone calls, a wonderful mix of music, and then finished at 10 AM with “Mishegas,” a zany “question of the day.” Laquidara respected his audience. He once said, “It was a learning process and a sharing process. It was radio that worked both ways. And it was also educational as opposed to today, where they just throw s— at you.”
Where do listeners find that kind of regional radio experience? It can be found on college radio. Bet your bottom dollar that the University of California radio stations sound quite different from Bowdoin College in Maine. Most college stations allow DJs to play their favorites. It may be within a genre, or perhaps freeform, but they push the musical envelope in an idiosyncratic way. Long live college radio!
For the listener, the value of regional radio is similar to what John Steinbeck wrote about the life affirming virtue a circus brings to a town: “The circus is change of pace — beauty against our daily ugliness, excitement against our boredom … Every man, woman and child comes from the circus refreshed and renewed and ready to survive.”
Van Morrison gets the last lines:
“When I’m down you always comfort me
When I’m lonely you see about me
You are ev’rywhere you’re ‘sposed to be
And I can get your station
When I need rejuvenation”
-Vincent Maganzini
Photo: Vintage radio (public domain)
Thanks for this article, but all is not lost. There are still fun, kind of quirky radio stations out there. Someone on the Radio subreddit has compiled a list. I like the radio.net app to find stations as well. They may be few and far between, but they are out there, and I do love the fact that technology has developed so I can listen all over the country from my smartphone.
Another weekly show that recreates radio station surveys from the past is the “Hometown Countdown” on internet radio station Ride Radio (https://therideradio.net) on Saturday evening, repeated on Wednesday afternoon.
I was a broadcasting student at Boston University from 1976 to 1981, and the radio was always on WBCN. Little did we know that what was so central to our lives at the time could disappear so completely. As the aforementioned Joni sang, “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”