Tag: radio

I’ve long lamented the demise of commercial rock radio, that long-lost tradition I’d call free-form, a radio station on which one might hear the Von Bondies and Bruce Springsteen, The Beatles and Curtis Mayfield and the latest from underground scenes around the world.

I’m not talking about just any Beatles track or Springsteen singing “Hungry Heart” — you can get that from a class rock station — but so-called deep album tracks and outtakes and the kind of eclectic soup that matches my CD, download and vinyl collections (filed under C, you can find not only the expected artists like The Clash, Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, but also bands like the Come On, Hayes Carll, The Cult, the Cruzados, Sheryl Crow and others).

Most commercial radio disdains this kind of variety. The idea is to tightly manage the playlist so that you can control who is listening and the ad folks can target their advertising. That’s why we have Classic Rock, and Top 40, and R&B and Light Music and Soft Rock and Adult Contemporary and never the twain shall meet, as they say. At least in the local (New York and New Jersey) markets.

Philadelphia is only nominally better, though it has the more eclectic WXPN. And there are the college stations.

The solution, some friends have been telling me, is to invest in satellite radio, to take what had been free and buy into the subscription model. It was a model that seemed wrong to me, one that gave in to the money-driven approach to music.

Of course, free radio was never really free. We paid for it by giving up about a third of our listening time to commercials, to ads for everything from McDonalds and Burger King to obnoxious sales pitches from ex-football players who now own car dealerships.

This brings me to my point: I’ve been wrong about satellite radio all this time. We bought a new Toyota Rav4, which is satellite-ready and came with a month free of XM. I didn’t use it much of the first week — I was having a good time listening to my iPod and playing with the Bluetooth — but I decided to program the presets for the satellite stations and, well, I am hooked.

I have 18 stations set, 13 music stations and five talk. The music stations include the Springsteen station and Little Steven’s great Underground Garage channel, a station devoted to Outlaw Country, a jazz station, one called First Wave (early punk and new wave), stations devoted to the ’80s and ’90s, and several others. The talk stations include two public radio channels, a sports station, CNN and something called AmeriLeft, which plays liberal and left-leaning talk, much of it from Air America.

It is the Little Steven channel, however, that has me hooked. Consider this recent string of songs: “Not Fade Away” by the Stones, “Circles” from Les Fleur De Lys, “Too Good To Be True” by The Yum Yums (a recent punk track), “He’s a Rebel” from The Crystals and “Cara-Lin” by The Strangeloves.

This morning, I heard The Beatles, “Every Little Thing”; Springsteen, “I Wanna Be With You”; Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, “Fool for You”; the Stones, “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love”; The Clash, “Clampdown”; The Stray Cats, “Fishnet Stockings”; Down Beat 5, “Dum Dum Ditty”; and the Purple Hearts (an Australian band from the ’60s), “Just a Little Bit.”

Part of my wonder at this, I know, is its freshness, its newness. I am sure to grow tired of the Underground Garage. But I have myriad other choices, enough to keep me interested for a long time.

The question is whether I want to pay the money ($12.95 a month) to keep the XM streaming in.

Here is a follow-up to yesterday’s news that G-Rock radio, 106.3 FM, is changing from modern rock to pop:

Less than a week after the Jersey Shore station WHTG (G-Rock) 106.3-FM switched from an alternative rock format to contemporary hits, a group calling itself “Bring Back G-Rock,” with a Facebook page, is planning a protest at noon Saturday, outside the station’s studio at 2355 West Bangs Ave. in Neptune.

“Over 400 people have RSVP’ed and will be there,” said group organizer Elyse Jankowski of Middletown. “It will be done in an organized manner, completely peaceful – we don’t want to make anyone nervous or the police and authorities alarmed – however we want to make it known how upset we are.”There are more than 3,500 in the group, Jankowski said.

Um. OK.

I agree with the group’s goal, as I think yesterday’s blog post makes clear. But I have to wonder whether the 400 people planning to march on the station could be using their energy in more important ways. For instance, the state is conducting a homeless persons census and needs volunteers to do the count and distribute food. There is a need for volunteers for stream cleanups, food bank sorters and soup kitchen servers. They could be protesting two wars, helping to organize communities and workers, helping out at their cash-strapped local library.

There are a lot of issues that need addressing. I’m just not sure that fighting to keep a commercial radio station from changing its format should rank very high on the list.

For lovers of slightly edgy rock ‘n’ roll, the news that alternative station 106.3, G-Rock, in Eatontown is changing its format hits a sour note.

In an effort to appeal to a mainstream audience, Press Communications LLC has switched the format of a local alternative rock radio station to current hits radio.

“What our research showed us was that we needed to have a more mass appeal format that reached all ages between 18 to 44,” said Alice MacCormack, general sales manager for station owner Press Communications LLC. The radio station is broadcast as WHTG-FM 106.3 in Eatontown and WBBO-FM 106.5 in Bass River Township.

Once called G Rock Radio, the station is now known as Hit 106. The change was made at noon Monday, MacCormack said.

The new format, according to The Asbury Park Press, “includes music from recording artists such as Rhianna, Pink, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and David Cook.”

This from a station — formerly dubbed “Jersey’s Rock Alternative” — that

was known for breaking in top alternative bands, such as The Ting Tings and The Duke Spirit.

Of course, the blogger says sarcastically, you just can’t have too many stations playing songs by the winners of American Idol.

This is interesting and probably shows my age, but WNEW has been revived as a high-def radio station broadcasting on HD Radio and on the Web.

WNEW 102.7 FM in New York, which billed itself as the place where rock lives, was the place — and I mean THE place — for rock ‘n’ roll, especially rock that ignored traditional boundaries. When I was in high school, which was at the tail end of the station’s real heyday, you could hear The Beatles and Led Zeppelin mixed with The Vapors, Jim Carroll and Elvis Costello (this was back when he wasn’t considered mainstream). The mix may not seem that revolutionary now, but consider how rare it is — outside of satellite radio — to hear Kings of Leon, The Fratellis and Art Brut, Zep, the Stones and early Aerosmith on the same playlist.

That cross-pollination was encouraged by a management that valued music and creativity.

That came to an end as the ’80s wore on — the station would continue as a shell of itself until the late 1990s — as the changes in the radio world, the return to extremely segregated playlists and an aversion to experimentation, a devotion to marketing at the expense of the music, replaced the creative impulse. The station moved through various rock formats — classic rock, “new” rock, etc. — that gutted what made the station so vital.

The new technology — the expanded HD spectrum, Web broadcasting — may allow an endrun around the marketers and bring back what made WNEW the station it was.

Annie’s brother Steven called tonight when Annie was out, so we chatted for a while about the family and what not. Then he told me about a new radio station he came across, one that played the good “classic rock” and mixed in old new wave and punk and a healthy dose of new alternative sounds.

The station sounded a bit like the old WNEW — that commitment to rock music of all stripes. I listened for a while on line tonight and it sounds pretty good. I don’t know if rock radio is making a comeback, but it is worth giving a shot — especially because I’d given up on commercial radio and listen almost exclusively to WXPN and WHYY (NPR).

Here’s the link to the new station: 101.9 RXP — The NY Rock Experience.

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