“A rotting corpse, stinking up the airways…”
As I study the history of rock and roll radio, looking for inspiration for the upcoming Rock and Roll Report podcast I find myself drawn to legendary radio stations of the past like KSAN and Radio London. While I don’t want the podcast to attempt to slavishly imitate these historical stations (that would be impossible) I do admire their willingness to take risks and march to their own drummer, playing music that they wanted to play knowing in their heart of hearts that what they were playing was good music. That in essence is what The Rock and Roll Report podcast will be all about. Good music regardless of the mode of distribution played by someone passionate about rock and roll interspersed with real rock and roll news and not merely a rock and roll version of “Entertainment Tonight.”
Commercial radio, despite the recent Rolling Stone article that I posted about, has lost its way. It is merely an advertising medium using “music” as bait. Take a look at the article “A rotting corpse, stinking up the airwaves” that Tom Donahue wrote for that same magazine in the November 23, 1967 issue (Volume 1 #2!). All you have to do is substitute the phrase “commercial radio” for “Top-40 Radio” and with only minor modifications the gist of the article still applies.
It’s a relief to this fan of music and rock and roll in particular that non-commercial radio, Internet radio and podcasting are keeping up the tradition that radio can be more than the same songs played only to break up a mind numbing array of annoying commercials and clue-less DJs. To paraphrase Big Daddy Donahue:
“Top-40 radio (Commercial radio), as we know it today and have known it for the last ten years, is dead, and its rotting corpse is stinking up the airwaves.”
Later.
