Have Attitude, Will Travel

St. Louis/...
It's 7:00 PM. I'm cranky and surrounded by morons. My wife and I are aboard a shuttle van departing the St. Louis airport. There are six of us: the driver and five passengers.

The driver, about my age, asks if anybody has a problem with him turning on the radio. He professes to need traffic information as we negotiate the final grind of a Tuesday commute. I can tell his actual agenda is something else. Hearing no objections, he snaps on the van's radio. On comes KLOU...the St. Louis oldies outlet.

CHRIST! Haven't I been punished enough?! Not only did I just finish an interminable plane ride, I did hump these "yester-hits" for at least ten years on KCBQ and KBZT in San Diego. (I also plead guilty to having made them hits in the first place back in the 60's and 70's.) I'm not certain that I can endure hearing "Do Wah Diddy" or "The Hustle" one more time without succumbing to dreaded OLDIES POISONING.

Sure enough, each heavy hit rolling out of the van speakers is the equivalent of a size ten steel-toed work boot to my groin. OUCH! The only thing worse than being subjected to this fossilized pop pap is having to listen to the twenty-something no talent jock who incessantly mentions what a Great Time he's having. " I'm glad you're here with me tonight...We're havin' a great time!" I keep remembering that thirty years ago a station in a market the size of St. Louis would have had a person with real talent making good money hosting the show and he or she would have been doing something that really WAS fun.

In today's corporate radio milieu the business plan is to hire somebody for little money and send them lots of memos about making it sound like "fun on the radio".
Pay peanuts...get monkeys. Sad.
The only monkey who was entertaining was J. Fred Muggs who roller skated on the Today Show in the 1950's, and he's dead. Come to think of it, a roller skating monkey (preferably not dead) would be more compelling radio than most of the crap on the air today.

It didn't matter anyway. By the time we cleared the St. Louis city limits, I was the only one paying any attention to the radio. Every other passenger, and the driver, was on their cell phone.