Turn Up the CHANGE!

I was born during the sunset of radio's first Golden Age.
George and Gracie, Bob Hope, and The Shadow still resided in the theater of the mind that was the province of the senior aural medium.

In the early 50's TV drove a stake through the heart of radio and left it for dead on the entertainment highway. In the mid to late 50's a young genius named Todd Storz resurrected radio via the miracle of something called the "Top 40". It was a simple format based in the repetition of current popular songs...usually forty of them. Nothing fancy, but it became the tribal drum of a generation. Mine.

Radio became my life. I listened as a teenager and spent the bulk of my working years behind the mic at a number of stations. It was mostly FUN, until it wasn't. For years, AM and FM provided a paycheck and excitement and all I had to do was show up and be myself. It sure beat the Army or bagging groceries for Oscar Swanson at Swanson's Super Store, the only REAL jobs I ever had. A charmed life.
Radio was an intimate medium. People listened, paid attention and considered the folks on the air their friends. I remember hosting the morning show at a Tampa radio station in the Summer of 1976. I had decided to leave Tampa for a job doing afternoons at KOGO in San Diego which offered better money and a chance to sleep-in. Linda, the kids and I left Tampa in early August and I was on the air in San Diego two weeks later. In September, while I was on the air one afternoon, I got a call from a guy who said: "It's so weird! My wife and I used to listen to you every morning in Tampa; then after we came back from our vacation in early August you were gone. We moved to San Diego in late August and today I turn on the radio....and there you are!" He said that he felt like he had found a long lost family member. Stories like that were not uncommon.

Today people don't listen to the radio like that. Not even in their cars. They talk on their cell phones, listen to their i-pods, and spend time on their computers. They are now able to create and customize programming that's just right...for them.
This blog and my internet show on the San Diego Union-Tribune website have shown that to me many times. For example: Just last week I heard from a young woman who had googled the name of a man she had recently learned was her biological father and a blog I had written about him had popped up in her search. She contacted me and I was able to fill in some of the gaps in her knowledge of her dad, including the fact that he had passed away last Fall. A week doesn't go by that I don't get an e-mail inquiry regarding a long lost friend or spouse that has been mentioned in a blog. Pretty amazing since I'm fairly certain that there can't be more that a couple of people reading this! (Maybe I need to revise my eyeball estimates.)

Someone once told me that there are two kinds of expectations. There are adaptive expectations and rational expectations. Adaptive expectations assume that "things were great yesterday; they'll be even better tomorrow". Rational expectations acknowledge the certainty that THINGS CHANGE.

Radio is now being run by lawyers and bean counters, the undertakers of any industry.

R.I.P.


TURN UP THE CHANGE...

BRING ON THE INTERNET!