Ralph Stanley, Bluegrass Ad For Obama

Radio; Cheaper and in many ways more intimate and local than TV.

I think a lot of undecided voters and disenchanted republicans can be reached through radio. We have let the GOP machine dominate the radio airwaves for too long. Time to take back the public airwaves from Rush and his ilk. Radio is a great place to run candidate ads and I was thrilled to hear about this one.

TPM Cafe hightlighted this great local ad that is running in Virginia with Bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley.

Are you hearing any good political ads/ outreach where you are?
Tell us about them.

Update: At little Ralph Stanley to celebrate.

There's more...

Emergency Ops v Rudy

Command Center - The Lies


Fire Fighters - Dead Because of Rudy


Radios - Dead On Arrival



This man wants to torture Muslims, deport Mexicans (and who gives a damn if they're here legally or not), and absolutely doesn't give a FUCK about black people, except as a way to gain political power by getting the cops to kill them now and then.

Many if not most of the deaths of 9/11 can be laid at his feet, due to his lack of emergency preparation.

Rudy really screwed the fucking pooch.

Like all Bush Republicans, Rudy's most at home telling the BIG LIE.

Take it from one who has actually worked car wreck after bus wreck after shooting after stabbing after beating after rape after home assault after child abuse after murder after motorcycle accident after train v car after helicopter crash after fire after explosion after head crushed in half after head blown off and after it all, one part becomes blindingly crystal clear...

On 9/11 Rudy was in a state of constant panic, being told what to do by his staff, with absolutely no command and control, operating out in the fucking street like a goddamn amateur, winging it.

Pro's DON'T wing it.

Rudy did, because the same radio's which had been for shit were still for shit, his fire department got blasted to hell when they couldn't talk to anyone on the shit radios, and his command center was destroyed in the one location Rudy demanded it be set up (WTC 7), overriding all rational advice and placing C&C in the same complex the bad guys had attacked before and said they'd attack again.

Rudy is running as Mr. 9/11 super-competent.

Rudy is a fake. Rudy is a liar.

Rudy is directly responsible for hundreds to thousands of deaths.

Watch the videos. Judge good ol' 9/11 Rudy for your self...

Would you really trust him with your life? Your families?

There's more...

Bound For Whoring

“Lame, Corporate Freeze-Out!”

Serendipity is indeed a strange bird.

Last night, I found myself up late watching perhaps my favorite TV channel—Turner Classic Movies, and their theme (which continues into today) is biopics of famed musicians. Last night they screened 1976's grossly unsung (at least nowadays) “Bound For Glory”—a phenomenally skillful depiction of the life of the late, great American songwriter/musician Woody Guthrie. Now, I was familiar with Guthrie's life —its up and downs, and the amazing art he created therein, but seeing the movie, one of the most beautifully shot films I've ever seen (thanks to the golden-eyed cinematographer Haskell Wexler), depicting dust-bowl America as a wonder of desolation, hopeful sunrises and bleary-eyed sunsets.

Guthrie's story itself was something that kept me thinking much of the night, too. David Carradine played Guthrie with a deft, naturalistic ease—conflicted and determined, but most of all, as a man of rich levels of empathy for his fellow man, and the state of world in general. His (and history's) Guthrie traveled with (via the rails along with the hoboes), and documented the travails of the millions of Americans left adrift in the economic hell that befell the Wsetern U.S. with the Dust Bowl and the latter stages of The Great Depression. He documented these American “voyages” through his songs—songs celebrating the American ideal that was not being put into practice by too many in power, and songs celebrating the spirit of the “little guy” worker at the mercy of his moneyed “betters” who ran everything that mattered in the U.S.

There's a key set of scenes in the movie where Guthrie, after receiving some fame for his musicianship and vocal styling nabs a job at a Los Angeles radio station. He sings a slew of the Okie standards of the time, but began to slip in more than a few of his decidely pro-“the little guy”, union and anti-corporate bully songs. He of course, runs into trouble with the station's boss who then asks Woody for a list of every song he'll perform before each week's broadcast because of fear of upsetting the sponsors—namely many of the farms and growers who took deep advantage of the poor migrants who came west seeking a way to survive. In one passage, Woody, who's ducked the angry station manager for days, finally shows up. The manager angrily demands the list of songs which Woody reluctantly produces. The manager goes over it, nodding his approval at the non-controversial tunes on the list until he stops at one and hesitates over the title. He's not familiar with it.

“This isn't one of them...union songs is it? I mean Woody, our sponsors...”

“Oh no.” Woody reassures him. “THis one's about a man who catches his wife cheatin' on him. He kills her.”

“Oh.”, says the suit. “That's okay, then.” And Woody looks at him with naked disgust.

Guthrie would battle constantly with that paradox of entertaining the masses, and remaining true to himself as a supporter of progressive causes, so much so that he is pretty much the avatar of that sort of putting one's self on the line that way. Not very many would follow him and be able to maintain a popular audience as he did. But a few have managed to do so.

One was the several posts aforementioned Curtis Mayfield. I wrote plenty on Curtis, but it's a comment by one the readers here that stuck out for me days ago, and even moreso today.

“Curtis always seemed to be relevant no matter what was going on.

To get the full flavor of that era, add Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder. Sly had his moments during the Psychedelic end of the Sixties, but never got as deep or as meaningful as the other guys. Perhaps he would have if he hadn't let his talent dissolve into the drugs.

Somehow, despite what must have been great commercial pressures to stay within the old "love and lost" formula of pop music, they were able to make music that spoke of the fight for freedom, to comment on the war, to say things that may have been a bit on the edge.”

Carol 10.28.07 - 3:45 am #

Carol hit that paradoxical “"ars gratius pecunirus” (art for money's sake—thank you, Amuseinc) note perfectly. Then, I saw “Bound For Glory” last night which dealt with this subject again.

And then in my blog trawling, this story today completed the serendiptous circle with a pen-jab right through the paper to the table top:

(Hat tip to Atrios for pointing the way to this at Down With Tyranny)

For all the kudos Springsteen's new Magic album is earning for the joyful rocking it delivers, it's rife with self-doubt, disillusionment, anger and acceptance of the disappointments and compromises life inevitably presents the thinking person.

A couple weeks ago the new album was #1 on the Billboard album chart. Kid Rock's new album knocked it down a peg and this week, Springsteen disposed on Kid Rock and is back at #1. The album is already gold and headed right towards platinum and he's got a great shot to win a Grammy for Best Album of the Year. Magic's reviews virtually everywhere are over the top and the intro to his latest interview in Rolling Stone refers to the album's subject matter as "weighty stuff like the direction of our democracy and party stuff that recalls the days when sparks first flew on E Street more than three decades ago."

Republican radio network Clear Channel, a monopoly in many cities and a dominant player in most of the rest, isn't interested. Is it because Springsteen has been an outspoken campaigner for Democrats and progressives? Clear Channel has taken a political stand with its programming in the past. Just think back to their boycott of the Dixie Chicks. Oh, no... not way back, just back to when they released their most recent album. Despite being one of the top 10 best-selling American albums of the year-- across all genres and demographics-- radio studiously ignored it. There were maybe half a dozen country stations that even played it at all. What Clear Channel did to the Dixie Chicks is a watertight case for the need to break the media companies up into a thousand pieces. (John Sununu disagrees; he's pro-censorship.) I spoke with an old friend who heads a record company and preferred to speak off the record.

"When you have artists like the Dixie Chicks and Bruce Springsteen who have overtly spoken out against this Administration, they are taken to task in spite the clear and undeniable indications from the marketplace that people want to hear their music. What seems to be happening-- if sales are any kind of a barometer of what the marketplace is-- is that these politically-connected radio networks like Clear Channel are not looking to succeed as radio stations as much as pushing forward some political agenda.

Another friend of mine distinctly recalls the Senate hearings on radio consolidation in light of the Dixie Chicks boycott where Barbara Boxer and John McCain heard testimony including an internal Clear Channel memo threatening "Just wait and see what happens if Springsteen tries this." I guess we're seeing that right now.

Of course, Clear Channel hasn't publicly said they are boycotting Springsteen's music. But they are. Fox News, hardly a hotbed of liberal alarmists, reports that "Clear Channel has sent an edict to its classic rock stations not to play tracks from Magic...

“Meet the new boss...same as the old boss.”—The Who

What's chuckle-worthy here is the silly-ass irony of it all. Here you have Clear Channel clumsily acting the role (again, as first noted in their Dixie Chicks ban) of the out-of-touch, corporate-whore, hayseed radio station owner from “Bound For Glory”—except, they're not answering to any aggrieved sponsors per se. Because the radio game is a lot different than it was in the 1930s. In fact, it's a lot different than it was a mere eight years ago, as the medium has lost 20% of its listeners since 1989. Ray-diddi-o is NOT about pushing records up the charts anymore. My kids—13 and 18 years old don't listen to the radio AT ALL. And neither do their friends. They get their music via the internet. They haven't turned on the radio tuner of my stereo in at least two years, which is kind of scary to a person who grew up on terrestrial pop radio like I did. In fact, what with the new music delivery systems in the computer age, like the iPod and internet and satellite radio, a recent study shows that terrestrial radio actually hurts record sales. And with the steady bleed-away of the listener base, the big ad rate money of the old days is just that—of the old days. What radio is now is little more than a massive corporate entity owned lock, stock, and barrel by a few large mega-companies. It's a corporate entity that leverages its monopoly powers and reach as a political weapon to be used by the most desperate bidder. But it is in fact, an increasingly toothless tiger, as broadband access finally reaches deep into once-isolated rural outposts and gives listeners a wider range of music and general programming and eats deeper into an already disappearing audience. Still, Clear Channel uses what power it has left in the service of furthering their goal of total domination of the medium, and wields its increasingly brittle cudgel for their wingnut masters on Capitol Hill who either pass laws that favor the company, or scuttle laws that could hurt them.

But they couldn't kill The Dixie Chicks...and in spite of their lame-assed “Boss Ban”, the album's gone gold in three weeks, (rapidly headed toward platinum status) and been the #1 record in two of its three weeks of release, slipping to #2 against the human Hep-C culture Kid Rock's release for the middle seven days.

What's the saying? “They're already dead...they just don't know it yet.”

And the secondary irony in their lead-eared mishandling of the Springsteen album lay in “The Boss's” tack of late as a performer. For the last decade, he has very much embraced the ethos of Woody Guthrie, in singing about the plight of “the little guy” on his own albums, and yes, singing several Woody Guthrie songs (“Riding In My Car”, “Deportee”, “I Ain't Got No Home”, and “This Land Is Your Land”) on various tribute albums and concerts. This note on Springsteen struck me:

Rather than continue as the wealthy rock-poet of the American grunt and risk being labeled inauthentic, Springsteen set out for new territory. As he put it in Better Days, a 1992 song, "It's a sad funny ending to find yourself pretending/ A rich man in a poor man's shirt.”
--------------------------------------------

Then in '95 he put out an album of folk songs, The Ghost of Tom Joad. It won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album, but it felt more like a Woody Guthrie tribute than a Springsteen record. The songs were stark and compelling, but the old optimism was gone. The characters of Tom Joad lived on the fringes of American life...

The funky parallels to the radio battles Guthrie found himself fighting as an artist, and that Springsteen now finds himself embroiled in are just plain...weird. Ghost Of Tom Joad? As in The Dust Bowl, The Grapes Of Wrath Okie Tom Joad? Who Woody Guthrie wrote a 1940 song entitled “Tom Joad” about?

Eerie.

But in the end, the “Boss Ban” is a failure, as Clear Channel continues to “Yee-haaaaah!” in between wheezes— every gimpy-ass step of the way to history's dustbin. They're in the same position as the “record” industry nowadays—spindly legged on a trembling sea of sand. And the same way that record companies fought so damned hard, and in the end futilely to retain their monopoly over content delivery, terrestrial radio with Clear Channel as their paragon wil lose its battle as well. They've got so much invested that they have to fight it. Take a hard look at who's backing the congressmembers against Net Neutrality and you won't be surprised to see the names of giant telecoms and “Old” media protecting their asses. Trying to smack down a Springsteen and his ilk is a chump-change favor in return for the legislative hook-up from their boys on Capitol Hill.

The ghost is already out of the machine, though. They've already lost. As I said, my kids and their friends ain't checking for radio at all. And when's the last time you saw a kid listening to a portable radio of any kind? Who's the last person you know who said “Hey! I bought a new radio!” How much has your own listening dropped in the last 10 years?

Yeah... I thought so.

So they have their moment, Clear Channel does. I'm not going to say don't fight them. But I am saying they're pretty much just a punch-line to a joke we'll soon forget the set-up to. Besides, it's so God-awfully easy to sidestep them in this age. Time was, you had to wait an hour or two until you heard the song you wanted to hear. Now, you go online.

You hear the song.

You see the video.

Just like that.

Ain't America a grand place?

There's more...

And Now, A GOOD Piece Of Radio News!

After an ill-advised format change, a much-loved New York radio station backtracks to actually please the listeners. Imagine that!

(Taking a momentary breather from breathing fire—while I re-load my political plasma/acid rifle.) :)

With all the bad news about radio going around lately, this piece of news cheered me up in a big, BIG way:

In a move sure to thrill legions of New Yorkers, WCBS-FM returned to its roots at 1:01 p.m. Thursday afternoon, playing the hits of the 60s, 70s, and 80s at 101.1 FM.

The station changed to JACK-FM in 2005 in an effort to attract a younger audience. Popular disc jockeys were let go, in fact live DJs were eliminated completely, and the music was replaced by an "adult hits" format – a shuffle of songs from the past three decades.

With the switch, though, it saw ratings and advertising revenue fall off.

"I didn't like the music they were playing,” said a listener. “I love the oldies though.”

The station brought back the oldies Thursday with "Do It Again" by the Beach Boys and station officials say they are thrilled to be back; listeners agree.

"We are so excited, I think I never could have captured the energy level that is in the streets of New York," said WCBS-FM General Manager Jennifer Donohue. "Our phones have been ringing off the hook with fans that are so happy for its return. And, internally, people have come so alive because this is a culmination of everyone hard work bringing the radio station back."

This story warmed my heart and kind of brought a tear to my eye.

You see...anachronistic as it may be nowadays, I love music radio. With a passion. It's what I, and and many millions of New Yorkers...hell, Americans, grew up on. The glory days of Top 40 radio is one of the most enduring, tactile memories of my youth. I can remember where I was when I heard certain iconic songs. The Fifth Dimension's "Wedding Bell Blues”, Hendrix's rendition of “All Along The Watchtower”, The Doors' “Light My Fire”, and Boz Scaggs' “Low Down”.—I remember where I was, what station it was, hell—even the brand of radio I was listening to.

Now, I used the word anachronistic to describe my love for radio. I did that because I know in my heart of hearts that the medium--at least in it's standard terrestrial form is a dying thing. My kids listen to music via the internet. I laugh when they're in the car with me as they nod, with eyes closed, and softly lip-sync to their own individual beats of what's playing on their respective iPods. They don't know from Dee-Jays, call-in contests, request lines, workforce blocks or hit countdowns. These are teens I'm talking about—so knowing that they're not checking for radio (along with their friends), and knowing that that once-rich target market is disappearing, tells me everything I need to know about where radio as I knew it and loved it is headed.

That doesn't blunt my love for the medium at all. And I'm not alone.

But what happened here in New York two years ago when they switched from the "Oldies/Greatest" format to the abysmal "Jack" format sent a large group of loyal NY radio consumers into a rage.

You see, New York has long been one of the "big four" radio meccas in the country (The others being Los Angeles, Chicago and Memphis), and has always had rather provincial tendencies as far as its AM-FM tastes. It was the birthplace of FM Rock radio in 1966 at WOR-FM. It was also the hub of Top 40 radio with the legendary WABC and WMCA AM superstations. And even with the dollar-chasing, demographic splitting "niche" broadcasting that took over the airwaves ("Urban Contemporary", "Lite", "Smooth Jazz" and so on), New York still maintained holdovers of the glorious sounds of music radio's "Platinum Age" from 1962 to 1982. Those holdovers were stations like the now-gone WPIX-FM ("Where Rock Lives"), and WCBS-FM 101, which continued "the classic Top 40 sound", albeit as an oldies format as soon as the venerable WABC 770 Musicradio's power began to wane and later switched to all-talk.

For close to 33 years, CBS FM played a mix of songs from the fifties (Elvis, Fats Domino, Doo-Wop, The Everly Bros. and everything in between), sixties (The Beatles, Motown, Stax, One-Hit Wonders, et.al) seventies (Elton John, Philly Soul, Disco, P-Funk, Paul Simon—you get it...), and even a bit of the eighties, including New Wave and Synth Pop.

It was the ultimate "Boomer" station—and it featured some of the most legendary DeeJays of the "Platinum Age", like Ron "Hello, Love!" Lundy, "Cousin" Brucie Morrow, and perhaps the greatest of them all, Dan Ingram. They continued the the school of "Personality" radio, where the jocks spinning and their song choices and patter was a piece of performance art—every broadcast. Still using the old-school jingle packages (the same company that I'm sure did your local Top 40 superstation's jingles, too— PAMS of Dallas ) , the perfectly modulated reverb/echo combo to recreate that "amped-up" sound of yesteryear, and of course, the great voices of the Jocks themselves, CBS-FM became an institution in this town. And basically became the repository for rock music history as well, as no other stations were programming as much of the seminal stuff as they were, with context and oftentimes historical backstory.

The station got great ratings and had a verrrry dedicated fan base, of which I was a part.

But as radio's audience in general began to show shrinkage, due in large part to changes in consumption habits—such as internet radio not being bugged by the vagaries of weather, and signal chop due to location (i.e. the canyons of Lower Manhattan), the rise of satellite radio, and yes...the power of the iPod, the ratings eventually dipped. Not catastrophically, but just enough to give an overpaid radio consultant the chance to trot out his or her newest sub-sub-sub-niche format as the savior.

The "Jack" format.

You probably have a "Jack" station in your listening area. And they're all the same—a focus group tested group of songs, loaded into a computer and played "at random" (or so they'd like you to think—these songs are checked and tested for what people "like" in the morning or at night—right down to the hour), with a snarky, know-it-all "DeeJay" who sounds like the annoying guy you didn't invite to your party who's criticizing the music you're playing. Except here, he's "in control" and riffing repeatedly about how cool it is that what you're listening to is just some stuff he's thrown together.

Trouble is, he's not actually there. There is no live person picking the music or commenting on it. He's digitally recorded too, and dropped in here and there to make it sound like there might actually be a human being connected to what you're hearing.

When there isn't.

The format took off for awhile in the U.S. for one obvious reason—a station could fire all its actual "Personalities", saving on paying out salaries and benefits, reducing the size of the "physical plant" of stations (less money spent on rent and so on), and basically drastically decreasing the expenditure footprint of a radio station. Sure, you might lose a percentage of faithful listeners, but that loss is recouped in what you save on not spending for certain things anymore, right?

Well, it was right for a lot of stations. And the ones that caught the brunt of it nationwide were the CBS "clones"—stations who were using the "oldies/greatest" format with cost outlays to well-known on-air talent. Having worked in radio for years, I'd seen variations of the automated systems at work in "Dusties" formats (R&B Oldies ststions) in the south, where as good as the music sounded, the loss of the "soul", namely the personality of the Jocks doomed them. And oldies radio responded to the marketing whizzes pushing their snake oil, winnowing out their pre-1964 music from the playlists, and filtering more late 70's-to-mid-80's tunes to snag the MTV'ers. But alas, radio consultants never tire of new ways to re-package failed themes, so, a few years ago, "Jack" was pushed. And it caught on in just enough markets where it became "the thing". When Chicago's CBS Oldies station WJMK switched over in mid-05', the writing was on the wall for CBS-FM, but the question was only when?

"When" was the afternoon of June 3, 2005, when in the middle of the broadcast day, Disc Jockey Bill Brown said cryptically, "CBSFM 101.1, ever get the urge to shout "RESCUE ME!!"? Well I am getting that feeling, Here's Fontella Bass." "CBSFM 101.1, ever get the urge to shout "RESCUE ME!!"? Well I am getting that feeling, Here's Fontella Bass.", and that song played.

Brown knew something was up that day, and at the moment his show was over (with Bass's "Rescue Me" trailing out) he and the rest of the on-air staff were called into an immediate meeting as that song played, and the announcement was made then and there to them that the format was changing to "Jack". No on-air announcement, No good-bye. Just a random, fill-in engineer playing out the string with the last oldies and jingles—no on-air Jock—for the last half-hour—4:00 to 4:30, with the last song being Sinatra's "Summer Wind" —a wistful, but ominous farewell. A creepy, non-sequitir montage of sound effects was heard for the next half-hour until 5 p.m., and then a jarring intro of the new station, and it's snarky motto: "Welcome to the NEW 101.1 Jack FM, playing what we want."

Trouble was, it wasn't what most New Yorkers wanted. Many stores, delis and workplaces had kept their station dial locked to CBS-FM for so long that the dials had seized into place. Now, the "new" station there was pissing them off and the listeners had no place to go for that ear-pleasing mix of music spanning several generations.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg supposedly responded to the change in his typically kinda vulgar non-public manner, saying he would "never listen to that f---ing CBS radio again". The station tried to use Bloomberg's rant as a publicity tool, razzing him for the statement, and then snarkily (that word again), ripping the irate former listeners who were making a very public stink about their favorite station being so callously ripped away.

The station tried to placate the listeners by putting the "oldies" station online, while leaving the broadcast version as the schizophrenic "Jack". It didn't work. The station was branded a joke in town, and while the numbers were trending upwards in the desirable younger demos, these people were also listening to less radio—not because of increasing age‚—but because of more distractions. IM-ing, texting, online activity including video games, and yes...the iPod.

Off Topic For A Moment: To see how much the iPod/iTunes has changed how people listen to music, think of the last time you saw big ads in the paper for stereo components. Think of how many parties you've gone to recently where the music was run off an iPod or Mac blasting through custom playlists for the party. When was the last time you actually looked at radios while electronics shopping? It's a different time, indeed.

Okay, I'm back—they lost close to 30% of their listenership. Which in NY is an awful lot of people. And that angry, cast-off listener base never forgot or forgave, in spite of JACK-FM's on-air entreaties to "give us a try". It never caught on. Then they tried the idiocy of pushing it as "It's like your iPod...on your radio!" The problem with that?

"Well, if I have an iPod what the hell do I need your station for?"

And two years into the programming clusterfuck, they gave up the ghost. In my radio connections, I'd heard rumblings of the switchback. I even participated in a focus group this Spring that I'm pretty sure was testing the failure of Jack and the possibility of CBS returning. But last week, it was verified—Jack was jacked up, and CBS was returning. And everywhere you went around town, one could hear people talking about the return to the familiar. Happy talk.

Happy talk about radio. Bringing back memories of those endless nights I slept with my cherished Panasonic monaural boom-box, perched on my bed at wall-side—facing my right ear, while Carly Simon coo-ed "That's The Way I Always Heard it Should Be" as I drifted off to sleep.

Or swinging my beat-up, blue Pepsi-Cola pocket transistor radio by its black nylon strap as the O'Jays blared "Love Train" from its tinny, little speaker while I bopped down Northern Boulevard.

Memories of all those tapes I made of songs off the radio, catching snatches of weather updates—where if I listened to a tape made in the Summer on a Winter's day, I'd get that wistful feeling hearing a 70º degree forecast on a 2º degree day. Songs I incorrectly, knee-jerk anticipate the follow-up to, to this very day because of the crazy-quilt sequences I taped them in years ago...off the radio. Whenever I hear Billy Joel's "Just The Way You Are", I expect to hear Boz Scaggs' "Low Down" next—with a "Three-ten in the afternoon, in the most beautiful city in the world!" timecheck in between.

Because that's how I heard it...on the radio.

I can hear 'em all again, now—and it makes me happy, which is a lot to ask for in this awful world today. Still have that vintage Pepsi radio, too.

And the music sounds damned good comin' out of it. :)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update: If you're into the classic Top 40 radio sound—especially the killer New York sound that set the pace, check these great links:

For the WABC 77 Musicradio Sound

For the WCBS-FM Sound

And of course, the WMCA "Good Guys"

(Note that these recordings have been "scoped" which means that the middle parts of the songs have been removed for copyright reasons—but the run-ups and trail-outs remain intact. TRUE RADIO-HEADS UNITE! :) ) LM

Update #2: One of the other great things about CBS's return is that once again I can occasionally hear my dad's voice on the radio. He was a member of a group of some reknown in an earlier life, and yes, I snuck him and his group into the image in the photo illustration I put together for the post. But I ain't sayin' which. I'm a little stinker that way! :) LM

There's more...