May 20, 1972: The decline and fall of free-form rock radio
For anyone whose nerve endings were nourished in 1972 by thought-stimulating rock music on the airwaves, this development was a major catastrophe:
May 20, 1972
Free-Form Rock Radio Is Tied by New Rules
ALL ACROSS
the nation, progressive rock FM stations are going through their most
significant metamorphosis since they started playing “underground” music back
in 1966-67.
After
steadily gaining popularity while acting as a free-form non-competitive
alternative in a system ruled by tightly-formatted AM Top 40 rock, the
progressives now are succumbing to pressures to be “more commercial.”
The
result has been the adoption of lists of top albums from which the deejays are
required to make their selections. And restrictions on deejay talking – a style
which gave the progressives points in the
The
format was adopted at
“But well, old Lather’s productive, you know,
He produces the finest of sounds …”
JEFF LUBICK’S
last record faded and in came the archetypal FM radio voice of Jim Santella. A
little tentatively because it wasn’t just any Monday night. It was his 33rd
birthday. And it was his farewell to WPHD.
When he got through the “There comes a time …” and told how
he didn’t begrudge owners the right to run their station and about certain
conditions he couldn’t work under, he played one last tune.
It was Jefferson Airplane’s “Lather,” a song about the
belated end of childhood and innocence, and it summed up the moment for Jim and
for WPHD and for what’s happening in progressive rock radio across the nation.
Lubick held the station until program director Jack Robinson
got there.
Meanwhile, Santella, WPHD’s senior deejay, keeper of the prime-time 9 p.m. show, the man who introduced Buffalo to James Taylor, Chuck Mangione and even Don McLean – Santella was gone.
“Lather was 30 years
old today,
They took away all of his toys …”
“HE WAS too
much into the music,” Larry Levite was saying a few days later. “It was a
persona thing. The show was for him, not the audience. We’re going to miss him,
but I think it was silly what he did on the air.”
Larry’s station manager at WPHD and sister station WYSL,
staring there five years ago as a salesman after a try at becoming an actor in
He offers his visitor a cigar. He prefers to be called Larry,
rides a little motorcycle to work and says his office door is always open. He
took over operations in 1970 and has encouraged a number of bold,
public-spirited features.
There’s been beefed-up news, a voter registration drive,
Christopher & Co., which peeks into controversial issues; outdoor rock
concerts, prisoner-of-war bracelets and Larry’s own populist let’s-do-something
editorials.
“You can fight City Hall and you can win, not by throwing
rocks, but by writing letters,” says Larry, who feels his radio comments helped
save the Allentown Art Festival from cancellation by the city last year.
The stations are part of a Dallas-based chain owned by Gordon
McLendon, son of a
These days WYSL beats out Top 40 giant WKBW in some
demographic areas, but Larry still digs the role of underdog.
“PHD has come up too, but we thought it should have gotten
even bigger,” Larry says, “the way it was running in this market, the only progressive
station.”
Recent ratings gave WPHD 2 percent of the audience in the
morning, rising to 8 percent at mid-evening. Three years ago, when there were
few listeners and virtually no commercials, almost anything might happen
musically, but now it’s different.
“When PHD started out,” Larry says, “it got the 18- to
24-year-olds. Then as it got more acceptance, we got 16- and 17-year-olds. Then
as a lot of the original college-age people got older, we got the 25-35 group.
“The format decision came from Ken Dowe, our national program
director. He thought a lot of people would like progressive rock if it was
programmed right – doctors, lawyers, factory workers. The ratings elsewhere
proved it out.
“You can’t play music for one little segment of your audience.
It’s programming for the people themselves. You give them more of the
programming that they want. Record sales are a big determining factor.
“The deejays would talk about personal things at the
beginning. There’d be chit-chat in the studio. I think that when the mike’s
open, the announcer should be informing you of things that are interesting to
you, not to them.”
WPHD’s format now requires deejays to play 75 percent of the
music from a file of 50 top progressive albums, with the rest divided between
new releases and oldies. Deejays also were ordered to keep talking to the
barest minimum. That’s what provoked Jim Santella.
“It would be different if Santella was the top deejay in the country,” Larry notes. “Johnny Carson might have the right to quit on the air, but Jim …”
“And sometimes he’s so
nameless
That he
hardly knows what games to play,
What words to say …”
THERE’D BEEN
a big photo of Santella in UB’s student newspaper and a dedication naming him
“Man of the Year” for refusing to go along with “the totalitarian wave of the
future in American media.”
Now strangers were greeting him in Norton Union. He hadn’t
wanted to make a big thing of it. Everything had been said.
Besides, he still has his college library job and he’s
teaching a course this summer and he has drum students as well. He once was a
jazz drummer.
“I never claimed to be that important,” he said between sips
of coffee. “But I don’t like someone to push a button and I come out. I’m
sensitive. I like relating to people as people.”
WPHD tightened up even before the format. Mandatory things
kept burgeoning – more announcements, more commercials, more emphasis on just
the top albums. Jim explained the restrictions.
“Once you start a flow, to me it stops when you have to do an
ID or a commercial. It DOES interrupt the flow of the program. It DOES put you
in a format.
“Why push people into being automatons? Part of the
overwhelming ennui today is because there are so few decisions you can make.
Roles at one time were clearly defined and then Eli Whitney messed up the whole
society with interchangeable parts.
“I’m not an interchangeable part. I want people to challenge
me, make me find out where I’m at and I should do that with other people too.
You have to live what you are and what you think.
“I have no regrets. I think the audience has lost something. Not me, but something they could relate to.”
“And I should have told
him: ‘No, you’re not old
And I
should have let him go on,
Smiling baby wide.”
JACK ROBINSON,
WPHD’s program director for two years, left this week. One reason was his
disagreement with Ken Dowe over the format. Jack wanted hit albums only 50
percent of the time.
“I was opposed to it because I thought it was too inflexible
and didn’t have enough concern for the individual,” Jack pointed out. WPHD
played softly from a corner of his large cool living room.
“But every progressive rock station in the country is going
on a format,” he explained. “There are very few free-form stations left.
“Personally, I think it’s kind of to be expected. The same
thing happened in progressive rock that happened in early Top 40. It’s gotten
stale.”
Nobody at WPHD had worked a format before and nobody really
wanted to. Jack noted, however, that the restrictions were getting less harsh.
“If it hadn’t been for Santella, most people wouldn’t have
noticed any change,” he said. “We’re still playing new music, trying to present
it in an interesting, informative, inoffensive way.
“The same albums may come up every six or eight hours, but
not necessarily the same cut. It’s just that an announcer can no longer ramble
on for three minutes.
“Jim didn’t give the format a chance. I really like him, but
I think he overextended himself. He didn’t hurt the people who put in the format.
He hurt me and the other people at the station.
“I think people expect too much of commercial progressive
rock radio. We’re just another radio station, like KB.
“I lectured this class up at UB and one guy was ripping me
apart because he felt the station was too commercially oriented. But he never
sat down and wrote a letter to the station saying why are you doing this.
“We tried radio poetry and got no response. Over and over, people have told us through their actions that music is the one thing they want. Everything else is a tune-out factor – news, announcers talking, new songs. That’s why there’s a format.”
IN THE PHOTOS: Top, Larry Levite; lower left, Jim Santella; right, Jack Robinson.
FOOTNOTE: Larry Levite would go on to bigger and
better things. He bought blue-chip mainline WBEN and its sister FM station,
sold them in the mid 1990s and in 1998 acquired
Also a
Buffalo Broadcasting Hall of Famer, Jim Santella found other jobs in FM radio –
on formatted 97 Rock, where he co-hosted the morning show for a while, and then
on free-form WZIR and WUWU before a long stint doing a weekend blues show and co-hosting
“Theater Talk” on WBFO. He’s still with us and has made occasional appearances
to sign copies of his memoir, “Classic Rock, Classic Jock.”
As for
Jack Robinson, before 1972 was over, Billboard magazine reported that he had jumped
from WPHD to KRLD-FM in
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