Full Moon Edition April 2024
More than a few people who know about www.radicalradio.media ask me why we’re spending all this time and money on a long-past period of radio history. Who cares about this stuff? We’ve chased down tapes that have been sitting in boxes in basements and closets, tapes of radio shows by the people who created freeform radio, and had them reengineered into state of the art digital files. Those deejays played a critically important role in creating the Classic Era of Rock Music. It was a uniquely creative period in radio history and we believe archiving it is worth the effort.
We all remember the music. We still listen to it, at least the top 400 or so songs from that era that radio stations and streaming services today deem to be the cream of that astonishingly productive time. But much more was happening that deserves to be preserved. Much more music was played. We want to honor the folks who brought it to us. We want to hear them do it again so people who weren’t there can experience the magic for themselves and know what it was. That’s what our site is about.
The hunt for missing tapes extends to the music recordings, too, as this recent article reveals (HERE) So what if Olympic Sound Studios dumped all its tapes in the trash in 1987. Do we care that thousands of hours of music by the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Procol Harem, B.B. King, Joan Armatrading, Humble Pie, Jethro Tull, Traffic, Jeff Beck, and hundreds of others are lost? Likewise, do we care what Jim Ladd, Bill Ashford, Tom Donahue, Charles Laquidara, Dusty Street, Rosco Mercer, and Alison Steele did to bring music our way on the FM dial? If you do, please join us in making it happen (HERE). We really need your support to keep this beautiful boat afloat.
While we’re on the subject, was Jim Ladd the Last Deejay? Tom Petty released a song called The Last DJ in 2002 about a guy “you can’t turn him into a company man, you can’t turn him into a whore, and the boys upstairs just don’t understand anymore…There goes your freedom of choice, there goes the last human voice, there goes the last DJ.” He said it wasn’t about anyone living, but we all knew it was.
It was about Ladd and his stellar career at KMET in Los Angeles. It was also about Charles Laquidara, who did his amazing Big Mattress show on WBCN in Boston for nearly 30 years. It was about them and all those other folks mentioned above and Ron Middag and Bonnie Simmons and Scott Muni and dozens more who gifted the public airwaves with freeform radio and brought the world the Classic Era of Rock Music.
The Last Deejay is about all those men and women who played music from the entire songbook, who hipped you to what was new, what was old, how they fit together and why the music mattered. They were actual human beings who knew the songs and curated the best possible shows day after day for low pay in uncertain circumstances because they loved the music and appreciated the musicians and respected you. They wanted to turn you on and they did it whenever and wherever they got a gig on the radio until the boys upstairs didn’t understand anymore. There goes the last DJ.
One thing leads to another, ‘tis said, and that certainly has been the case for me of late. First I wrote this book (HERE), then I began to promote it, which led to Zoom and virtual presentations during the pandemic when personal contact was limited. That led to developing a six week class called Music, Media, and the Counterculture 1950-80, which I’ve taught to continuing education classes all over the country. It also led to creating radicalradio.media because the wealth of information about freeform radio threatened to overwhelm the book. The story about freeform radio and The Last Deejay also found a featured place in the MMC classes.
This newsletter played a role in promoting those various ventures, as well as giving me the venue to rant and rave about a variety of things I care about, all of which get grouped under the heading: cultural commentary. A broad topic that covers a lot of ground, that one, but it’s been fascinating to note how deeply embedded music is in the cultural fabric of our time. We’re still searching it out to this day.
Those classes I’ve taught have attracted an astonishing array of people from all walks of life, the most humble to the very impressive and all of them have stories to tell about their time and the music. We all were very fortunate to come of age when the music mattered so much, but we also had a role in creating that music. The musicians inspired us, but the audience that was the counterculture inspired them, and freeform radio brought it to us in a manner that respected and nurtured that blazing moment of creativity that was happening. It was a wonderful time to be alive.