New Moon Edition September 2024

Our Freeform Radio project HERE has generated attention recently from people who are new to what we’re doing. In promoting it, Founding Member David Shepardson repeatedly gets asked for supporting information. We’ve been sending it in written form, suspecting it rarely is read.

So, with the generous support of another Founding Member, Jamie Dell’Apa, we produced a three-minute trailer that hopefully will get seen – and maybe even tempt people to read more about it. There’s a lot to say in that very brief window but it came out pretty well. You can see the trailer HERE and it’s worth a look.

Freeform is and always has been about community. We’d like to keep growing the awareness of this project so please distribute the trailer link to anyone and everyone who might be interested. If they want to join us, they can do so HERE.

We have a sense of impatience about this project and for good reason. So many of the great deejays of the Freeform radio era are passing away. Our friend and website supporter Bruce Allen sent news our way about Jim Santella, one of the original freeform jocks in Buffalo, NY, who died a few months ago.

Jim began his shows there at WYSL-FM in 1969 and like so many of his colleagues at freeform stations across the country faced a crisis of conscience in 1972 when management decided to drastically reduce the station’s library, another way of saying they instituted a playlist. Goodbye freeform. Goodbye Jim Santella, too. He quit on the air and subsequently was advised “you’ll never do radio in this town again.”

Forty years later, he did his final radio show in Buffalo, albeit the first few gigs under an alias after leaving YSL, and in 2013 was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame HERE. His story is typical of so many of those brilliant radio pioneers whose impact on people like Bruce and the rest of his devoted audience still resonates today HERE. May he rest in peace.

We had the pleasure a few weeks ago of talking with Steve Postell, he of the famed group of studio musicians known as Immediate Family (HERE), who had a lot to say about the importance to him of freeform radio and all the arts in becoming a musician of note (so to speak). But he also had some very salient things to say about art and commerce in his business that continue to resonate with me.

First, Steve said, we should expand the subject of freeform radio because that period of astonishing creativity was reverberating through all of the arts and society itself. But he also talked about when it changed and why. He said when Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Seagram’s heir and wheeler-dealer, bought Warner Bros. Music, Steve said to himself, “Oh, I get it. Now it won’t be music people running the music business anymore.” Warner Music Group today is headed by Robert Kyncl, self-described “entrepreneurial leader and creator economy pioneer.” Sadly, that pretty much says it all.

It happened in music and eventually it happened in all the arts. The bankers took over. We live now in a world where healthcare is run not by highly trained medical people but by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, agriculture by the genetically modified seed and herbicide companies, and the songbooks of our greatest composers are owned by hedge funds, their music distributed by $multi-trillion dollar corporations. Freeform seems like a quaint term these days, an artifact from before consolidation, but worth valuing too as a concept in opposition to an inexorable trend.