Whatever happened to rock 'n' roll radio?

Richard Neer remembers 'FM'

"FM" author Richard Neer spent more than 25 years at New York's WNEW-FM.

By Todd Leopold
CNN

(CNN) -- In the beginning, there was AM Top Forty radio.

It played the Big Boss Sounds and the Platters That Mattered, Motown and Merseybeat, folk-rock and Frank Sinatra, girl groups and garage bands and the Beatles, the Stones and "1, 2, 3, Red Light," and you could hear it across the land with 50,000 mighty watts from W-A-Beatle-C in New York to WLS in Chicago to KHJ in L.A. And the people listened, and it was good.

Then came free-form progressive radio, and it played the longer, groovier tracks, the LP versions of your 45s, and it ebbed and flowed, "Bitches Brew" into Pink Floyd into Carole King into Van Morrison, long, adventuresome sets where only the DJ knew what was coming next, and it was inventive, and wonderful, and a whole new thing, and the people listened, and it was good.

And then came ...

Well, as Richard Neer will tell you, nothing much.

Neer's a little biased, of course. He's the author of "FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio" (Villard), and a longtime radio industry professional who spent almost 30 years with one of the pioneers of free-form, New York's WNEW-FM. At that station, he watched as playlists tightened, audiences fragmented, consultants took over, and a once-proud broadcaster lost its way and finally gave up being the place "Where Rock Lives" for, of all things, talk.

The story of WNEW parallels that of many FM stations, Neer observes. When the DJ's input was taken out of the equation, music radio became just another bland corporate bottom line, he says in a phone interview from his home in suburban New York.

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"It really took the fun away when we (DJs) had no choice," he says. "We were handed a printout and given designated times we could talk. We went from architects to computers. When that control was taken away, (DJing) became just another job."

Rock 'n' roll gospel

As he recounts in "FM," Neer, 53, grew up at a time when the DJ was dominant. In the '50s and '60s, Murray "the K" Kaufman, Wolfman Jack and John R. spread the gospel of rock 'n' roll from coast to coast, and if they got behind a new record, they could make it into a hit almost single-handedly.

Neer remembers those times with fondness. "I became a big fan of WABC," he recalls.

Legendary New York DJ Scott Muni helped create WNEW's sound. He's shown here at a TALKERS magazine party in New York.

By the late '60s, the music was starting to change. Singles had given way to albums, and free-form, a new style of radio, was making inroads on the once-neglected FM side of the dial. Neer started out at WLIR-FM, a Long Island station that had some small success when it switched to a free-form style coordinated by Neer and his friend Michael Harrison.

Neer and Harrison joined WNEW in 1971, Neer starting as the station's music director and a weekend DJ. The station's roster was filled with now-legendary radio names: Vin Scelsa, Jonathan Schwartz, Pete Fornatale, Alison Steele, and the gravel-voiced Scott Muni, who had been a New York radio icon since the late 1950s.

At the time, WNEW, like many FM stations, had more high concepts than high profits. The money was in AM, and though WNEW was owned by Metromedia, a large corporation, the station's employees were given plenty of leeway.

Those were heady days, Neer writes. Record companies and musicians angled for the station's support; WNEW was seen as a bellwether for the nation. Its DJs were regional celebrities. "FM" is filled with anecdotes about the personalities' brushes with fame, from meeting Beatles to enjoying the high life.

Efficiencies

But, as FM radio became more profitable, the stations -- and their corporate owners -- started playing it safe. Consultants began darkening the doorways of FM stations, bringing in consultants. They catered to specific demographics and homogenized the sound -- and in the process, Neer says, darkened the business.

At WNEW, Neer writes, the station was sold several times in the 1980s, and -- with rare exceptions -- each time the new owner brought in a consultant with little feel for the market or the station's history. By the end, WNEW was a shell of its former self -- and it's not alone, Neer says.

"It's gotten to the point where (even) program directors don't have any say," says Neer. "Fewer hands are more cost-efficient. It's cheaper to have one guy make the decisions for everyone."

Neer is passionate about radio, but sounds resigned when asked if there's any possibility of a renaissance for commercial music stations, almost all of which are heavily formatted nowadays.

"Business in general is like this," he says.

'I wouldn't know where to turn'

Which is not to say there isn't a market. "When I talk to people, and ask what music they like ... they're very open-minded," he adds. "I think the constrictions in radio were put on by consultants rather than the audience, and I think audiences resent that -- that they don't have taste themselves."

He's disturbed by a number of trends: the way classic rock stations, which conceivably have the deepest libraries, play the same core songs over and over; the way DJs say little except pre-written station patter.

And the lack of variety creates a vicious circle with music's distributors -- the record companies, he says.

"I think in some ways the major labels have given up," says Neer. "They now cater to the lowest common denominator in response to what gets played. If I were a young musician, I wouldn't know where to turn."

Neer now works in talk radio as a host for New York's WFAN sports station. His own listening habits favor sports and politics on talk radio now. "I rarely listen to music on the radio anymore," he says.

Still, despite his own experience in music radio, Neer does see a glimmer of hope: satellite radio services such as XM, partly created by a former radio consultant, Lee Abrams. ("He says he's paying for the sins of his previous life," laughs Neer.)

"They asked me to put together a sample," Neer says. But his mix, which would sound daring on most broadcast stations, "didn't go far enough. They wanted 'anti-radio.' That's encouraging," Neer adds.

That and the reaction to "FM." "It just amazes me how many people loved progressive radio, and they hold on to it to this day," he says.

He sounds wistful, then saddened. "For a brief period, what we were doing was an art form. It didn't last," he says. "But it died a lot sooner than it had to."