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On New Year's Eve Eric Rhoads sent a letter to the industry titled My Moment Of Radio Depression wherein the publisher of Radio Ink reflected that while attending the recent BIA conference he remembered a session with a prominent radio colleague at which point wrote Eric, "We shared horror stories about missteps in our industry." Returning home Eric recalled, "I realized I was depressed. It struck me. Radio is flat, not innovating, and not doing much of anything new." Knowing Eric Rhoads, I'm assured his malaise is well founded though not chronic, and suggest with certainty he's not alone with these nuit blanche fears.
Perhaps losing icons like Larry Lujack, Bob Grant and other irreplaceable pieces of radio's golden tapestry add an elegiac tone to the end of one year, the beginning of another. As I read Rhoads' candid appraisal of radio crossing the horizon into a new year I accepted his syllogism and it took me back three years to a session I conducted for NAB titled, "Back To The Future" where accompanied by high achievers like legendary WLS programmer John Gehron, KVIL co-architect and celebrated radio mind George Johns representing hugely formative figures in radio's so-called golden era, teamed with contemporary high achievers Kevin Robinson (CBS and Hubbard) and Midwest Family's CHR superstar PD Jen O'Brien, we explored the premise of the session: Why must we accept that techniques and talent performance of the past be out of reach in today's post-consolidation universe? It was a sensational session thanks to my panelists who reached some stirring conclusions.
(1) Radio's farm system has all but disappeared. Where once like Baseball, radio had a natural order of procession; from Dubuque to Des Moines to Dallas. The radio oligopoly of today doesn't recognize that system or the need for it. Where are the new stars?
(2) Today debt and debt service come first; all else follows. As I write this I can see I've gone too far; some ownerships put product and persona ahead of feeding the credit bull dog but they are an exception to the fiscal footprint of too many radio companies. That downward pressure shatters creative focus and its funding, sucking oxygen from the air.
(3) As navigators in a so-called creative industry we have a choice: either see the era of "great radio" as ephemera belonging to a certain time frame from which we've long departed, or, do the things Gehron and Johns did to stoke company chauvinism, find talent who salivate to become better than the best, then get the hell out of their way in order to let it happen. By the way, several of our firm's clients are succeeding at this every day. (If you'd like a list of examples let us know).
Great Radio was not a certain place, in a certain time. It was a state-of-mind. It can happen anywhere today with a few conditions: you must be able to hear it, build a culture for it, and reward the exemplars in programming who relentlessly create it.
With the passing of a year and numerous greats now absent companions, I won't pass this way again on the topic of the existence or absence of "great radio." Radio should be among the mysteries of art; part myth, part narrative. Eric Rhoads was right when he asked, "Do our stations sound any different than they did five years ago? Thirty years ago?" Well...do they?
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