Rick Minerd - Life Is A Jukebox

In these day's of hardly any reason to turn on a radio for little more than
traffic and weather together every three or four minutes,  it's difficult to imagine that once upon a time there were better ones with better purposes.

Reasons that is.

Too many radio stations and not enough listeners to any of them to produce "stars" like the guy shown above.

There was a time when being on the radio really was a payoff for being willing to work for thin pay checks at all hours of the day or night, and in some cases, raggedy radio stations with sub-par facilities.

Being on the air in the 1930's until about the mid 1990's could, and often did make announcers household names and was a way to work in a profession that connected those who were good at it with their communities.

It meant something more than just a part-time job, or one that goes away either because of down-sizing or frequent ownership changes.

Rarely can today's radio announcers go anywhere where people have heard of them, or if they have they aren't overly impressed.

And for those of us engaging in conversation with anyone who wasn't around when radio was a more mainstream form of entertainment we can't expect them to understand that once upon a time it was a big deal.

One can dial around the radio from FM to AM to XM and Cirius and not find anything as exciting, or as interesting as Wolfman Jack and the style he brought to the industry.

Instead there are a lot of traffic reports,  weather reports,  sports and when you can find it, music that no longer has much personality, or personalities to make it interesting.

If  I were to meet the biggest star on the radio, who ever that is now, I doubt that I would be impressed and I'm sure there wouldn't be any emotional feling like I had when I met the Wolfman in 1974.

Or when I met Kasey Kasem,  Dick Clark or any of the other pioneers of Rock & Roll radio.

Even those I never met but admired from afar like  Larry Lujack and  Charlie Tuna, people like that have never been replaced and never will be.

Locally there were many, perhaps the last of this breed being Suzy Waud.

Throughout this journal and some others I have written I have mentioned many of them, but some who's stories are worth telling include WCOL's Terry Tyler, Chuck Martin,  Bob Alan,  Jack Armstrong,  Jerry Gordon, Tom Kennedy, Harry Valentine,  Steve Bayliss,  Duke Hobson and  Mike Mahone,  and that stations list could stretch seemingly forever.

WNCI also had it's share of both locals and nationally syndicated stars, among them Charlie Pickard,  Mike Metzger, Steve Mountjoy, Jack Phippips Christopher Paul Tyler,  Michael O'Malley,  Easy Ed Hayward,  Jay Michaels,  Mike Raub,  E. Karl,  Bob North,  Dave Anthony and John L.

Those are just a few of many.

Over at WCOL-FM names such as Mike Perkins, Neal Martin, Don Gorman, Ginger,  Jim Roach,  Scoe Benson, Bill Pugh and Terry Wilson were all innovators, and all were different from each other.

This list of once well known radio personalities seems endless when you consider all of the above and count all of the others from WBNS, WTVN,  WRFD,  WMNI, WBBY, WXGT and all of the other radio stations that are still around, either with the same call letter's or with new ones and new configurations.

But try to name a half dozen radio personalities now.

I can barely do that I still pay attention.

Recently I participated in an on-line forum that discussed what's wrong with radio today, and ways to fix the problems that have caused it to become little more than an after thought.

The issue came back to what it has for the past decade or so, economics.

Owners of radio stations aren't willing to spend money.

They want to own the stations, but aren't willing to gamble on ways to reinvent something that's begging to be reinvented.

Could there be new "Wolfman's" out there waiting to be discovered?

Certainly.

There was never a shortage of new talent ready to sit down to a microphone and give listeners reasons to stay tuned.

There never will be.

But the opportunities aren't there and they probably never will be again.

With personality radio all but gone now there are new genre's of  DJ's trying to get noticed.

There are of course many successful club DJ's doing theirbit in bars and at parties, and there are a lot of Wolfman wannabe's spinning tunes at weddings and car shows, but never again will there be the plethora of good, entertaining jocks on the radio that was enjoyed in America before the last decade of the last century.

Having met a lot of them and having had the good fortune to work with a number of talented radio people before I got old I know that I was part of something very special.

You had to be around to understand Burton Cummings words when he sang, "Clap for the Wolfman,  you're gonna dig him till the day you die."

Imjustrick@aol.com

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