Published in the LAWeekly, Dec. 8-14, 2000
DEAD AIR
Jim Ladd and Free-Form Radio’s Vanishing Act
by Jay Babcock
It’s easy to be annoyed by Jim Ladd.
For a DJ, he talks an awful lot. A sentence from his 1991 memoirs Radio Waves—“At night, the relationship between DJ and listener can be transformed into a mystical intercourse between shaman and tribe, both enraptured by the spell of rock ‘n’ roll emanating from a forbidden radio in the dark…”—is both a description of the way Ladd views his work and an example of the goofy, overwrought patter that often peppers his show.
He’s unadventurous. Ladd may be fond of the Jim Morrison quote, “Out here on the perimeter…we is stoned immaculate,” but his hand-picked selections sit squarely in the middle of the road; night after night, his sets inevitably feature all the usual classic rock suspects—the Doors, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, the Eagles, Dylan, the Stones, etc.—played by all the KLOS DJs who spin records according to pre-programmed playlists.
And, even after being on and off the air in Southern California for the last 28 years (KLOS, KMET, KLSX, now KLOS again), he’s still strangely lacking in the basic training skills that hip-hop DJs master by age 15; a startling number of his song-into-next-song segueways are inept sonic trainwrecks, textbook cases of how not to match beats or mix textures.
And yet…. And yet… And yet, hearing Jim Ladd doing his free-form rock thing every night from 10pm to 2am can be a major revelation: four hours that can give you at least a taste of what “free-form radio” (basically, radio in which the DJ can play whatever s/he wants) once was. Because sandwiched between the commercials for hair-loss replacement systems, corrective laser eye surgery, the National Guard and McDonald’s new McBurrito menu… the hawking of the show’s signature “Lord Have Mercy” buttons and T-shirts starting from the program’s 11th minute… and Ladd’s own constant championing of free-form radio’s virtues (every night is something of a pledge drive-group hug-revival meeting.)…somewhere in there, Ladd will do what all great DJs used to do—play you what you didn’t even know you wished to hear. Maybe it’s some nicely picked Black Crowes, Moby Grape and the Pretenders tunes, all at the same tempo, right in a row; or an hour of collaged-together vintage Hendrix on what would have been his 58th birthday; or the Beatles’ “Blue Jay Way” and Van Morrison‘s “Into the Mystic,” playing as the fog drifts in at 12:20am.
In those moments, or during one of his more inspired monologues, the self-styled L.A. Lonesome Cowboy is something more than the guy who says stuff like “Speaking of serious juju—here’s the new one from Sammy Hagar” and plays more Don Henley and Roger Waters solo album cuts than any audience should be burdened with. In those moments, Ladd is a living, broadcasting example of what a popular commercial rock DJ, freed of pre-selected playlists made by someone else, can be: moodsetter and partystarter, explorer and interpreter, provocateur and peacemaker, curator and comfort-giver. Voice and waveform. Reader of tea leaves. Secret sharer. Granter of requests. The genie in the transistor box, with the uncanny ability to somehow divine, distill, and in turn, shape, a moment’s very essence. A treasured figure who has been elevated into American folklore—think of Wolfman Jack in American Graffiti, Cleavon Little as the magnificent DJ Super Soul in Vanishing Point and the laidback headset philosopher Chris in the Morning on Northern Exposure—even as he has almost completely vanished from the nation’s commercial airwaves.
**
“The problem in the first place was Ronald Reagan, okay? His administration deregulated the broadcast industry. It used to be you could own seven TV and seven radio stations in the country. And if you bought a station, you had to own it for three years. That meant that you had to be in to broadcasting, you had to make it work, you had to be part of the community. Now [a radio station] is like a piece of junk bonds. Fewer people own more radio stations. And there’s less variety because those people who own those stations go to the same cadre of programmers to program the various types of stations that they own… ”
Jim Ladd—lanky, lean, clad in Levis and a stylish vest, grey-haired and with drooped, squinting eyes—is explaining to me why radio sucks. It’s a rant he’ll deliver from time to time on the air—sometimes with more exasperation than patience, like a sighing Al Gore at the first debate, but always with genuine passion and a sense of loss. The irony that he’s delivering what is essentially an anti-corporate lecture from the belly of the beast—an extremely corporate, kinda depressing radio compound that houses KLOS, Radio Disney and KABC, all owned by ABC/Capital Cities, which is in turn owned by the Walt Disney Corporation—is not lost on him. He’s the aging hippie—the Old Music Man On the Mountain—alone in the Valley of the Suits, who‘s somehow managed to be given the floor. It’s an odd position to be in, and one he is grateful for.
“It’s the ironic thing. Here I am, instead of at some little podunk outlet out in the middle of nowhere with bad equipment—I’m at KLOS, one of the biggest radio stations in the world, getting to do this. I don’t know of anybody else, certainly on a station of the status of KLOS, that has anywhere near the freedom that I do. So, I’m really fortunate.
“My show is a very personal expression. I really do try to break down the wall between us, so it’s not like ‘show biz,’ it’s like a friend of yours coming to your house. It’s completely improvised, it’s completely stream-of-consciousness. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have to carefully consider each and every song I play. There’s a myriad of reasons I’m playing that song at that moment. And I appreciate when people get that. Thank God for my audience. My secret weapon is I have Rita Wilde as a boss, who is the rare person who grew up in the time of real FM radio, knows what that is about, and has given me this opportunity to do this.”
“Jim is one of those icons of radio,” says KLOS programming manager Rita Wilde a few days later on the phone. “He’s probably the reason I got into radio, listening to the magic that he created. It‘s just worked out that we had the opportunity at that particular time slot to say, okay, here’s the lanes of traffic—see how fast you wanna go. He has some parameters—but it’s nothing compared to what everybody else has.”
How wide are those parameters?
“I can play anything I want,” says Ladd, smiling.
Anything?
“Anything…within these parameters: obviously, rock n roll and the blues. I’m not gonna go in and play an hour of polka music. The emphasis is on ‘classic rock‘—but that covers a lot. That covers from Bob Dylan to Creed, it covers from the Beatles to U2, from Bruce Springsteen to Collective Soul. That’s a lot.”
But why not open it up a little further, to play sets that are as wide-ranging as the shows were in the early days of free-form FM radio, when squadrons of DJs followed underground radio pioneer Tom Donahue’s formula of 60% “familiar” (mainstream album rock artists), 20% blues and R & B, 10% jazz and 10% electronic and spoken word? Why not play a wider range of new artists? Heck, how about playing Sly & the Family Stone?
“I have played Sly Stone. I have. A few months ago I played a Sly Stone song. I would play them, and I do play them, but I usually confine that kind of parameter to ‘Headsets’ [a one-hour program Ladd does every week on his show]. I think you would have to agree that ‘Headsets’ may be the most eclectic piece of radio, commercial or otherwise, that there is. I play everything from Ravi Shankar to bands you’ve never heard of, and people you’ve never heard of, and spoken word poetry. That’s kind of where that works for me. If the show isn’t as broad [as you‘d like], that’s really my fault. I’ll take credit for what you like, but also I’ll have to take blame if you don’t think I’m pushing it enough…
“I am very interested in playing new bands, too, that fit into my show. Not all brand new bands would fit into my show. But those that do, I wanna play them. Cuz it’s always been a tradition of rock radio to move forward. I like doin’ that.”
(A few weeks later at the Museum of Television and Radio’s Radio Festival 2000 panel on the Rise of Rock FM, in front of an audience of predominantly plump white baby boomers, Ladd will say, “We have changed the culture so much that we don’t even recognize the good things that we’ve done. We’re kind of just focused on, [in whining voice] ‘How come you guys aren’t so far-out anymore?’ Well excuse me, but screw you. Where were you? We were there, and I think we’ve changed some things. We have a lot to go, but we’ve changed things.”)
It’s this tendency to segregate the more out-there impulses of free-form radio that’s probably the main reason why Jim Ladd is a success in 2000—his show is currently rated #1 for his timeslot in the coveted “Males 25-54” demographic—and why he’s still on the air when all of his contemporaries-in-arms long ago gave up waiting for the magic phone call inviting them to do their thing on the air again. It must be a strange, lonely position to be in at one in the morning, three hours into a shift.
“There are many, many people out there who can do free-form radio,” Ladd acknowledges. “Very talented people—people that I would like to listen to. They’re out there. But yeah, it’s not like there’s a team of us [on the air] doing this against formatted radio. No. It’s me. I’m IT. I’m the only guy that’s left standing. And it is very lonely, because the whole fight, if you will, is me.”
***
Of course, free-form commercial radio does pop up here and there now and then.
In New York, the legendary Vic Scelsa, who’s been free-form DJing since 1967, still does his impressively wide-ranging “Idiot’s Delight” show every Sunday night on the hard rock-leaning 102.7 WNEW; a recent playlist included Coldplay, Sade, Yo La Tengo, Horace Silver, and Neil Young-Chrissie Hynde and Francois Hardy-Iggy Pop duets.
In Los Angeles, we have the nationally-syndicated Big Snoop Dogg Radio on the Beat Friday nights at 9pm, and, of course, Rodney Bingenheimer is still on KROQ every Sunday at midnight for three sugar-glam-punk-Britpop-filled hours. And to its credit, KROQ has broken a bit with its preprogrammed flash juvenilia format recently, broadcasting in October the as-yet-unreleased Radiohead Kid A album commercial-free one Sunday afternoon, as well as excerpts from the band‘s concert at the Greek.
But Jim Ladd, for better or worse, is the only one who’s doing free-form radio five nights a week.
“KLOS is the only commercially rated radio station in the country that does this, that gives somebody the freedom to pick and choose as he or she pleases,” says KLOS’s Rita Wilde. “Free-form radio just doesn’t exist. We’ve considered [extending the free-form format to other DJs], but right now, this is such a big risk that we’re taking, we need to make sure that it works here first, and who knows, maybe [there will be] a revolution of sorts. But I think it would be difficult to do that on regular commercial radio.”
The bottom-line truth is that free-form radio was birthed, and thrived, under a unique set of historical circumstances that simply aren‘t present now. In 1967, the federal government had issued a set of regulations that had the effect of encouraging experimental programming on a relatively new, under-utilized communication technology: FM radio. Simultaneously, there were groups of youths, eager to give voice to a culture divorced from the mainstream straights, who would staff radio stations for almost nothing. Over time, these stations were able to build large, loyal (and profitable) followings.
Today, FM radio is of course completely assimilated into the mainstream communications culture, and government regulations on radio content and limits to station ownership have been significantly relaxed. Fiscal reality—bottom-line Suit Math—set in long ago. Stations became valuable, lucrative commodities; in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest radio market, they now go for $200 million a pop. Corporations that are servicing debt as a rule don’t experiment—they go with that think will work, and what will work fast. That means they have to avoid formats they perceive as risky and slow-building: in other words, one in which you allow DJs to play whatever they want. With significant changes in laws governing ownership of commercial radio stations looking extremely unlikely, there’s simply not much hope for the future of the free-form Radio DJ on the FM dial. As FM radio vet Dusty Street said at the Museum of Television and Radio’s Radio Festival 2000 panel in November, “I don’t think existing FM radio is gonna make room for us.”
The free-form radio DJ will be gone soon, perhaps banished to the purgatory of a low-profile specialty show on noncommercial radio, or a lost-in-the-fray, delocalized Web ‘radio’ station, or a subscription-based car-only satellite radio service. But ultimately, he will cross-fade from the FM airwaves completely, and disappear into myth like the other American folk heroes before him.
The DJ, always invisible, will now be silent too.
Jay Babcock 