Suddenly, Last Summer

This summer marks the thirtieth anniversary of a dark moment for rock and roll and for rock and roll radio.  Many people believe that rock radio in the New York area began its decline and fall when WNEW-FM dropped its rock format in 1999 after 32 years as a rock station and after having spent the previous five years or so trying to update said format.  Actually, the decline started farther back than that.  It started in the summer of 1983, when New York's WPLJ-FM changed its format from rock to Top 40 - or, as it was now known, Contemporary Hit Radio (CHR).  The fact that it happened less than three years after John Lennon's murder and about two years after the debut of MTV should have been a clear sign that popular music was going in a new direction . . . and not too many rock fans liked where it was headed.

The format change alone was injurious, but the insult was added in how the format change was implemented.  Rather than give it to us straight, and go immediately from being "the Home of Rock and Roll" to being the "Home of the Hits," WPLJ phased in the format change gradually, increasingly peppering its playlists with some of the more pop-oriented tunes from veteran rock artists, as more current songs uncharacteristic of what WPLJ had been playing for years were suddenly making their way into the mix.  Moreover, the low-keyed banter of the DJs between songs was slowly giving way to more hyperactive introductions, or "talk-ups," for records that were partially spoken over the music.  According to legendary WPLJ rock disc jockey Carol Miller, in her memoir "Up All Night: My Life and Times In Rock Radio," she sensed something was wrong when she got back to New York in early July 1983 after being away for a few days.  She called fellow WPLJ jock Pat St. John, who was on the air in the time, and overheard him frantically talk up a song from Rod Stewart - and the song was not one of Stewart's classic early blues-based cuts but his latest synthesizer-laden, insubstantial pop single.  St. John then told her the news.  

We listeners had been, and still were, trying to figure out at the time what the hell was going on, and had been going on for a few weeks.  Yes, we heard Michael Jackson's "Beat It" on WPLJ, but that had Eddie Van Halen on guitar, which made sense - maybe black artists not named Jimi Hendrix were breaking the album-oriented rock radio color barrier.  So rock critic Dave Marsh assumed.  But then we knew something was clearly wrong when WPLJ played Irene Cara's hit from the movie Flashdance, which Carol Miller said caused one motorist to drive off the road when it came on the car radio.  What a feeling, indeed.

The reasons for the format change were twofold.  First, pop-oriented fare was becoming more lucrative to play on the air than traditional rock and roll, thanks to the influence of MTV and the compatibility of music videos for songs that were the musical equivalent of cotton candy and didn't rock out so much; all of this lightweight pop was more profitable to advertisers than the latest Rush record.  Second, Top 40 sounded better on FM stereo than on AM.  By the end of the eighties, AM music radio would practically be extinct.

So, it seemed, was rock and roll.  Sure, we in the New York area still had WNEW in the eighties, but the gravity had clearly shifted away from rock in favor of pop, some of which sounded like the dreaded disco we thought (and hoped) was dead.  What rock that did get through in the 1980s was video-friendly hair metal, a subgenre destined for ridicule and oblivion.  Then came hip-hop.  By 1990, rap albums held the top position on the Billboard album chart for most of that year; not one rock album made it to the top.  After a few hopeful signs in the early nineties, rock and roll went into further decline, and rock radio - especially in dance-pop-loving New York - followed suit.

So, what seems to have happened only recently - rock radio stations biting the dust - really began thirty years ago, in 1983.  We rock fans, whether in the New York area or elsewhere, should have known our beloved music was doomed, as so many of the new artists popping up at the time were nobody's idea of rock and roll.  Even the New Wave artists of the time were more pop than rock.  I don't care how good the Motels were - their hits "Only the Lonely" (not the Roy Orbison song of the same name) and "Suddenly, Last Summer" were not rock and roll!

We had it coming. As I always point out, we rock fans let the music get too white, too male, and too guitar-based, and when a new, more diverse generation of pop fans weaned on MTV and not so much raised on radio arrived, we were suddenly on the defensive.  And we weren't quite able to accommodate ourselves to anything new.  A lot of us had even been reluctant to embrace punk, which was white, male, and guitar-based.  Good grief, when the eighties began, our idea of cutting-edge rock was Journey and REO Speedwagon.  So we soon invented a new radio format - "classic rock," which now allows us to live in a world in which hip-hop never happened.

Oh yeah, after several years at WNEW after WPLJ went pop, Carol Miller moved to New York classic rock station WAXQ-FM. She's still playing the rock and roll of the seventies on the radio.  Some things never change. :-) ;-)