WPLJ - Well, Praise Lord Jesus?

WPLJ-FM, one of New York City's longest-running music stations, went off the air last Friday (May 31).  Its place on the FM dial, 95.5 megahertz, has been taken over by a new station playing contemporary Christian music.

I'll forego a discussion of whether a station playing white gospel records of recent vintage is the right fit for a rambunctiously diverse and cosmopolitan city like New York and concentrate instead on why WPLJ - originally WABC-FM until it adopted new call letters after the old 1950s blues song "White Port Lemon Juice" - went off the air.  The issue is simple - money, or lack thereof.  Cumulus, the radio conglomerate that owned WPLJ, sold the station to the Christian broadcaster Educational Media Foundation to, as Cumulus CEO Mary Berner explained, generate "substantial cash for debt repayment and investment in other business opportunities," which is a roundabout way of saying that the company needs to pay off creditors and wants to put money into something else.  The station, which broadcast contemporary hits and old favorites from more recent decades, began to see its ratings slip when longtime host Scott Shannon left in 2014 after 22 years on the air (prior to 1992, he'd been at WPLJ's rival WHTZ-FM).  As listeners  gradually lost interest in WPLJ, Cumulus gradually lost interest in keeping it on the air.

I lost interest in WPLJ long ago.  At the time of its demise, it was playing overproduced pop hits from the 1980s to the present, and it had become a Top 40 station back in 1983 after over a decade of playing straight rock, a topic I covered on this blog in an earlier entry.  Coincidentally, 1983 was the year that synthesized dance music began to dominate the Billboard Hot Hundred singles chart, and so WPLJ was suddenly playing the sort of music I'd once listened to WPLJ to get away from. It had had a storied history as a rock station, playing free-form music that surprised listeners rather than offering predictable AOR-style fare, and when it was still WABC-FM, it aired a radio concert from a then-little-known Elton John.  As a rock station, it aired the concert show "King Biscuit Flour Hour" regularly, and its storied DJs included Carol Miller,  Pat St. John,  Tony Pigg, and Jimmy Fink, who still broadcasts on Westchester County rock station WXPK-FM.  And that's not counting Shannon and many others who were on WPLJ after it went pop. 

In fact, as a pop station, WPLJ had as much influence and relevance as it had as a rock station.  David Bookbinder, a fellow Tri-Stater who's my age and who keeps a Facebook page devoted to the rock-era WPLJ, said that the 1983 format change was "the real day the music died,” but he did concede that, with WPLJ going Christian, "it's sad. It was still a New York institution."

Well, I can't argue with that.   But with satellite radio and streaming increasingly taking precedence over terrestrial radio, perhaps WPLJ's demise was inevitable.