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A week ago in the Washington Post's Style section there was an article that I was actually inspired to read when I saw the teaser at the foot of the front page. A legend of a Led Zeppelin show at the Wheaton (Maryland) civic center in 1969
Reunion for 1969 Led Zeppelin concert in Wheaton - washingtonpost.com. Had it actually happened or was it just a figment of collective imagination? The answer the article seemed to lean towards was that - yes - in a disorganized preamble to Led Zeppelin's first US tour, this had happened. I think I once saw Beefeater (a Dischord band) play this same venue. As I read the article there was a moment of improbable serendipity: Jeff Krulik had organized the reunion the Post article hung its hat on, and led the rumor confirmation efforts. I know Jeff Krulik, Jeff, then program director, is the person who brought me into WMUC, the University of Maryland's student run radio station, back when I was in college. The person responsible for the debilitating condition I suffer from, I call "dj disease'. If at any point in your life you've answered a question with the words "Tav Falco" or "Johnny "Guitar" Watson" you probably have this. It didn't require much arm-twisting, being on the radio, at any rate. Jeff Krulik may be more well known to some as the person, along with John Heyn, responsible for the short film Heavy Metal Parking Lot. In the wake of WFMU's annual fund raiser it's worth spending an additional moment on the idea of radio forms. Free form radio not just as an interlude, but as the perfected form. As a life pursuit. This is against the idea of commercial, talk, college(iate), or even lpfm community radio. Low power community radio (LPFM) could be an ideal when the object of the enterprise is a limited geographic community. Certainly WMUC's ten watts reached little further than the outskirts of the College Park Campus. Or it could be something of a bait and switch when the idea seems to be to administratively stifle the growth into supporting audiences of larger non profit, or locally owned commercial stations. I can see lpfm and college radio as a training proving ground for well formed free-form, without growing into an audience of a certain size and attracting commensurate talent pool I don't see them as a replacement or substitute. A radio station - any music culture promulgator which is going to be successful needs an identity, a personality, individuality, a sense of itself. A certain momentum behind that self.
Years go in Washington there was a group called the Council for Progressive Radio. I recall (and only vaguely) this as a collection of prog. rockers and Firesign theater aficionados inspired more by WGTB nostalgia than any affinity for what WMUC was doing. WGTB was Georgetown University's radio station which was off the air for a period in the mid 1980's after the Jesuit administrators there accidentally started listening to it . This was also during the interregnum between WHFS i and WHFS ii (now null set). The goal of the council was a free form progressive radio institution whether distributed by broadcast (AM even), sideband, cable or even pony express. I believe they were poised to be flexible. If somehow they had been successful D.C might now have something like WFMU. I can't identify any trace of this organization remaining now. Ars Technica had an article
Labels: whatever the future of music is, it isn't "free" - Ars Technica based on a UK seminar (and resulting white paper named Lets Play recorded Music (
MusicTank) . The subject in general was how to coax the cat of digital recorded pop music back in its bag, or at the least get the cat to come across with some cash. The RIAA (and similar organizations) no longer believe it needs radio to introduce and popularize its product. Perhaps niche audiences have become too small to support big radio, maybe its become easy enough for these audiences to talk amongst themselves via social networks. All the same popular culture must be relentlessly commercialized, and commodity packaged. Certainly music culture and the standard model for this is the prerecorded pop song. It's all about monetizing it. The report refers to the a la carte model, by which they mean iTunes. Not particularly favored because it leaves the patron almost feeling like they own something especially now that iTunes offers higher bit rates. More discussed by the panels that made up the seminar were various type of Blanket Licenses - for streaming rights - all sharing attributes of being limited time/use/area - essentially being borrowing models. The tensions between the recording industry, digital device makers and internet service providers were apparent. The former believing they should just get their payment from the latter up front. Leaveing it to the ISPs already in contractual relational with their customers, to redefine activities possible, with a data stream, into revenue stream services. Augmenting (or bypassing) that by monetizing traffic data garnered and data mined from net activity (right now verizon is saying to themselves "music makes this guy hungry - he went from iTunes to Google and looked up Buff Medway - sell that man a chicken). At no point do they seem concerned with where the meaning or value of music comes from. Believing only that if they can hold it with one hand they can charge for it with the other. What gives modern music culture, a composition or performance its importance to an audience? Not just a particular instance, but the culture of the beat combo; assorted small branded groups of overstated socially reflective personalities. The songs in sonic and lyric form are well examined elsewhere. In broad form a snapshot taken in youth, of desires and anxieties of a handful of generations; expansive and retrenched by turns. With perhaps a meta narrative revolving around not only the performed living of musicians, but the frontiers they stake out. The arbitrators of our destiny. A functionalism of some variety is likely at work here. Cultural forms are solutions (answers) to cultural questions. When the questions change the cultural forms of the answers must change also. The Beatles are content to be represented in the digital age by a video game. A blinking diode light cousin of the old toy Simon. This may be the best revenue solution for work created to speak to people now in their sixties. L.E.D Zeppelin are likely to make a similar decision.
Of course it's not all just fast cars and guitars. There is the strange case of Little Kenny G. Inhabitant of WFMU's non-rock spree modernist space. With radio dominated generally by humorless music types or talk shows, both equally blanketed under a wide-eyed sincerity, an antidote to hyper earnestness (like tramadol) should be nearby. Recreation of a 1966 lecture by Foucault? Essentially a piece of aural sculpture. I find my reptilian reflexes fighting down the impulse to take notes. It's unkind. You gotta ask, how does a guy like Kenny G talk himself onto the air? Even with art somewhere there's the pitch. The question I ask myself is: would I schedule him? I think back to the brief time I was a college radio program director, scarcely a matter of weeks really, and many years ago. I once put a dj on the air, a freshman. Came across him in the record library a week or so latter listening to a German Shepherds 7" possibly THC. "Oh no, you're not going to be one of those are you? I got a schedule full of that sort already." He replied he knew what he liked. We never really saw eye to eye after that. He later conceived of a record - in the way people conceive records and the songs their rock star bands of the mind might produce. Kustom Karnal Blaxploitation he would call it. An homage not so much to Kevin Nutt as to Kenneth Anger. The songs would have names like: (I want to go to) Malcom X Park, but they would never explain why.
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