FM
The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"It was all so honest, before the end of our collective innocence. Top Forty jocks screamed and yelled and sounded mightier than God on millions of transistor radios. But on FM radio it was all spun out for only you. On a golden web by a master weaver driven by fifty thousand magical watts of crystal clear power . . . before the days of trashy, hedonistic dumbspeak and disposable three-minute ditties . . . in the days where rock lived at many addresses in many cities."
–from FM
As a young man, Richard Neer dreamed of landing a job at WNEW in New York–one of the revolutionary FM stations across the country that were changing the face of radio by rejecting strict formatting and letting disc jockeys play whatever they wanted. He felt that when he got there, he’d have made the big time. Little did he know he’d have shaped rock history as well.
FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio chronicles the birth, growth, and death of free-form rock-and-roll radio through the stories of the movement’s flagship stations. In the late sixties and early seventies–at stations like KSAN in San Francisco, WBCN in Boston, WMMR in Philadelphia, KMET in Los Angeles, WNEW, and others–disc jockeys became the gatekeepers, critics, and gurus of new music. Jocks like Scott Muni, Vin Scelsa, Jonathan Schwartz, and Neer developed loyal followings and had incredible influence on their listeners and on the early careers of artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Genesis, the Cars, and many others.
Full of fascinating firsthand stories, FM documents the commodification of an iconoclastic phenomenon, revealing how counterculture was coopted and consumed by the mainstream. Richard Neer was an eyewitness to, and participant in, this history. FM is the tale of his exhilarating ride.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1979, the Ramones declared the end of the century. To many music insiders, this proclamation rang true: Rock and roll radio or free-form FM that allowed DJs to select music was dead, so there was no sense in dragging out the 20th century when it had already crested. Born after an FCC ruling in 1964, free form was never as "free" as it sounded. In this affably told history of music freaks vs. corporate monsters, Neer reveals that FM was a doomed marriage of commerce and creativity. In fact, FM was molded into a competitor of jingle- and single-heavy top-40 AM radio. Suddenly, there was pressure on musicians to craft quality albums (take the Beatles'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), as DJs (like Murray the K) sometimes played entire sides to compensate for the lack of advertising. First a jock at an AM college station, Neer went on to land a program directorship at New York's WNEW-FM. His 30 years there inform the bulk of the narrative, though glimpses into the evolution of other New York and West Coast power stations are offered. Readers will get an inside, but not necessarily enthralling, view of the legendary station owners and managers, jocks and rock stars of the free form era. It's important that this story be told, but Neer's voice doesn't come across compellingly on paper.
