Old School

So I was in Oklahoma on business this week, driving a rental car without tapes or CDs to accompany me. Because audio in the car is as necessary to my driving as gasoline in the car, I was at the mercy of the local radio dial. For years, "local" radio has for me meant either NPR or one of the national sports talk networks, which, of course, aren't really local at all. Not that it matters all that much. With the rise of corporate consolidation and the attendant evils of voice-tracking, you can't even be sure that more local forms of radio are actually local.

(Grim radio joke: "What's the difference between your local McDonalds and your local Clear Channel station? The voice on the microphone at McDonalds is live and local." The DJs you are hearing on your local station talking about local events may actually be in Baltimore and may have recorded their shows several days ago. Why this doesn't bother people more, I have no idea.)

I bounced between a couple of oldies stations in Tulsa, KTSO and Kool 106.1. I was guessing that Kool 106.1 was voice-tracked from elsewhere, although the DJ profiles on the station's website tout the local Tulsa roots of most of the jocks. It was hard to detect a hint of it. The jocks at KTSO were even more anonymous. Both stations cranked out a decent mix of oldies--KTSO's with a 70s/80s flavor and Kool 106.1 more in the 60s/70s vein--but there was nothing surprising about either station, ever (except maybe The John Tesh Show evenings on KTSO--what fresh hell is this?). They were perfectly serviceable radio stations, typically contemporary, with slick jingles, well-produced promos, and music that pushed the envelope never. I wouldn't have bothered to remember them at all, or to write about them here, were it not for another radio station I heard on the trip.

I had to head from Tulsa down toward Oklahoma City yesterday, and when I got out of range of the Tulsa NPR affiliate, I hit the "seek" button and landed on another oldies station, KOMA from Oklahoma City. The call letters sounded familiar--it wasn't until I got home and researched a bit of the station's history that I realized why. In the 1950s, KOMA was part of the Storz Broadcasting chain. Todd Storz was one of the primary inventors of Top 40, thus KOMA is one of the places where the format was born. Sure, it was an AM station back in the day, and it's been through the wringer format-wise since then, but it's been playing oldies since 1988. KOMA's playlist is almost exclusively 60s music (although I heard a couple of things from the early 70s), but it's what goes on between the records that makes it extraordinary.

I could tell by listening that KOMA's jocks are all veterans, and they are--the greenest of them has been in radio since 1975, the oldest since 1947. Guys from the old school know that a good DJ does more than just talk and play tunes. Anybody can be trained to do that. An old radio guy uses everything at his command, including his control board, to create atmosphere--what he says, how he says it, and how he times the play of jingles, records, and commercials, (There was a time when DJs touted their skills at the control board--"good production, tight board"--but that subtle art is almost entirely dead today.) An old radio guy also adds to his show by interacting with other people on the air--the news guy, the traffic reporter, the meteorologist, or callers on the phone. (This, too, is a dying art. The only people permitted to talk on the air anymore are morning show hosts, and most of them don't know when to shut up.) Old radio guys tend to know where they're from. A couple of the people I heard on KOMA still possessed Oklahoma accents, unlike the Tulsa jocks, who were bland and quirk-free and thus could have come from anywhere.

KOMA also has a seriously old-school jingle package, and they know how to use it. Jingles aren't as common as they used to be--stations tend to use what are known as "breakers," which are voiceover lines with sound effects (and the clips from movies and TV shows that everyone uses), because they're cheaper. Singing jingles cost a lot--and with stations changing call letters and formats as often as they do these days, the cost is often prohibitive. KOMA's jingles capture the flavor of vintage jingles--and their top-of-the-hour legal ID is one of the best you'll ever hear: "K-OMA--Oklahoma City, USA!"

Bottom line: What I heard yesterday on KOMA was so utterly solid, so perfectly balanced between music, humor, personality, and information--in other words, so much like radio used to be, and so much like the radio I grew up listening to and wanted to do--that the single worst moment of the trip was when I lost the signal on the way back to Tulsa. And here's what really sucks--the station isn't streaming its signal on the Internet, which means I'll have to go back there to hear it again.

Friday Mini-5: Five Great Legal IDs
1. WCFL, Chicago, 1974-1976 (Big fanfare followed by a donut for the jock to identify himself: "Seven o'clock with World Famous Tom Murphy at the Voice of Labor," and then the singers do the call letters. Still gives me chills when I hear it at Reelradio.com.)
2. WLS, Chicago, 70s and 80s (The Musicradio ID--to follow this with anything that didn't rock was a sacrilege.)
3. Q106.5, Davenport/Quad Cities, 1995 (Great whooshing sound effects and a dead-cold ending that required you to nail the next record at precisely the proper instant. I am pretty sure it was developed by accident.)
4. KOMA, Oklahoma City, current (As noted above.)
5. WSUP, Platteville, WI, late 1970s (I will never forget rolling this one at high noon to start the second radio show I ever did in my life, and following it with Billy Preston's "Space Race"--which I nailed at precisely the proper instant. Just born with it, I guess.)