So, Tom Petty is getting under the skin of the NAB? Cool.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/entertainment/cst-ftr-petty11.html
I can see why the NAB is pissed. Petty’s 100% right.
Wow. This guy gets the Philip Morris Award for Balliest Bullshit Claims.
Can we all share a laugh in this? Petty and crew are one of the most solid, consistent rock acts in history. He and his band are truly talented, as anyone who has bought an album or seen him live can testify. My advice to Tom Petty is to become fifty years younger and full of rage. And call pot “chronic.” Then he’ll get played on rock ‘n’ roll radio.
I doubt this. True, most everyone want to make it big, but I don’t think many think that they’re “the best.” I know a few bands, and while the members are proud of their work, they wouldn’t dare say or even think that they were the best.
This is like kindygarten. The classic “Prove it!” defense followed by the “Well, my cousin in Washington did it once, so there!”
This woulda been fun to see in person.
I’ll stop here so’s I don’t overquote a copyrighted source (That and I’m on a lunch break). But I’ll listen to Tom Petty over your generic angry white boy rock band any day.
A few months before he died, Wolfman Jack gave an interview in which this very subject came up.
The interviewer started by talking about Wolfman’s early years as an outlaw DJ with fly-by-night radio stations across the Mexican border, and then mentioned how corporate and highly formatted radio seems to be today.
The Wolfman shook his head and said, “Guy, let me tell you, as bad as you THINK things are in radio today, they’re a LOT worse than that.”
At that time, Wolfman Jack had his own syndicated radio show, a nostalgia-oriented show devoted to music of the 1950s and early 1960s. He told the interviewer, “Oldies is a very conservative genre to begin with, but within that format, you’d THINK I could play ANY song by Elvis, right? Wrong! There are EXACTLY 5 Elvis songs I’m allowed to play. You’d THINK I could play just about anything by Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly, right? Wrong! There are EXACTLY 3 Chuck Berry songs and 3 Buddy Holly songs I’m allowed to play.”
With a combination of amusement and exasperation, he noted the irony of his situation. Here he was, he said, the most famous DJ in the world, and he had absolutely no power to choose the songs he played on what was (supposedly) his own radio show. He had consultants and marketing experts telling him precisely what he could and couldn’t play.
What amazed him was, he had INFINITELY more power when he was a nobody than he had as the richest, most famous DJ ever.
I love this:
I don’t know about DC, but Nashville does have a Spanish station (though I think there are more immigrants from somewhere like Laos living in Nashville that Latinos, and they don’t have a radio station) which is utterly useless since it’s got something like a 5 watt transmitter, so it can’t be heard very well unless you happen to be next to the transmitter. I’d be interesting to see how the power of those stations compared to the power of the non-ethnic stations in DC. I’d be willing to bet that a goodly number of them are fairly low wattage stations with a microscopic listenership.
As I posted in this thread, radio listenership has been dropping for the past several years. The NAB is running scared because Petty’s right, and they don’t know what the hell to do about it. (I’ve got a few suggestions, guys, but they all involve things like ditching the generic format formula, so you’re not interested, I’m sure.) Petty just gets cooler and cooler as he ages. 
I dont particularly like petty, but you’re right about him becoming cooler as he ages 
FLICK THE RADIO CONSULTANTS!
(to be truthful, I do answer their polls, i figure it’s my one way to tell them that ALL their songs are overplayed. The one that calls me, asks me to rate the songs from 1 to 5, 1 being the worst, and if i’m tired to not tired of hearing it. I do respond, but NEVER rate a song a 5*, 1.5 being the mean, and 90% of the songs i tell them I am very tired of hearing them. They DONT seem to be getting the message.)
*Actually, there are 3 songs that I have heard on commercial mainstream radio in the past 4 years that I would have rated a “5” if they would have polled me on 'em. Those 3 being “Voodoo”, “Coke”, and “Tangerine Speedo”. Of those only Voodoo achieved truly Big Hit status, the other two sort of faded away, i guess the Radio Gods have decreed that I should like Puddle of Mudd and Creed instead.
I read the linked Sun-Times interview with the NAB’s Dennis Wharton and my first and overwhelming response is : what a tool! This guy defines “tool.” Everything he thinks, says, and does reeks of tool. He is thoroughly soaked with the viscous slime of tooldom. He’s such a big tool that his house was made by Stanley.
(Oh, did I mention I think he’s a tool?)
And such a defensive attitude! Why is it that whenever I see a quote by someone from the NAB or Clear Channel, the tone is always defensive? Halfway through this story, my image of Wharton became that of Nathan Thurm–the chain-smoking, intense, defensive corporate attorney played by Martin Short on “SNL” in the 1980’s. For people in the media, they are certainly ignorant about presenting themselves in an attractive light.
I love how he never gives a good answer to the question “how can you learn to like a song that you’ve never heard”?
This isn’t exactly a new issue. I remember at least two episodes of WKRP that dealt with the issue of programmed music. One where Venus was being recruited out of WKRP by a station whose playlist was generated by computer, and another where the station was audited by a guy who, oddly enough, was selling a programming service.
(Ah, WKRP. What a great show. Bailey was totally hot.)
When will they play NOFX on the radio? They said “Please!”
The NAB guy:
Exactimundo. Nobody’s demanding that the radio stations play music that’s demonstrably unpopular. What we need are more outlets where DJs can introduce us to cool stuff we’ve never heard, in between the stuff they know most of us like.
I especially like this quote from the NAB guy:
And how can an artist be popular with a new song before it’s played? Yeah, they’re full of horse apples, alright. They decide which small handful of artists will be the ‘breakthrough’ artists each year - God only knows how.
(How the Sam Hill did their computers pick Jon Mayer, for instance? If I hear him sing “Your Body Is Monotonous” one more time, I’m gonna scream. But if we want something ‘new’, we don’t have a lot of choices, so enough people will buy his records, I’m sure, to make it look like the record execs know what they’re doing.)
I like their backpedal on Tom Petty:
It’s getting airplay only at gunpoint, is what it looks like to me. If Petty and his band weren’t touring, and his “Last Deejay” song weren’t being heard by tens of thousands of people in each city they visit, then I bet it would still be getting zero airplay.
Here in the Washington, DC area, which Petty has yet to visit on this tour, the only times I’ve heard “Last Deejay” have been on the (genuinely) alternative WRNR - not on any of the mainstream stations that play new stuff routinely, and not on the classic-rock station that only plays new cuts by artists who have been around long enough to be classic rockers, like the Stones, U2, and Petty. And WRNR plays it with pride, because they’re one of the last stations in America, aside from college stations, where the deejays get to pick most of their songs.
For awhile, I’ve been saying that the corporations own American popular culture, a fact I regard as an abomination. This is one example.
My tool highly resents being compared to this poor excuse for a skid mark, but it’s suggestion that you substitute the word “asshole” shouldn’t really be followed, as pissing off one’s asshole could lead to really serious health problems.
You’re on your own on this one, bucky. 