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Powerful Radio – “I’d love to turn you on”It was worth hearing, again, that the Beatles album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” passed a milestone. It was forty years ago this week that radio stations daringly played a song starting “It was twenty years ago today…”. Things change.
Every station that playing more than the officially released singles of the day were pirates, literally or figuratively. The thread connecting those stations taking risk, whether on a boat or in a basement, is also found in the Sgt Pepper album. “I’d love to turn you on,” they sang. And the slightly out of mainstream radio of the day, world-wide, wanted more than anything else to turn the listeners on. The soaring baby-boom generation was turned on. The music business was expansive. And radio won back its place, a different place but a place in the hearts of those turned on by it and those turned on by making it happen. “You have to admit, it’s getting better.”
As summer 1967 began WICR FM, owned Indiana Central College in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA and operated by students faced a dilemma. There were too few students on campus during that summer to keep it going. Two students with time on their hands approached one of the deans about letting go of the formalities of college radio of the day. They asked the dean, himself all of 25 years, if perhaps a few volunteers could be found for a special summer program of popular music. After relentless pressure, the dean agreed. “Summer Session ‘67” was born. I was among those volunteers. Indeed, I was a four-year station veteran, though never a student at Indiana Central, located ten minutes away from my parents’ house. Volunteers came, literally, out of the woodwork, about equally divide between high school students and Indiana Central students. Some had a little experience, most had 3rd Class radio licenses (required in those days) and all had record collections. WICR had an extensive classic music library, no pop music. Dick Smith brought his copy of the Mothers of Invention album. The thread connecting those volunteers at 10 watt WICR FM’s “Summer Session ‘67” was turning somebody – anybody – on to the sound of it all. The same thread runs through Valerie Geller’s book Creating Powerful Radio, now expanded and re-released. The art, science and secret to radio broadcasting is “turning on” listeners. Powerful radio, she says, makes people want to turn it up. The book is a collection of energetic bursts from Geller and several contributors. (full disclosure: I am one from the original edition) That energy is pervasive. Any reader will hear the words as a call to action. Music format broadcasters might find it slightly dismissive; no rambling paragraphs on “wheels,” “rotations” and “hot clocks.” But, music formats aren’t powerful, less so since the iPod revolution. Geller’s forte is news programming and talent development. She draws from broad experience with news and news-talk broadcasters on both side of the Atlantic. Her guidelines for producers succinctly grasp the essence of live talk-radio production up to and including “bury the dead. If a topic is overdone, drop it.” The advice to managers on talent management is as good as the advice to performers for getting along with the boss. Managers are reminded “…while the performer in question is an adult, legally speaking, that 40-year-old body may hide the emotions of a six-year-old.” To the performer:” Your boss is not a mind reader.” As with many professional books written primarily for an American reader it occasionally falls into American commercial radio jargon, not always easy for non-Americans to follow. However, the special relationship between broadcasters and listener is universal. Almost completely ignored is the business side: turning on media buyers or, for public broadcasters, turning on politicians. As well it should be. |
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Top of the Pops grabbed it first, I think, at least the title single. It spread to LA and the rest of the world. It was a car-radio song, a beach radio song. Sony’s Walkman was still several years away. It was not a song for tiny headphones, anyway. It was a song, and time, to turn up. In 1967 all pop music was heard on the AM band; FM, where available, relegated to background music or the occasional college.