“Radio is not an educational medium!” he emphasized. He was a nice enough guy but shallow as all get out, so keeping a straight face as he imparted his wisdom of the moment didn’t come easily.
I had been alone in the control room of the quite-low-on-the-food-chain AM radio station when he came through the door with that imposing body language and hardy hand clasp men often use when they realize that their job title, rather than their intellect, is all they have going for them. Let’s just say he had been recently promoted and had a vision for the station that didn’t include disc jockeys who thought for themselves.
He had a point, of course. Commercial radio required enough listeners to show up on surveys so they could convince advertisers that it was in their best interest to part with a chunk of change on a regular basis in order to properly get the word out on their goods and services. If what you did between records caused listeners to change stations, well, that carefully erected house of cards just might come tumbling down.
Anything beyond time and temperature and the occasional public-service announcement caused a wrinkle to appear in the fabric of his vision. Chat concerning a composer or sideman or an upcoming gig at a local club had no business clotting his airwaves.
“This isn’t ‘the educational band!'” he continued, referring to the range where non-commercial stations roam. He let it roll off his tongue with the assured smugness of a recent college grad given a position of authority.
As the record ended, the one that had been playing since he first walked into the studio, I flipped the microphone switch to “on” and, with a wink and a smile, began using the space leading into the next song to identify the vocalist, the lead-guitar player, the percussionist, the recording engineer, the record-label rep out of Denver, the barkeep next door, and spin a short yarn about the last time the act in question played Salt Lake City. If you were listening carefully, you would have heard a door shut, not all that softly, in the background.
As you can tell from news accounts over the past few years, the age-old tussle between radio management and their staff and listeners continues to this day. And it was in the search for just such creative freedom over the airways that a quorum of past and present programmers from the aforementioned station began the collective process to establish a community radio outlet in their adopted home town of Park City.
A group of Salt Lake music activists, social activists, and hipsters of various persuasions had already got the ball rolling on what would become KRCL and, of course, KUER had been broadcasting from the University of Utah for quite some time.
What these radio stations had in common was that, once the new guys were up and running, all three would broadcast from the far left-hand side of the FM radio dial — those frequencies between 88 and 92 MHz. Set aside for “noncommercial educational broadcasting,” this portion of the spectrum had come to be known as “the educational band.”
We all saw it as a haven at the time, a sanctuary for the creative process run by a cross section of volunteers while reflecting the cultural tastes of the various enclaves within the community at large.
The “community radio” concept, which allows localities a piece of the action formerly reserved solely for institutions of higher learning, appeared on the broadcast horizon as a saving grace to those who saw within the medium the possibility of an art form.
KRCL appeared first, with studios located above the old Blue Mouse art-cinema screening room on 100 South in Salt Lake City. Setting a standard for free-form programming not heard previously in the land of Zion, this bunch pushed the envelope and kept the faith more than any other.
That is why the recent news that they had bought into the “programming consultant with focus group” ideology and were about to completely revamp their midweek daytime programming came as such a devastating shock to radio purists.
The spin from the program director is that, even with the “hiring” of three DJs and a music director, KRCL won’t sound all that much different. They call it “evolution through intelligent design.” The change that will most be evident, however, will be in the lost level of passion the replaced programmers and their listeners once brought to the table. It’s the old quality-versus-quantity debate.
Even more recent changes have come to the “educational band” with KUER dropping its long-time midnight-to-4 a.m. jazz programming in favor of that of the BBC. To be honest, with me, the removal of the syndicated Jeff Fox show is the one that hurts the most. Slowly but surely, KUER management is demonstrating a tendency to seek out the lowest common denominator.
But aren’t they all. KPCW listeners know the “spins” by heart as, over the years, classical and free-form non-thematic rock programming have been jettisoned in favor of homogeny. And now, with the impending sale and future format of KCPW in Salt Lake very much in the headlines, new verses are being written. Call it “The Educational Band Blues.”
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.