An iconic musician dies. Radio silence.
A legendary disc jockey defies his program director and devotes his entire program to the man’s music. The PD lasts a few more months and is quickly forgotten. The jock remains a radio fixture until shortly before his own passing and is remembered as one of the all time greats.
I’m referring to the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995. WNEW-FM at the time was going through one of its frequent format shifts before its demise as a rock station in 1999. They were playing mostly what was called AAA, or adult alternative music. The Grateful Dead weren’t considered hip enough to make the playlist. They were yesterday’s news, according to management.
But Scott Muni understood what a huge part the Dead played in the station’s history. Live concerts, in studio interviews, premiere performances of new albums. He felt he owed it to the band and the listeners to honor a musician who in many ways typified what the station was all about in its salad days
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Flash forward a couple of decades. Glen Campbell dies. On a radio message board catering largely to people who wannabe in radio, some of the comments explained why his passing did not merit stations breaking their format to play one or two of his songs. Millennials don’t care about Glen Campbell, they claimed. Even boomers deem him irrelevant today. Anyone who cares can find his stuff online.
What gutless idiots radio programmers are. God forbid they risk losing ten minutes of ratings credit to acknowledge an iconic musician. Campbell toured with the Beatles, played on sessions with Elvis, the Beach Boys, Sinatra and so many others. Hosted a big network TV show. Acted in True Grit with John Wayne.
If millennials don’t know that, they should. But if we abdicate our responsibility to occasionally inform as well as entertain and spoon feed our audience more helpings of what they already like, the next generation will have no appreciation of history and will therefore be doomed to repeat its mistakes.
Sometimes we have to try foods we don’t think we’ll like, watch serious movies that aren’t based on comic books and read books that use multi-syllabic words. Sometimes adults have to make kids do things they don’t like in the interest of broadening their knowledge and cultural horizons.
John F. Kennedy said that “we choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard”. If we continue to take the easy way out, only working hard when it leads directly to lining our pockets, what kind of world will we be left with?
Sadly, it may be the one we are already in.,
