Six years ago, radio veteran Bill Gamble was no longer getting a thrill out of deciding which Michael Bolton or Gloria Estefan records to play on his station. As program director for WKQX-FM 101.1, he was mired in a costly ratings war with two other stations for the affections of an audience of middle-age suburbanites who seldom bought records or went to concerts.
Then, in 1992, came a radical overhaul of the station’s format from soft-sounding “adult contemporary” to “modern-rock,” a play-the-hits, Top-40 approach to the then-emerging alternative genre. Within months, Gamble was no longer just another well-respected but largely anonymous cog in the music-business machine.
Posters of Courtney Love and Pearl Jam went up in his office in the Merchandise Mart, and later, so did gold records from the Offspring and Bush. The abrasive guitars and angry voices of alternative rock soon became synonymous with Q101 in Chicago, and Gamble became one of the most powerful men in the industry.
With his weekly decisions on what records to add to his station’s play list, and his consulting work for nearly a dozen like-minded stations from California to Virginia, he now holds sway over the buying decisions of millions of rock-obsessed teenagers and young adults.
“There’s a lot of clout at Q101 for one simple reason,” says one nationally prominent concert promoter. “Bill Gamble sells a hell of a lot of records and concert tickets.”
Not directly, of course. In the $12-billion-a-year music business, thousands of musicians make records and millions of listeners buy them.
But true power is concentrated in the hands of a few executives, behind-the-scenes figures who measure their clout in terms of how much they influence whether a record will become a hit, a concert will sell out or a performer will become a star. In the last five years, Gamble has joined this elite club of powerbrokers and tastemakers, one of the select few programmers in the country who can make or break an act in the lucrative alternative-rock genre.
In an industry where risk-takers are few, Gamble stands apart by pushing the “play” button earlier than anyone else–whether it’s on the Prodigy’s recent breakthrough “Firestarter” or Veruca Salt’s 1994 debut single “Seether.” And he doesn’t hesitate to admit he’s wrong by pulling a record to which his station’s audience isn’t responding.
“He’s one of three or four program directors in the country who sees the future and puts his stamp on it before anyone else does,” says Rob Kahane, president of Trauma Records, whose multimillion-selling bands Bush and No Doubt received big early pushes from Q101. “In this business, there are very few leaders, and mostly sheep. When KROQ (in Los Angeles) or Q101 put their stamp on the record, every station in the country takes notice. They line up behind it.”
Once considered a fringe, underground category in the music business, alternative has become synonymous with the mainstream since emerging as a radio format on KROQ in Los Angeles in the late ’80s. Acts such as Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, Alanis Morissette, Oasis, No Doubt and Beck all have emerged from this category to become as dominant in ’90s rock as the Rolling Stones, Eagles and Fleetwood Mac were in the ’70s.
It is a music consumed largely by teenagers and young adults, ages 14 to 29, and Gamble, 42, would seem an unlikely person to anticipate their needs, shape their musical tastes and influence their buying habits. For many in his audience, Gamble would fit the profile of an out-of-touch older uncle, just another executive who buzzes from the northern suburbs to work in his spacious Loop office each weekday.
Married with two children, ages 12 and 13, Gamble has been in the radio business since attending Michigan State University in East Lansing in the early ’70s. He has a passion for Tom Petty records–there’s a stash of them in his office even though they aren’t hip enough for his station to play. He wears a tie to work and sports a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. But his office door at the Merchandise Mart is usually open, and dozens of people wander in and out to voice opinions, trade jokes and pass along tips, and he consults frequently with his astute music director, Mary Shuminas. As one fellow industry tastemaker from the West Coast describes him, Gamble is “accessible, unassuming, easygoing, anything but the self-important, look-at-me guy that a lot of people in this industry turn into.”
`It’s still about music’
If there is irony in this genial middle-aged suburbanite programming records for people half his age, Gamble doesn’t see it. “I do my job. I see bands, I listen to people,” he says. “One of the best things I do is listen, and I learn. You talk about sales and numbers and statistics, but it really is still about music.
“It’s a business, but when I was in London recently to give this keynote at a music convention, they had a rate-a-record seminar, and I heard the record (`Female of the Species’) by this new band Space. And I loved it. I couldn’t wait to get back and put it on the radio station.
“That’s the fun–the ability to hear records, get excited about them, feel the chills, and then be driving up Lake Shore Drive and hearing people cranking a song that you put on the radio. That’s an ego boost. That’s the ultimate deal in this whole thing.”
Gamble says there’s no exact science to what he does. He’s blown a few calls; even though he loved records by Elastica, Pulp and Sebadoh, they never found an audience in Chicago. But he remembers when he first heard “Everything Zen” in 1994 by the then-unknown Bush. “It had heavy guitar but it was a big sing-along pop song, and, oh, wait a minute, they’ve got a great looking singer too? They’re doing a video? They’re British but they don’t sound British? All these things are going through my head, and to me it was obvious. How much easier can it be?”
Bush never got a big industry build-up, the type of pre-release hype that tips programmers to an incoming smash. But within months they had sold millions of records, and Gamble secured a longterm relationship with a band he considers a cornerstone of the alternative genre when he enlisted them to play at the station’s 1995 summer festival in front of the biggest audience they had ever seen to that point, on the main stage at the World Music Theatre. In April, the band will headline a Q101-sponsored show at the Rosemont Horizon.
Gamble uses the word “fun” more often than any other to describe what he does and how he relates to a music that is no longer being made expressly for him or his Baby Boom generation peers. To an 18-year-old, Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails may be all doom and gloom, but Gamble doesn’t see it that way.
“The psychologists and social scientists will write about why grunge was big, but to me it’s just people going to the clubs and having fun,” he says.
“The format for me is a band like Oasis–great pop songs with the snottiest attitude in the world. That to me is what rock ‘n’ roll is all about–`We’re rock stars, and “f” you if you don’t like it.’ These are guys I would never want at my house. I don’t even know if I’d want them at the radio station. But I love ’em.”
The love–or what passes for it in the glad-handing, you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours world of the record business–is returned. Gamble has demonstrated his clout in recent years at his twice-a-year Q101 concert festivals by enlisting a veritable Who’s Who of alternative rock: Oasis, Hole, Garbage, No Doubt, Bush, White Zombie, Alanis Morissette, Foo Fighters.
“The labels all line up to curry favor with Bill, which is why he’s consistently able to do arena and amphitheater shows at this level,” says a major national concert promoter who requested anonymity. “These label guys figure if they do a favor for Bill, it’s like the wheel of karma spins in their direction. They deliver a star client for one of these shows and the understanding is that he’ll take a longer look at what records they have coming down the pike in the upcoming quarter.”
But on the integrity meter, Gamble is widely considered above such tawdry wheeling and dealing, which is commonplace at smaller stations. He knows the record labels need him a lot more than he needs them; his station doesn’t have to play the game because it owns the playing field in the Midwest.
“A young generation of takers is being bred among radio executives,” says Sky Daniels, alternative-radio columnist for the radio industry trade publication Radio and Records. “But no one controls the bigs. Bill Gamble has too many people lined up outside his office to play favorites.”
Gamble is even more succinct: “If you put records on your station for any other reason than the audience liking them, you’ll be out of work.”
Opening big
Q101 does phone surveys of its audience every 10 days, and has a reputation among naysayers for researching itself into conservative programming, of playing a handful of anointed songs to death in a business that is about gaining Arbitron ratings and advertising dollars rather than promoting artists or their music.
But though there are more than 100 radio stations nationwide that play alternative rock, only a handful do the anointing, a process that involves a certain amount of risk and which welcomes the occasional out-of-left field hit: Beck’s “Loser,” for example, or the Cardigans’ “Lovefool.” The endorsement of Q101 and KROQ, along with inclusion in MTV’s “Buzz Bin” rotation–a status reserved for only a handful of video singles a week–can all but ensure that last week’s obscurity is this week’s must-have record.
“There are two ways of delivering a hit in today’s musical climate,” says Daniels. “One is the old-fashioned way of working hard, developing a core audience, improving your songs, touring year after year, culminating all that effort with a hit.
“But the more common approach is to put out a record that KROQ, Q101 and the `Buzz Bin’ all add to their play lists. That’s called opening big. It’s like having a $20 million opening week in the movie business.”
Gamble’s decisions can be measured locally in terms of album sales and concert sellouts. In the week ending Jan. 19, according to SoundScan figures for album sales in Chicago, nine of the top 20 best-selling albums in Chicago were on Q101’s rotation list, led by No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom” with 5,541 sales.
Recent Arbitron ratings, which monitor radio listenership, show Q101 in a dogfight for rating’s supremacy with other rock stations in town. WRCX, which emphasizes hard rock, has pulled slightly ahead of Q101 in the most recent Arbitron survey, and WXRT, which plays rock geared for an older audience, remains within striking distance. But Q101’s audience is by far the most active in terms of putting their money where their musical tastes are.
“The ratings of these Chicago rock stations are about the same, but the audiences and the impact are vastly different,” says a Midwest rock promoter. “The average Q101 listener is a 16-year-old kid who lives for music, buys 40 albums a year and goes to maybe a dozen concerts. He sits there with his wallet open listening to Q101 telling him what records to buy and what concerts to see.”
Though the primary challenge facing Q101 is how to stay on the air and attract advertisers, the station has built its reputation and ratings on a veneer of hipster cool. A recurring ad is one that pits Q101 music–loud, abrasive, edgy–against the classic (read “stuffy”) rock presumably played by its competition.
“We want certain bands identified with this station,” Gamble says. “Metallica defines rock, Hootie and the Blowfish defines adult contemporary, but Nine Inch Nails defines us. If we do our job right with our audience, they’ll equate `alternative’ with new and different.”
Make profits, but stay on the edge. If the approach is not an outright contradiction, it’s a juggling act that finds Gamble constantly tossing shiny new CDs into the air while discarding others as he tries to not only keep up with but anticipate the shifting tastes of the marketplace.
“We should be rewarded for being aggressive and trying new things,” Gamble insists of the alternative-rock format. “The fundamental promise of these kinds of radio stations is to play new music and challenge the audience a bit, but also to give them what they want. Balancing the two things is the tricky part.
“So you may complain that we’ve been playing Alanis Morissette too much, but our audience keeps telling us they’re not tired of her. There is an audience out there that would like to hear new music more than anything else. The problem is, they’re not that big. They set tastes and trends, so you want to reach them, but then there’s this bigger group who are still buying the Alanis record.” (In mid-January, Morissette’s 1995 album “Jagged Little Pill” was still the 10th biggest seller in Chicago with 2,487 copies sold in one week, according to SoundScan.)
Gamble peers out onto the Chicago skyline from his office and sounds a veiled warning for any rock act, or any rock station for that matter, that falls into the trap of self-satisfaction.
“We program as if looking through a window at this parade of 18- to 29-year-olds marching past us, and as they march out of view, they’re taking their taste with them. Artists like Peter Gabriel and Natalie Merchant that were once part of the format are gone. The Cure was untouchable a few years ago, and now I’m not so sure. You’ve got this new group of listeners coming up saying, `You know what? I like Cake. I like Rage Against the Machine. I like the Chemical Brothers.’
“If there’s one truism in this format it’s this: Gone tomorrow.”
