You must have been an adventuresome night owl if you were there at the beginning, back in 1972. Or maybe you had insomnia, flicked on the radio sometime after midnight and turned the dial until something caught your ear at 93.1 FM. Hey, that’s a song by that weird cult band Pink Floyd followed by . . . John Coltrane? Joan Baez? The National Lampoon? Jimi Hendrix? Beethoven???
In the morning you flipped the switch again only to hear that the bizarre mix of music had vanished like a mirage, replaced by Spanish-language programming on the station that rented out its time in chunks. But come midnight again, the fledgling WXRT would return for six hours, presenting rock music in the context of almost anything that could be plucked from the air. The format was inspired by a classical music station no less, WFMT. The disk jockeys were laid-back, personable and assumed you had some intelligence. They read the commercials rather than punching in a prerecorded tape. They certainly didn’t yell at you.
In that year of Nixon’s landslide reelection, of top-40 strongholds WLS and Super ‘CFL ruling the airwaves (AM, of course), of the country’s most popular songs including “The Candy Man” and “I Am Woman,” you could be forgiven for not concluding that this weak-signaled, loopy little station on the Northwest Side would prove to be Chicago’s longest lasting, most beloved transmitter of rock a quarter century later. You might have thought WXRT would be lucky to scrape together the means to broadcast 24 hours a day–as it finally did in 1976–and not that it would become known as the most adventurous, commercially successful rock station in the country.
“They’re still way out in front,” says Sybil McGuire, progressive-music director for the New Jersey-based radio trade magazine Friday Morning Quarterback. “They’re still definitely the standard-bearer in the industry for paying attention to what’s new and what’s good. They are my favorite radio station in the country, hands down.”
So WXRT’s 25th anniversary celebration this year has been a prolonged victory dance. The station made its own rules, and the mainstream caught up. It’s not as wild as it used to be–and it succumbed to prerecorded ads long ago–but it hasn’t adopted computerized playlists and marketing studies that drive most commercial rock stations.
The station still offers an idiosyncratic mix of old and new; folk, rock and blues; music and news. As its reward, it has forged a familial bond with its listeners, and in recent years has earned top-5 ratings among listeners between 25 and 54, the ages that matter most to advertisers.
Those ratings enabled WXRT to generate $14 million in revenues in 1996, well behind WGN’s leading $38.3 million but ahead of the other album-rock stations, such as hard-rock WRCX-FM ($12.9 million) and alternative WKQX-FM ($11.8 million), according to Duncan’s Radio Market Guide. The station’s profitability inspired Group W, a subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric Corp., to buy it and sister station WSCR-AM/The Score from original owner Dan Lee for $77 million on Jan. 1, 1996. (WXRT now is one of eight Chicago radio stations that are part of the CBS radio network, which has since merged with Westinghouse.)
Yet if the main theme of the anniversary celebration has been a happy tune, the flip side is a more pensive number. WXRT is attempting to age gracefully in two areas that favor early flame-outs: radio and rock ‘n’ roll. The Rolling Stones may be proving their unprecedented longevity and popularity by mounting another huge, lucrative stadium tour while in their 50s, but when is the last time those guys produced any new music that excited people? Likewise, WXRT won many of its loyal listeners by introducing them to groundbreaking new music when nobody else would play it. Yet when is the last time you heard a song on WXRT that made you stop and say, “Wow!”
Not for the first time, WXRT finds itself navigating uncharted waters. How can a station ride the cutting edge of music–produced largely by performers in their 20s–while catering to an aging audience more likely to read the Wall Street Journal than Spin? How does it satisfy its new corporate parent as well as its long-standing sense of pride as the station that helped make Chicago perhaps the most sophisticated rock audience in the country?
Chicago’s Fine Rock Station”–nicknamed in tribute to WFMT’s “Chicago’s Fine Arts Station”–was born around Labor Day 1972 when a trio of local up-and-comers–Don Bridges, John Platt and Bob Schulman–got Lee’s go-ahead to program the overnight hours of his brokered station.
“We felt like in the city of Chicago there was room for a station that played a wide variety of music,” Platt recalls. “There was no other station playing anything other than rock hits at that point.”
Bridges soon left, replaced by Seth Mason, and the three did all the work on and off the air in the cramped one-story cinder-block building at 4949 W. Belmont Ave. that still houses the station. The next year they added disc jockey Terri Hemmert, currently the station’s senior on-air personality.
“I was the news director, public affairs director, traffic and continuity,” recalls Hemmert, 49. “I didn’t even have a typewriter. I would sit on the floor with a scissors and cut stories out of newspapers and Earth News so the jocks would have something to talk about.”
The deejays’ relaxed knowledgeability, the spoken-word advertising and the commitment to news and public affairs contributed to what Lee dubs “holistic broadcasting. All of those things were part of the whole. You just couldn’t cut one part of it out for cost savings.”
The station received enough notice that it was able to keep expanding its hours. In September 1973 it introduced one of WXRT’s most identifiable staples for the next 15 years: the Featured Artist cards, which listed the performers whose work would be highlighted on the station each day. The first Featured Artist pairing was the Who and “Chicago Folk Artists,” with the Rolling Stones and the comedy team of Nichols & May featured on the 7th, the Moody Blues and B.B. King on the 17th and King Crimson and Billie Holiday on the 29th. The next month matched Neil Young with Walter Carlos/”Switched on Bach.”
By the time WXRT ditched Featured Artists in favor of weekly Friday Features in the beginning of 1989, the anything-goes attitude had been significantly reigned in. Yet, especially when you consider that no band had been around very long in the early ’70s, it’s striking how many of the rock acts featured in the beginning were still WXRT staples 15 years later–and in many cases remain so today.
“We were playing classic rock back then, but we didn’t know it, because it was new,” says WXRT general manager Harvey Wells, who held various positions on and off the air after starting at the station in 1975. “That’s why we’re not ashamed to play that stuff today.”
“An artist’s average career time is usually set at about five years,” says Billboard magazine radio editor Chuck Taylor. “Within that time most active genres of music have evolved and changed enough that the artist no longer has the hip quotient it did. Radio formats are much the same in that styles change, listeners’ desires change and radio formats must evolve within the confines of what top-40 means or what rock means or what R&B means. For a station like ‘XRT to remain within its format and to continue to draw in ratings to make the station money is highly unusual and admirable.”
Chicago has gotten so used to what WXRT does that it doesn’t seem so strange anymore. Yet few stations today mix even old and new songs–as well as female singer-songwriters, punk rockers, blues veterans, art rockers, lightweight popsters, hippie jam bands, reggae musicians and country rockers. When WXRT plays “classic” tunes, it often digs deep into albums rather than trotting out the chestnuts: the Rolling Stones’ “Rip This Joint” or “Moonlight Mile” rather than “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”; the Who’s “Join Together” or, in less inspired moments, “You Better, You Bet” rather than “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
Although never a ratings topper, WXRT has outlasted stations that at times seemed invincible. To borrow the title of a retired WXRT feature, the “Gone But Not Forgotten” bin of Chicago rock radio formats includes WCFL, WLS, WDAI-FM, WLS-FM, WDHF-FM, WMET-FM, WCLR-FM, WXFM-FM, versions of WKQX-FM and WBBM-FM, and the original album-rock incarnation of WLUP-FM/The Loop. ‘XRT folks appreciate the irony that the Loop is currently trying to revive its rock glory days while playing bands that it had considered too left of center when WXRT was originally championing them (R.E.M., Talking Heads).
Success breeds competition, and as radio becomes ever more fragmented, WXRT has been fending off challenges from stations that, as longtime program director Norm Winer puts it, have been “removing chunks of our library.” You can hear songs that WXRT introduced to Chicagoans on such diverse stations as the lite-jazz WNUA-FM, the alternative rock WKQX/Q101, the adult-contemporary WTMX-FM and WPNT-FM, the Loop and the classic rock WCKG-FM and newcomer WXCD-FM/CD94.7.
Listeners, meanwhile, have developed such a sense of ownership over WXRT that they won’t tolerate any perceived backing down from the station’s ideals.
“They’ve always held a different standard for us than they would for anybody else,” Winer sighs. “They’re just that much more critical, that much less forgiving (of us) than anyone else who does radio in Chicago.”
A favorite complaint is that the station’s glory days are long past, though as morning drive deejay Lin Brehmer notes, listeners forget the has-beens the station used to play alongside the hip newcomers; for instance, the Featured Artists for April 21, 1978, were Elvis Costello and Kansas.
“From the time I started, we weren’t as good as we used to be, and that was in 1980,” deejay Marty Lennartz says.
Although WXRT had attracted a devoted cult following by the late 1970s, Dan Lee says it was struggling and needed wider support. “We were too deep in the underground,” he says. “Seventeen-minute versions of (Iron Butterfly’s) `In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida’–how many times do you want to listen to that? It kept a very deep core of our audience thrilled, but it didn’t allow us to reach a broader audience.”
So in a move that set the tone for WXRT for the next 18 years and counting, in 1979 Lee and general manager Seth Mason replaced original program director Platt with Winer, then a 30-year-old Brooklyn native who had made his reputation programming the cutting-edge WBCN in Boston. Winer, who boasts an articulate passion for music, pulled the station back from its outer ranges, such as classical music and comedy, and tilted the balance more toward punk and New Wave performers (the Clash, the Jam) than more traditional art-rockers and singer-songwriters.
Winer also hired a set of knowledgeable disc jockeys he could trust to run their own shows. Apparently he still does, because those early hires–Tom Marker, Frank E. Lee, Johnny Mars and Lennartz–today operate as the station’s weekday on-air staff from noon to 5:30 a.m. Hemmert, who covers 9 a.m. to noon, and pinch-hitter Bobby Skafish predate Winer, though Skafish was at the Loop and Q101 before Winer rehired him in 1994. Richard Milne (on whose “Local Anesthetic” show this writer used to appear unpaid) has covered various shifts since 1986, and Brehmer, the station’s award-winning 1984-1990 music director, who took over the morning drive slot at the end of 1991, is the relative newcomer.
“We’re all still working in the same place and still getting along,” says Lennartz, 44, who is the station’s irreverent movie critic, “A Regular Guy.” “That’s one of the special things about ‘XRT. On the other hand, it doesn’t allow for much career advancement.”
WXRT’s unique method of choosing its music balances disc jockey freedom with the controlling hands of Winer and current music director Patty Martin. The on-air staffers program their own shows according to a complicated system Winer created to manage the active library of about 5,000 songs. The deejays’ receive a flow chart of letters, each one standing for a certain category (a new release, a song by an old standby like the Beatles, a blues song . . .) and they select accordingly.
“For every artist in our library, we indicate how many hours have to go by before you can hear that artist again,” Winer says. “And therefore you don’t hear Bob Dylan as often as you hear Talking Heads.” The ratio of new or semi-new songs to old has been at about 40:60 for at least 15 years, Winer adds.
In the early 1990s the system was put on a computer, which streamlines the process by listing only eligible songs. “On one hand it makes things easier because you don’t have to stare uninspired at a wall of albums and say, “What do I play now?’ ” Mars says. “But it also takes away some of the freedom and gives management more control, which is what they wanted.”
One goal has been to allow what Winer calls “undetectable repetition.” A song must be played a certain number of times so people have a chance to hear it, but WXRT listeners won’t hear songs over and over. Generally, the most a featured new song will be played is twice a day.
That strategy helps explain why WXRT has never been a ratings goliath. Many progressive stations of the ’70s and ’80s were killed off by the “superstars” format and album-oriented-rock (AOR) stations that rotated popular performers while ignoring those on the margins. Today’s fragmented radio scene is designed for listeners with very short attention spans. Q101 repeats alternative songs in a top 40-like rotation, and classic rock stations offer almost no surprises.
“I think when people get into their cars when they’re driving to work in the morning, they want a station that matches their mood,” contends Bill Gamble, program director of the new classic-rock CD94.7 and the former Q101 program director who created its alternative-rock format. “I think we have this mythical idea that people used to turn on the radio around the clock day after day.”
But WXRT has been designed for people who may do just that, with unpredictability a key ingredient. “It’s rock and roll for adults,” Winer says, “and by setting out to try to appeal to people who appreciate it, we know that an awful lot of people won’t.”
Remaining king of such a large territory has been a struggle. When WNUA debuted its New Age format in 1987, WXRT cut back on electronic instrumental jazz acts such as Pat Metheny and Spiro Gyra. In 1988, WCKG became Chicago’s first classic-rock station, drawing fans of the old reliables.
Most significantly, in 1992 WKQX’s adult contemporary format became the alternative Q101, which initially drew heavily on such WXRT-associated bands as the Cure, 10,000 Maniacs, R.E.M. and the Replacements. WXRT had always been the most ahead-of-the-curve local commercial station, so Winer tried to fight fire with fire.
“Our tactic was to try to out-alternative them, show them how wild and obscure we could be. `You’re playing Bob Mould? We’ll play Husker Du!’ ” The result was a ratings plunge, with many older listeners becoming “disenchanted,” while others switched to Q101 “because they could hear their favorite songs every couple of hours,” Winer says.
The Q101 debacle prompted some deep soul-searching at WXRT that led to the station’s current focus: listeners who are 35 and older.
“To a great degree those are the people who’d discovered us early on and had continued to be loyal to us,” Winer says. “Those are the people we can’t afford to lose. We remembered where we came from and we started playing music that appealed to everybody who listens to us again. Brought back the Steely Dan records.” The result: four straight years of strong ratings.
At this point Winer says he doesn’t even consider Q101 a competitor, because it now targets such a young audience. Yet as the city’s top alternative station that can hammer an act’s song every few hours, Q101 receives much record company attention–such as concert promotions–that used to go to WXRT.
“The record companies these days are wearing blinders and a lot of times will automatically hand over a band to Q101 despite (the band’s) history,” Winer complains, noting that two bands WXRT gave strong support, the Charlatans UK as well as Echo and the Bunnymen recently played Q101 shows.
Winer says he won’t punish his listeners by refusing to play worthwhile music just because another station is featuring it. Yet “if the band is going to be handed over to a competing radio station as part of a radio station promotion, by playing them, in effect, we’d be supporting a promotion of another radio station.”
Still, Q101 has been able to lay claim to some of the most acclaimed albums of recent years, such as Beck’s 1996 “Odelay,” while WXRT stood on the sidelines.
“Seven months after we read about it on all the critics’ best-of-the-year lists, we got a copy of Beck’s last album,” Winer says. “And that was agonizing to us.” Still, Mars liked the Beck album enough that he bought his own copy to play selections on his weekly new-music show, “The Big Beat.” WXRT eventually added a couple of songs from the album.
The rivalry between WXRT and Q101 is well known in the industry.
“You’ve got to be careful about how you go about aligning your artists, putting your eggs in one basket and shooting yourself in the foot with the other stations,” says Ray Gmeiner, Virgin Records’ vice president of promotions. “It’s a touchy situation. It has to be handled very delicately. But the bottom line is, WXRT is the preeminent radio station of that format in the United States, and they’re treated with the respect they deserve.”
“That format,” in the eyes of the industry, is not “alternative” but Album Adult Alternative (AAA), which was created to lump together stations playing breakthough hits by groups that appeal to an older demographic, such as Blues Traveler and Sheryl Crow. Winer was happy to learn last month that for the second straight year WXRT swept the Billboard Monitor Radio Awards’ Best Station, Program Director and Music Director prizes in the AAA format.
Yet WXRT still wants to be known as the station that discovers the best new music.
“It’s still very, very, very important to us to be the primary source for our audience to find out about good music,” Winer says. “It’s a matter of pride for us. We want people to remember that they first heard a record, that they first got turned onto an artist from hearing it on ‘XRT.”
But, industry politics aside, much envelope-pushing music no longer sounds at home amid the station’s heavy reliance on softer American guitar-bands and female singer-songwriters. So WXRT is not playing the new, raved-about Bjork album. Martin says: “She just doesn’t sound like us.”
Martin contends that WXRT’s current sound reflects more what’s being released than any conscious shift.
“I’ve been thinking that in all the years I’ve been working at ‘XRT, this is the lamest time ever,” says Lennartz, who makes a point of listening to new releases and attending shows. “Is it a reflection of someone who’s 44 years old or is it valid? I’ve got to say it’s valid.”
“I’m waiting to be blown away like I was in the late ’70s,” Hemmert says. “In 1976 I was wondering if I was getting too old for this, and then Talking Heads, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello and then the ska music came along.”
A current WXRT print ad lists artists it introduced to Chicago, the 1977 roster including Costello, Talking Heads, the Clash, the Jam and, in a case of brutal honesty, Foreigner. The 1996 lineup consists of the relatively marginal Primitive Radio Gods, Duncan Sheik and Nil Lara. Winer says: “I’m telling you 1996 was painful ’cause there was nothing there.”
Still, the sound of the ’90s is likely to be defined by many bands not on WXRT. Although it has played Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and some Pearl Jam, it has passed on boundary-pushing acts such as Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, Hole, Prodigy and Chemical Brothers, who exist in a separate Q101/MTV/Spin universe. Radiohead’s “OK Computer” is a strong contender for 1997’s most evocative, widely acclaimed rock album, yet it has received minimal play on New Releases Thursdays; the assumption seems to be that listeners would rather hear another old Eric Clapton song.
“We can’t be too hip for the room,” Winer says. “We know there’s a lot of cool music coming out that might not be suitable for our audience, and we’ve got to know–and I mean know–that the decisions that we’re making are going to be the right decisions from the standpoint of the audience.”
Hitting the bull’s-eye is more important now that the station is part of a publicly owned corporation, though Winer, Martin, the jocks and the new owners insist that CBS has not influenced what goes on the air.
“We came along and bought a finished product,” says CBS Radio president Dan Mason. “I told the people the best thing I could do was stay out of their way.”
But some changes have occurred. Staffers note an increase in paperwork and more attention paid to expenditure requests, which must be sent to New York instead of taken down the hall to Dan Lee’s office. The sales staff is feeling the pressure of higher goals, and some recent personnel moves indicate a willingness to consolidate positions.
Also, WXRT’s long-standing commitment to news has been scaled back in recent years. The station had prided itself on outhustling news-oriented stations with its three-person staff, which won numerous awards. But the 15-minute noon newscast was jettisoned several years back, and the staff was reduced to two people in anticipation of the station’s sale, Winer says. While the sale was going through, longtime news director/afternoon anchor Neil Parker left and was replaced with someone working just half days. The news desk now is anchored by full-timer Kathy Voltmer in the morning and half-timer Mary Dixon, who arrives at WXRT in the afternoon after writing for CBS Radio’s WMAQ-AM in the morning.
In one sign of blatant corporate synergy, CBS flew Frank E. Lee and Dixon to Los Angeles to interview stars of the network’s upcoming television season. On the other hand, the station now draws on WMAQ’s resources and still provides more news than any area rock station: Voltmer and Dixon deliver 11 serious-minded newscasts a day, and Voltmer won several awards for her half-hour, prime-time documentary on last year’s Democratic National Convention.
The assumption is that as long as WXRT pulls in good numbers, CBS has no reason to tinker. Yet the station’s summer Arbitron ratings were its worst in years; it dropped to eighth in the 25-54 demographic, lagging behind CD94.7 as the new station scored gangbuster numbers in its first ratings period. Dan Mason says: “No, it doesn’t concern me. You have to look at the long haul and the big picture.”
The WXRT brass sounds more annoyed than worried. Wells says: “When a new station comes on the air and takes a piece of ‘XRT’s format, some people sample it. They always come home.”
“We’re not, and I emphasize not, going to play more classic rock,” Winer says. “The reason for that is because we play enough. They (CD94.7) are a one-dimensional radio station, and we’re not.”
Instead, WXRT is playing a variation on a theme it started humming in 1972, making it the nation’s longest-lasting, big-city progressive station. Although it doesn’t play as broad a range of styles, it now draws from 25 more years of music. And its connection with its audience and city extends beyond the playlist: the on-air staff’s frequent involvement in public-service events; the station’s sponsoring of public events such as 10 annual free Fourth of July concerts featuring big-name acts at Grant Park.
WXRT is still the rare rock station that supports the blues–not everyone’s idea of progressive music–and maintains a weekly jazz show. It highlights its music’s historical and cultural context through Wendy Rice’s popular “Saturday Morning Flashback” show and Skafish’s “XRT Files” segments. And the station has sold acts to Chicago audiences–such as the BoDeans and Los Lobos–that struggle elsewhere.
“Honestly, Norm (Winer) was one of the architects of the Smithereens’ success,” says Smithereens frontman Pat DiNizio.
“All I can say is `God bless ‘XRT,’ ” echoes singer/songwriter John Hiatt.
Although WXRT has retreated from the bold mix it was spinning 20 years ago, it’s unlikely that a new commercial station could approach its range.
“In today’s environment of debt, not many companies start this type of radio station, because (it takes) a long time to mature,” Dan Mason says.
Maturing is exactly what WXRT, its staff and listeners have done, they hope, in the context of continued vitality, not built-in obsolescence.
“We realized you just can’t play everything,” Wells says. “You can’t play Beethoven and play rock music. There is just not a wide enough audience for that diversity of music. We used to swim in the 12-foot end of the pool, and now we’re in the 8-foot end. But everyone else is in the 2-foot end.”
