Summer of Love 61 Revisited #12 & 35

[realthog]

NPR is posting all weekend great scads of stuff recorded at this year's Newport Folk Festival for free download here.

I'm not sure how long these downloads will be available, so I'd not tarry. More is being added even as I type: Gillian Welch and Billy Bragg and The Low Anthem already, Decemberists later this evening, Pete Seeger tomorrow . . . These are just some of the people I immediately recognize; perhaps more exciting are the discoveries I'm going to be making.

Makes you wonder, dunnit, why all the good stuff ends up on budget-strapped NPR rather than on richer-than-the-wildest-dreams-of-Croesus stations like, say, those of the Clear Channel network.

Comments

[avengangle.livejournal.com]

AWESOME! Thank you!

(Ben's going to be so excited about Pete Seeger this evening! Also Arlo Guthrie.)

[realthog.livejournal.com]

There are further downloadable Newport performances here: http://www.mvyradio.com/music_info/newport_2009.php.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

It's because while ClearChannel had the money, they earned the nickname "CheapChannel" fair and square. The Mays family, the previous owners of the company before it was sold out last year, figured that they could get rich(er) by buying up every station they could and then forcing everyone to put up with the crappy playlists they offered, all of which were based upon how much payola the music labels were offering. I remember one interview with a senior manager who crowed about how he didn't give a damn about how much listeners complained about lousy playlists and worse deejays, because he and the company had ascertained that the winner of the great radio wars was going to those who had a hammerlock on "drive time", when folks trying to get home had no choice but to listen to their offerings.

And then the iPod came along.

To be fair, CheapChannel was already digging itself a big hole due to its playlists, and that's why it invested in XM satellite radio the first chance it had. Car CD player sales jumped through the roof in every city where a significant number of stations advertised "A ClearChannel station!" during the station ID, but the killer was when listeners realized that they could just plug in their iPods and ignore the arrogant programming directors and their vomitous morning and afternoon deejays. This really started hitting the advertisers, too, when they started to make the connection that potential customers actively stayed away from just about any business that advertised through ClearChannel. These days, terrestrial radio is as much of a money suck for advertisers as weekly or daily newspapers: sure, you can buy radio advertising at about one-fifth the cost of a 30-second spot a decade ago, but the only people who will respond aren't going to be the customers you want.

Of course, I knew that CheapChannel was doomed when its stations were flooded with ads for the fake weight loss product BodySolutions in 2001. Every station was flooded with ads performed by their own deejays, promising extensive weight loss "even after eating pizza" if customers just took "one teaspoon before bedtime". The BodySolutions company was based in San Antonio, right next to ClearChannel's offices. The deejays identified themselves as being ClearChannel employees. Apparently BodySolutions was given a much lower advertising rate than other advertisers, allegedly because ClearChannel management was getting a cut from the sales in exchange for the lower rate. Yet, somehow, the Mayses claimed in court, when angry customers sued BodySolutions for selling quack medicine, that they had no idea who approved the ads and that they had absolutely no idea that it was all a scam. Uh huh. That's right: pull the other leg so I don't walk in circles.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I knew part of this story, but many thanks for filling in so many details.

Interestingly, if you subscribe to the e-mail updates of the rightist wingnut webzine Newsmax they start bombarding you not just with inducements to join dubious moneymaking schemes but also with pimpages for "unorthodox" medicine. It makes you wonder if it must be something in the water wingnuts drink during their formative years, or something; just look at the romance between megaquack Harry Hoxsey and the most virulent right-wing pro-Nazi politics during the first half of the last century.

To give you a flavour of the Newsmax quackitude, here's the opening of one that arrived just a few minutes ago:

==============

Dear Newsmax Reader:

David Brownstein, M.D., one of the foremost American practitioners of conventional as well as holistic medicine, has some urgent health information that could dramatically affect your health and well-being. Please take a moment to read his information below.

Dr. Brownstein's Natural Way to Health

How to Prevent Arthritis, Cancer and Alzheimer's!

Try this simple remedy for rheumatoid arthritis!

Use this mineral to protect against skin cancer!

See what to do now to prevent multiple sclerosis,
Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's!

Plus, why a deficiency in this nutrient puts you at greater risk for heart attack and stroke!

==============

I imagine you can search Lancet in vain for the details of Brownstein's researches . . .

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

I'm really not surprised. Considering age and general levels of education among NewsMax readers, miracle cures find fertile ground. (And to be fair, the Huffington Post has the same exact problem. Everyone expects miracle cures, especially for conditions that are just part of the human condition as we age.)

Otherwise, glad to be of service: considering how big the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is for radio and television, I'm usually pretty close to Ground Zero for some of the bigger scandals and scams. Part of the reason why CheapChannel's name is mud is due to how it treated its competition. At the beginning of 2002, one of Susquehanna Radio's stations in Dallas changed format to heavy metal and changed its name to "93.3 The Bone". The format was wildly popular, and The Bone rapidly stole a lot of listeners from ClearChannel's two AOR stations. Rather than, say, play more than the same 60 songs per day, or reevaluate the fallacy that somehow Elton John, Phil Collins, and Billy Joel are "classic rock", ClearChannel decided that there was only one option, and that was to buy up every last URL on a variation of "the bone 933" and forward the traffic to its Dallas-based classic rock station. Not only did this cost ClearChannel a lot of business when word got out, but then it was stuck with a gaggle of domain names it couldn't use and that Susquehanna wasn't willing to buy back.

In any case, Dallas radio is in much worse shape than in markets where ClearChannel didn't dominate everything. Things got so bad that ClearChannel reverted one Spanglish station back to its rock format after five years, mostly because at least the mulletheads were willing to listen, even if it was the same exact playlist the station had back in 1984. As opposed to other markets, the Jack FM format station is doing quite well, mostly because it's the one station not overloaded with overly paid and ego-bound deejays yammering all day. (I have to admit that I listen to Jack in the morning as I'm getting ready for work, but mostly for the advertising. One of our old stations used to be a great guide for dying nightclubs: if a new club advertised on "The Edge", it was probably doomed. With Jack FM, those ads are a great guide for doomed real estate scams, banks, and cult movies. For instance, I knew the film Serenity was going to implode the moment Jack FM started running ads trying to convince someone other than the Cat Piss Men to see it, and remind me to tell you about the fiasco called Fed-Con, which also advertised there.)

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

The scam is always a sign of collapse. We switched from AOL in 2003 when an unexpected charge appeared on our bank statement. Within a year AOL ceased to be a viable commercial enterprise.