Page 511 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

0 | Shock Jocks: Mak ng Mayhem over the A rwaves

“payola,” hearings were held in Washington and some careers ended, Freed’s
most notably. The furor that followed toned down the audacity of the disc jock-
eys, as less threatening figures, like American Bandstand ’s Dick Clark, adopted
a posture that parents found acceptable. Nonetheless, the transformation of the
on-air announcer from a virtual nonentity to an audacious individual with a defi-
nite personality was complete.

voiCEs in ThE nighT

Some individuals saw in radio the opportunity to speak, person to person,
through a microphone and conceived of their broadcasts as a sphere of self-
expression. None, perhaps, succeeded more in shocking portions of the public
with his adoption of the airwaves as a kind of personal podium than Jean Shep-
herd. It was not that he had a polemical axe to grind, but, instead, Shepherd
thought of the medium as a means for transforming the minds of his listeners
toward a more imaginative, even anarchic way of thinking. Some think that
Shepherd single-handedly invented talk radio, even though his antics had their
predecessors, like Los Angeles’s Jim Hawthorne, who from the 1940s to the
1960s played records backwards and invited listeners to call in, only to hold his
receiver up to the microphone and allow them to address the audience at large.
Shepherd started his pioneering broadcasts on New York’s WOR in 1955. Much
of the time, he engaged in a kind of storytelling about his youth that one hears
today in the monologues of Garrison Keillor about Lake Wobegon. (The popu-
lar film A Christmas Story [1983] adapts Shepherd’s work and employs him as
its narrator.) He also would sometimes solicit his listeners to engage in group
actions that bear a surprising resemblance to the contemporary phenomenon of
flash mobs; he would announce a time and place for them to meet and engage
in some spirited action, a practice he called “the Milling.” Other times, he urged
them to throw open their windows and shout slogans to the open air, something
like the broadcaster Howard Beale in the film Network (1976). Station owners
and some listeners found Shepherd disturbing as he not only broke conventions
but also refused to bend to preconceived formats. His ultimate aim, he stated,
was to combat “creeping meatballism,” a poetic phrase for objectionable forms
of conformity.

ExPLoDing ThE PLayLisT
If Shepherd shocked some by treating his broadcasts as a kind of public con-
versation, then the advocates of free-form radio in the 1960s triggered equally
aggressive responses by expanding, if not exploding, the barriers that existed as
to what kind of material, either music or speech, might be broadcast. Most disc
jockeys were cobbled by playlists dictated by management and exercised little
to no influence over their choices. Even if they did, their shows were routinely
defined by particular genres of expression. It was considered unfashionable to
mix together disparate styles; rock was kept apart from country, or rhythm and
blues from concert music. The airwaves were, in effect, ghettoized, with little