All Our Heroes Are Dying: The FM Radio Edition

Los Angeles just got a little bit shittier. After a warm round of farewells from the lineup of announcers and station regulars yesterday morning,  Indie 103.1 (KDLD-FM) in Los Angeles said a fitting goodbye with Frank Sinatra’s My Way, bringing an end to five years of radio done right- for music lovers, by music lovers, Billboard be damned.

With very little fanfare, Indie 103.1 closed up shop yesterday, soon to be transformed into one of the ever-increasing number of Spanish programming stations on the dial. Indie began as a free-form masterpiece, a place to find refuge from the swarms of disposable banality and derivative mediocrity that’s been spreading through the FM dial like a raging corporate virus in recent years, extinguishing the pockets of cool that made it all worthwhile.

Not everything on Indie was great, but I wasn’t listening to consistently rock the fuck out or hear all my favorite songs. That’s what iPods are for. I listened for the challenge of what the station offered. I listened for the exposure to sounds I’d never heard, threads in the fabric I’d never seen. The programming was rich and varied, never lowballing the audience, and what caught my ear was new, different and even inspiring.  The DJs weren’t there to be “dangerous” and “edgy,” like every other goddamned station on the dial- they were real people with charismatic value and interesting stories to tell about what they were spinning.  Oh yeah, and they had some fascinating taste in music.

A message on the station’s website this morning said, simply:

BYE BYE

Thanks to everyone who made Indie 103.1 possible. We love you all.

The warning signs were there. In early 2007, founding program director Michael Steele was ousted and replaced by alt-rock programmer Max Tolkoff, a paint-by-numbers descendant of programmer Rick “Rock of the Eighties” Carroll, who played a big part in the shitification of KROQ. Max soon began narrowing down the format, trimming the branches, and it was quickly clear to everyone involved that the glory days had been quietly black-bagged and disposed of at Indie 103.1.

Fringe flavor shows started getting shuffled out of the weeknight slots and into lower-traffic weekend positions, or dropped altogether. They let Dave Navarro stick around because he was doing the job for free. They fired DJ Chris Morris in December, but offered to let him work a midnight shift- without compensation. Naturally, being a career man and not a rock star doing the gig for fun, he declined. 

Back in October I spoke with Scott Kirkland of the Crystal Method, who hosted a radio show on Indie called Community Service. After a four-year run the show was cut from programming, despite a solid showing in listenership. 

Kirkland dropped some hints at the time about downturns at the station. “They’re making some decisions right now to move to a more conventional format,” he said, “so all the specialty shows are pretty much going away.” 

I didn’t want to believe him. But soon enough, the culture rock, underground punk, odds and ends blues and so forth began giving way to a ’90s alt rock bullshit format that we’ve spent 15 years trying to escape from everywhere else. Smells Like Teen Spirit began getting just as much airtime on Indie as on KROQ. And if you’ve had anything to do with KROQ’s frequency any time in the past several years, you’ve undoubtedly heard that same. fucking. song. a thousand times over. Undoubtedly prepping us for the coming years, when we actually start to linger on those infomercials for Now That’s What I Call Music! or Hits Of The ’90s! collections on TV.

Say, that’s a really rockin’ beat, Nancy, what’s it called?

Don’t you remember? It’s the song that changed it all, Chad! It’s Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana!

Thaaat’s right! Hot could I forget? The angst, the flannel shirts… Drop it like it’s hot!

(head back, maniacal laugh) Oh I will Chad, and you can too, with the new Fabulous Hits Of The ’90s collection! From Creed to Seven Mary Three, they’ve got it all!

It’s all part of the plan. 

Radio listenership across the country is dying fast. Is that really any surprise to anyone? The fact that we can all take our iPods with us wherever we want to go, listed to whatever we want, anytime we want, removes the need for dodging 22 minutes of commercials an hour, not to mention God knows how long the DJ rambles on between each song. The quality’s just not there, and it’s not convenient. 

People are saying that “the spirit” of independent radio can live on by adapting to the changing times, i.e. giving up the FM dial altogether and switching to an online streaming format. But that’s bullshit- who the fuck wants to listen to somebody rant about carrying the terrestrial torch when a mixtape, and album download or one of a thousand music source blogs are already out there? 

Indie certainly had an audience, but crossover potential is minimal. Media consolidation speaks much louder than community support- a terrifying concept, but an altogether unsurprising one. With the world of music lovers collectively dismissing the most well-crafted, massive marketing campaigns for those outdated little pieces of plastic, it’s no doubt that the “insiders” are ringing the death bell for the radio industry. But the immediate bottom line still matters most, and co-opting and homogenizing is the quickest way to shove shit down people’s throats. 

That also includes satellite radio, which will not survive the departure of Howard Stern. He singlehandedly put Sirius on the map, and subscription fees and installation are cumbersome inconveniences in these hard times- especially when music is getting easier (and more socially acceptable) to obtain for free.

So that’s the end of DJ-focused shows, where personality played a role- and not the Rick Dees fucking car salesman personality, either. The DJs spun according to their tastes and passions, and it made for a hell of an adventurous ride. It’s the end of Steve Jones and his meandering, bizarre Jonesy’s Jukebox, the end of Henry Rollins’ brilliant, self-deprecating rock n’ roll stories (well, not really, there’s still his IFC show, his written works, his spoken word shows and this), the end of much-needed and well-received exposure for local and international acts, most of which have to otherwise rely on MySpace hype and/or sell their souls to get heard.

This does not bode well for the remaining “indie” stations in the radio market, ones with balls and personality, such as 94.9 in San Diego. 94.9 started out like a fireball of awesome, but slowly became co-opted and streamlined into oblivion. The FM dial has become just as bereft of meaning as junk mail or Britney Spears’ ninth career revival. 

No bottom lines are going to be affected in a way that you or I might hope by this loss. All the discontent in the world would, at best, only make ripples in already high seas. This is the end of Act II in the record industry, and it’s undoubtedly becoming clear that no amount of pay-to-play bullshit is going to change the fact that pushing plastic in a digital age is a failing business plan.

Am I pissed about the end of Indie? Sure. It’s a big loss for music culture in Los Angeles, that’s for sure. But ultimately, they’ve all got to go. The entire industry has to fold in on itself before they realize the beauty, the essential soul of what they’re paving over. 

But, as former 103.1 DJ Chris Morris said, “Tragic? Yes. Anything other than Radio As Usual? Not at all. Soulful? Please.”

The final message on Indie’s website says it all:

This is an important message for the Indie 103.1 Radio Audience-

Indie 103.1 will cease broadcasting over this frequency effective immediately. Because of changes in the radio industry and the way radio audiences are measured, stations in this market are being forced to play too much Britney, Puffy and alternative music that is neither new nor cutting edge. Due to these challenges, Indie 103.1 was recently faced with only one option- to play the corporate radio game.

We have decided not to play that game any longer. Rather than changing the sound, spirit, and soul of what has made Indie 103.1 great Indie 103.1 will bid farewell to the terrestrial airwaves and take an alternative course.

This could only be done on the Internet, a place where rules do not apply and where new music thrives; be it grunge, punk, or alternative- simply put, only the best music.

For those of you with a computer at home or at work, log on to www.indie1031.com and listen to the new Indie 103.1- which is really the old Indie 103.1, not the version of Indie 103.1 we are removing from the broadcast airwaves.

We thank our listeners and advertisers for their support of the greatest radio station ever conceived, and look forward to continuing to deliver the famed Indie 103.1 music and spirit over the Internet to passionate music listeners around the world.