100: Radio

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And let me do something that I've never done before. Let me just reach out and retune your radio for you.

[RADIO TUNING]

Ira Glass

You ever flip through the dial, past the stations that you listen to all the time, just skim up the dial, slowly, from station to station, waiting for something? You don't even know what. Something. Anything.

[RADIO TUNING]

Ira Glass

Something like this, a radio signal whose source is impossible to figure out and the intimacy of one voice. What could be more personal, even in another language?

Ira Glass

This recording off the radio is one of those things that got recorded and then was passed from person to person to person. Finally, it ended up on a compilation tape of radio moments put together by radio station WFMU in New Jersey. And that's how we got it. By anybody's best guess, it's a radio station in northern Canada. The speaker is Inuit.

And here's where it gets a little hazier. Because they're talking about a strike over and over on this tape, it's possible that this is a situation where the regular radio staff is on strike, and these are the replacement workers. Or it's possible that these are the regular workers who are about to go on strike, fed up, at the end of their rope. Or maybe that's not the story at all.

That's actually one of the things that I like about this. Like a lot of good radio, part of what is so appealing about it is what it leaves you wondering and thinking about when it's over.

Ira Glass

Can you imagine tuning your radio and stumbling upon this? You know, just stumbling on this? It's so ephemeral, this moment just happening and passing and about to actually evaporate into nothing forever. And that's part of what makes radio different from other media, I think, that quality where it can seem so small and so fleeting.

Ira Glass

Ian Brown used to host the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show Sunday Morning, and he was very great to listen to. He was smart and unpretentious and this great interviewer and writer. And when the show was revamped and he was taken off the air as host, he read this little radio essay on his last day about the intimacy of radio-- the false intimacy of radio, that feeling that we get together every week, you and me. I mean, literally, that's what it feels like. It feels like you and me. You and me, even though we don't know each other at all.

Anyway, months passed after he ended that job, and we wanted to get him on our show-- on This American Life And I called him up, and he was not brusk but businesslike, very proper, formal. And it sounds ridiculous to say-- I feel sort of silly saying it-- but it was hard not to feel a little strange about it. It was hard not to feel a little bit like here is this friend who went suddenly cold.

And I would not feel that way about Ted Koppel or Peter Jennings or anybody else who I've ever seen on television. I can tell you that. There is just something about radio. There's just something about radio. It's more personal.

Well, this is our hundredth episode of This American Life. Each week on our program, we choose a theme, and for our hundredth show, we bring you an hour of stories about the medium in which we work . A program on radio-- what makes it great when it's great, what makes it terrible when it's terrible, which it often is. Act One of our program today, Brigadoon. Searching for an illegal radio station in Miami that keeps appearing and disappearing and appearing again in the mist.

Act Two, The Invisible Leading the Blind. Jack Hitt stumbles on a radio station that seems to completely ignore the last six decades of broadcasting style and convention.

Act Three, Radio Most People Listen To, an act in which we spend some time with the radio programmers who think that it's better to play the same exact songs over and over all day long, the consultants who make every radio station sound the same. In short, the thinking that makes most radio in America today so boring, and we defend those guys.

Act Four, Noble Calling. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who says that when peace comes to his country of East Timor, he has just one wish. He wants to do a radio show like Howard Stern's. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Brigadoon. We're devoting this first half of our program to the ephemeral thrill of stumbling onto some radio station, some radio moment, that you don't know where it came from, and you don't know what it is, but you just cannot stop listening. We have this first story from Iggy Scam in Miami.

Iggy Scam

My friend [? Sinclair ?] was the one who first found the Northside black power pirate radio station way down the left of the FM dial. You could only tune it in up on the Northside, so we'd listen to it while we drove down 79th Street whenever I went to his house. You could tell it was pirate radio because of the number of times the DJs would say [BLEEP] in every sentence.

They'd play all this poorly-recorded local rap, like this one song, "Too Many Suckers and Not Enough Stretchers" where the guy raps, "Living in the M, the I, the A-M-I. Sometimes, I've got to ask myself why." And then they'd play Tupac and then, every couple of beats, the DJs would just cut in over it and just scream, howl, or go "Uh!" And then the music would cut out completely.

Most of the time, there'd be four or five DJs all in the room with the mic, all just talking and yelling and telling jokes over the music. It was totally loud and chaotic and fun. They even took phone calls somehow. They'd play a beat over the radio, and then people would call up to rap over it over the phone. Talk about DIY.

Actually, they were never really that overtly political at all, really. We only called it the "black power station" because of one time when they were taking calls, and this dude called up and said, check it out, man. Southern Bell van's been parked in front of my house for three days. There ain't nothing wrong with the goddamn phone. It's the white man spying on us and trying to keep us down. Like I said, it was a great station.

Besides being really great radio, the station was exciting. Who were these guys? Where did they broadcast from? And how did everyone in the city know their number to call in when they never gave it out over the air? When the DJs talked, I'd listen to see if there was even some discernible code that they used. I couldn't catch one. I never found out anything about it, really, and eventually, I just moved away from Miami.

But after all my plans fell apart one by one last year, I found myself back in Miami trying to sort it all out. I ended up living back up on the Northside, off 79th Street. Good old 79th Street, home to the "Welcome To Miami" water tower and the INS building. Six lanes of road from beach to swamp, full of rusty, old, American cars blasting bass. The home of the urban trailer park and the indoor flea market, the $0.99 quart of malt liquor.

I always thought 79th Street, and not the beaches or hotels, is probably the true heart of Miami. You could look at everything and think, this was all once somebody's idea of a good idea. Right away, I started trying to tune in to the station, but I couldn't seem to find it. I didn't know if my radio had bad reception or if they'd just gone off the air. I wasn't even sure of the exact frequency, really. I became sort of obsessed with finding out what happened to those guys, but there was no way to find out.

Meanwhile, I kept busy taking long bike rides to explore the Northside, an almost touching daily tour of the very architecture of defeat. Often, I rode by sad, old Bobby Maduro Stadium, which is named for a Cuban baseball star who had never made the majors. Originally, it had been built in the '50s by a Cuban financier who was trying to lure Major League Baseball into Miami. And even then, he built it way too small for the major leagues.

The financier lost all his money eventually, backing Castro, and then later backing anti-Castro revolutionaries. By the 1980s, the stadium was only used as a shelter and processing center for Nicaraguan refugees. And now, it was a host to a weekend flea market in its parking lot.

Eventually, I pretty much fell in love with the Northside for its own sake, and I gave up the search for the station. But then one time, on my daily ride past the unused warehouses and huge fenced-off lots full of weed and rubble and the boarded-up housing projects, I found what could've been an important clue about the station. Down at the end of a dead-end street where almost certainly no one would see it, someone had spray painted "Tape Radio, 61.5 WEED."

Now, 61.5 would seem to be a radio frequency. WEED would seem to be a station's call letters. Was this some kind of ad? How could it be a station, though, if the FM band doesn't even go down that low? Even if there could be a station at 61.5, no one would have a radio that could tune it in. 61.5 would almost certainly be dead air-- static.

I decided to even try it as a phone number--615-WEED. Not in service. I figured that since there's never really any people walking around down there on that dead-end street, if 61.5 was somehow a station, they were probably broadcasting from a warehouse on that very street and that the broadcasters themselves must have painted it. Later that same day, I found the exact same spray painted message in the same exact writing in black paint 30 blocks north in Little Haiti.

I never did find out what it meant. But that night, it was hot as hell outside-- the beginning of the Miami summer-- and I was just laying around feeling sweaty and miserable when I checked the radio for first time in weeks. And I couldn't believe it. The station was back on the air. DJ Funky One was on, playing music and taking calls. He'd play a little instrumental beat part, and then suddenly cut in completely over the music, put the caller on the air and yell, what's up?

Caller would say, I want to say it two times for Little Haiti. DJ Funky One would say, all right, baby. Little Haiti's in the house. What's up? Next caller wanted to say one time for the Larchmont clique. All right, what's up? One time for Arena Towers, one time for the 6-8, one time for Edison, two times for the 7-4 boys, and a shout out to Shadow Man. It went on all night, music and calls.

Outside my window, the station's signal was flying strong over the dark, rosy streets and avenues, past the open windows and open apartment doors and front porches, and the whole sad city out there sweating in the night. I drank some tall cans from the 79th and Biscayne gas station beer special and listened, and it felt like every radio in the Northside must be tuned in.

Finally, after a while, I heard the phone number actually given out on the air. So one afternoon, when only music was on and they weren't taking calls, I called up anyway. I couldn't believe it when DJ Funky One himself actually answered the phone. I said, "Uh, what are you guys called?"

He said, "We're the Space Station."

"Well, where do you guys broadcast from?"

"Carol City."

I said, "Do you, like, have a license or anything?"

And DJ Funky One started laughing really hard, and he said, "Yeah, yeah. We got all that [BLEEP], man." And then he hung up on me.

Carol City was at the very north end of the county. It had originally been a white, suburban subdivision, but eventually, it was where city planners tried to get the rising black population of the '60s to move to when the city needed new slum land as far away from downtown as possible. These days, it's a seedy, menacing residential sprawl of little homes and gang graffiti known widely as a place where kids from white, suburban subdivisions go to buy drugs.

I rode up there, but I found no more graffiti clues to the station's whereabouts. Later, with a car radio, I found that you couldn't even get the station that well north of 125th Street, which is about 60 blocks south of Carol City. So I think that DJ Funky One was probably lying about Carol City.

So I started keeping my eyes open for any new clues on my ride home from the more wealthy southern parts of town, where I was working. It was a long ride home but always interesting. When you left downtown for the Northside, it was like crossing over into the flip side of the postcard. You rode out of the pink and blue neon glare of air-conditioned malls and chain stores and gated condos and hotels and skyscrapers into a dark, narrow maze of funky old wood houses, hand-painted signs, and corner stores. The suburbs have the police protection, but the Northside has voodoo.

Well finally, one day I got a huge clue when the station was apparently having an on-air live promo party. DJ Funky One said, come on down. We've got all this great food down here at Mama's Kitchen. We've got the fried chicken plate for five bucks and Mama's conch dinner for seven bucks. Could it be? DJ Funky One and a pirate radio transmitter live in a restaurant?

The address they gave out was only a couple blocks away in the heart of Little Haiti. But when I got there, there was no restaurant at all, just two black dudes on a couch in front of this tiny house cut up into four efficiencies. There was no music anywhere. There was no sign of a transmitter.

I said, "Uh, are you guys with the radio station?" They looked at me like I was crazy and nodded. "This is Mama's Kitchen?" I could smell chicken. They said it was.

I said, "But where's DJ Funky One? Where's the station?"

They broke up laughing, and then one guy said, "Everyone wants to know that."

So Mama's Kitchen was really just some guy's mom's kitchen. I ended up passing on the conch dinner, and I just bought a frozen cup of Cherry Kool-Aid for a quarter. I took it to my favorite spot by the tracks and sat there with it, laughing in the summer heat. Now that I'd met two people from the station-- or had I?-- the whole thing was even more mysterious.

Well, I guess I don't mind not knowing, and now I'll probably never find out more about the station because now it was time to move away from the Northside. But I had one last Saturday night with the station, one last night of the station sending out the Miami-style bass to be packaged and delivered to the suburbs via 79th Street in a great, rusted 1971 Oldsmobile. One last ride through the ruins and failing streets and bad ideas that talk to you late at night, like radio.

Ira Glass

Iggy Scam's story first appeared in his handwritten, self-published zine Scam. Some music during this story was by the Mission Burrito Project in San Francisco, which delivers free, organic, vegan burritos to the homeless one night a week.

Ira Glass

Act Two, The Invisible Leading the Blind. So much radio listening happens in the car. This radio signal is one that our contributing editor Jack Hitt chanced upon on a long drive.

Jack Hitt

Last month, I was cruising the backwoods of Massachusetts on assignment in a rental car. For the longest time, radio wasn't much help in relieving the boredom of interstate travel. After three hours, my finger was numb from jamming the Seek button when the radio suddenly snagged this station. And it was two elderly gentleman reading. It was unlike anything I'd heard all morning, or for that matter, for the last 30 years.

Jack Hitt

The service is provided for the reading impaired. Mike and Gordon read items right out of the Lowell Sun, the Nashua Telegram, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune. They happily lack all the mannered, practiced intonation and attitude of commercial radio. Their keen story selection favors Homeric battles among sewer commissioners and landfill managers or pronouncements from local cranky professors. I knew right away that I had found my escape from Gordon Liddy and Chumbawamba.

Jack Hitt

That's Mike, who seems to have naturally married the vocal charms of Lawrence Welk and Howard Cosell. Gordon's the other one, who tends toward a quieter style. In this story, Mike reveals that the official statistics on domestic abuse are flawed because men simply don't report their beatings to police. And Mike explains why.

Jack Hitt

Every story ends with a touch of banter from the two hosts.

Jack Hitt

"Informal" is not quite the right word. The right word is "surreal." Even though the readings are as ordinary as anything found in a newspaper-- Dear Abby, the horoscopes-- their intensity makes the listener feel not so much like he's hearing a radio station as living in this place where Mike and Gordon dwell. Even the obits are absorbing.

Jack Hitt

I could not turn the stories off, whether it was assistant city manager Virginia Dolloff getting fired because she hadn't done enough to stimulate growth along one part of lower Middlesex Street, or sewer commissioner Tom Moran who, now a candidate for selectman, was worried that his sewer experience might peg him as a one-issue politician, or the account of Representative [? Millnozzle ?] breaking his leg.

But the story that had me spellbound for 10 minutes was a long and treacherous account of the annual meeting of the Dracut Water Supply District. It was rich in character and subterfuge, a mini Shakespearean drama. Essentially, three board members who faced pay cuts had packed the meeting with relatives. And in the end, they GOT raises.

Jack Hitt

But wait, there's more.

Jack Hitt

The disputed raise, by the way, was a mere $2,000. But the ferocity of the battle was apparent, and even the political tactics were strangely familiar. Like Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich, the raise plotters pretended to be astonished that anyone would question their motives for going to the meeting. So they shrouded themselves in patriotism.

Jack Hitt

By the end of the piece, my heart went out to Maureen [? Cares, ?] who had arrived innocently ready to defend smaller Jeffersonian government. But she was easily crushed.

Jack Hitt

The core audience of this program is maybe 200 blind people in New England who actually hear the broadcast on special radios configured to receive its non-AM/FM signal. Occasionally, they air the show on the local college channel, which is how I heard it. But for the most part, Mike and Gordon's universe shares in our air space but is not of it. It's what Lake Wobegon would be if real people lived there, and then broadcast their own show without Garrison Keillor. In this alternate universe, the men are not always strong. Rather, they are savagely beaten by their wives. And the children are not at all above average.

Jack Hitt

Not that there isn't a good deal of Keillor's sweetness on the air. Mike and Gordon discuss a pledge drive that will occur between now and the-- I'm not making this up-- Acme Club picnic. Later, there's a discussion of the election of the town hog reeve. That's the guy charged with rounding up the village's pigs if they bust out of the pens.

When you hear this program, you realize just how homogenized everything else on radio is. This is banter that hasn't been focus grouped or copied from another show with better ratings. Finding Mike and Gordon was like discovering radio as it might have been 65 years ago, a kind of ur-radio, beautifully preserved in amber.

Ira Glass

Jack Hitt listens to the radio from his home in New Haven, Connecticut. Coming up in the second half of our program, we move from the radio we love to the radio that actually exists on most radio stations, plus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who wants to host a radio show like Howard Stern's. And which Nobel Peace recipient is it? Nelson Mandela? Henry Kissinger? Yasser Arafat? The Dalai Lama? Real answers in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Radio. What makes it so great? What makes it so terrible? And we have arrived at Act Three, The Radio Most People Listen To.

[LAUGHTER]

Ira Glass

This is a recording of V103, WVAZ in Chicago. A few years back, V103 was in fourth or fifth place. But radio is not an art, my friend. No, no no. It's a science. And by applying scientific principles, consultant Tony Gray and program director Max Myrick transformed V103 until it tied for number one in the Chicago market, year after year, with adults age 25 to 54. This, of course, means lots more ad revenue, much bigger profits. Twice as many adults listen to them as listen to Chicago's public radio station.

The story of how Max and Tony did this, made their station number one, is the story of how radio works-- pretty much every commercial station on the dial. This is the science of modern radio. And it begins here, 15 blocks away from the radio station.

These are the offices of a company that V103 hires called Strategic Media Research. Every day, young women in 10 windowless rooms get on the phone in the late afternoon and early evening and call radio listeners. It's targeted research. For V103, they only call the listeners that V103 wants more than any others. These are 35- to 44-year-old African-American women. They go for women rather than for men for a very simple reason, Tony Gray tells me. Women are more likely to actually fill out the Arbitron diaries, which ratings are based on.

Ira Glass

So they get these women on the phone, and they hook them up to a computer which plays them brief clips of 30 different songs over the phone. It takes about 15 minutes. For each song, the women press numbers on the phone's keypad to indicate if they're familiar with the song, how much they like the song, and if they're getting bored of the song, which Max says is the most important thing.

Ira Glass

Every week, a printout of the audience scores arrives on Max's desk. And he marks it up, dividing the songs into A songs, B songs, C songs. A songs will be played on V103 every three and a half hours. B songs will be played every five hours. Cs will be played twice a day. These 30 songs are the only new songs that V103 plays They make up 40% of the music on the station.

The other 60% is what radio programmers call "golds," proven songs that always test well with the target audience. For V103, that means Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing," anything by Anita Baker. On last week's list, Max crossed off six songs that just did not test well enough to stay on the station, one of them a sentimental favorite for Max by his favorite artist, an artist that he does not want me to name on the radio. So I'll just say that he's a crossover black artist who married Lisa Marie Presley.

Ira Glass

V103 has four competitors who are going after the same demographic group that they are. The average person, says Max, jumps around between two and three radio stations all the time. If at any moment V103 has a song that scores lower with the audience and one of its competitors has a song that scores higher, V103 loses.

Some programming tidbits I picked up during my visit to V103-- if you play rap music, you pretty much say goodbye to any adult audience. So even stations that target African-Americans usually don't play much rap. V103 plays none. Sampling is another matter. One of the reasons that sampling bits of old songs so popular now in pop music has to do with the way that radio stations operate, with the science of modern radio.

Picture-- if you were a songwriter and you put some famous old clip from a pop song into your song, when radio stations do those telephone surveys of listeners, way more listeners, especially older listeners, are likely to say that they recognize and like your song. And radio stations will add your song to the playlist. One of the songs that Max is adding is a song called "Too Close," which has a sample in it.

Ira Glass

When they came to V103, Max and Tony made some changes in personnel, they tinkered with the station's slogans and promotions. They paid a marketing firm to call 200,000 women on the phone telling them to listen for a contest on V103. But the main thing, Tony says, the single most important thing that moved them from number five to tied for first place was picking their music more carefully, letting in nothing that did not test well with the target demographic.

Ira Glass

When I went to visit V103, I had not been in a commercial radio station for 20 years. And I was curious about what it was going to be like, Chicago's number one station. Turns out it looks exactly like Chicago's public radio station-- same carpet, same fixtures, same office equipment, same phone system. It looked exactly the same, except everyone at V103 had much nicer clothes. And the stereo speakers in Max's office are nicer than the ones in the studio that I speak to you from right now.

Tony and Max and I are the same age-- 39 and 40. All three of us started in radio as teenagers Ask them what they love about radio, and they talk about finding unknown songs, putting them on the air, watching them become hits. They talk about the satisfaction of watching the science of radio marketing actually work. And their lives are organized around one moment that happens every month-- the moment they get their numbers.

Ira Glass

Running a station the scientific way means, of course, that most radio stations sound the same. It's why most radio is so boring, why we hear the same songs repeated over and over, everywhere on the dial, from city to city, why V103 can't even play Otis Redding. I should note that public radio does not stand above all this. Research has been driving it for years. The jazz played on Chicago's public radio station is audience tested. The classical musical on most stations is audience tested. The most any of us can hope for in this environment is pockets of individuality.

And one of the interesting things about V103 is that their format does include pockets of individuality, most notably, the morning show. Tom Joyner, who's syndicated around the country, who does one of the most idiosyncratic, funny, truly interesting radio shows I have ever heard. It jumps quickly from This Day in Black History to the three-minute radio soap opera It's Your World. From serious and semi-serious to straight-out comedy, it is surprising and just great by any measure.

Ira Glass

A few weeks ago, Joyner and his morning crew took on conservative columnist Robert Novak. This is while President Clinton was in Africa apologizing for slavery. Novak, at the time, said something on television about how African-Americans would not be in the United States if not for slavery. Joyner's show started a barrage of mail to the Chicago newspaper that publishes Novak's syndicated column. And very, very quickly, Novak came onto Joyner's show to try to clarify his position for Joyner's audience.

Ira Glass

One more thing about the scientific way of making radio-- it is weirdly democratic. Every song is chosen by polling. Here's this multimillion dollar business, all these well-groomed men and women and their expensive clothes spending every hour of every day thinking about how to please middle-aged, inner-city black women. How many other civic institutions are doing that?

Ira Glass

Well, of course, the science of radio-- the machine of modern radio-- takes as well as it gives. It breaks hearts. Lots of people and ideas get knocked off the air as programmers try things they think will more predictably and scientifically attract listeners. Ida Hakkila had a job as a DJ on two big New York rock stations, and she got pushed out for more predictable programming. She began at a station called Z-Rock.

Ira Glass

Ida turned in her resignation. Then she looked for other jobs, including one at her first radio stations-- Z-Rock and K-Rock. But she decided she couldn't work there when she saw what those jobs would be.

Ira Glass

Act Four, Noble Calling. This is Jose Ramos-Horta on an international news program called Worldview that's broadcast on Chicago's public radio station. Horta is an exile from his homeland in East Timor, has spent two decades as the leading international figure denouncing the invasion of his country by Indonesia, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his efforts to hinder the oppression of a small people.

But before his appearance on this radio program, Worldview, he confided in producer Edie Rubinowitz that someday, if peace comes to his country, he has another dream. He would like to do a radio program himself, one like Howard Stern's. He's seen Stern's movie, Private Parts, on an airplane. We reached Horta at the United Nations offices in Geneva.

Ira Glass

Jose Ramos-Horta in Geneva.

Ira Glass

Well, our hundredth addition of This American Life was produced by Julie Snyder and myself with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike, senior editor Paul Tough, contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Laura Doggett and [? Sahini ?] Davenport.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

To buy a cassette of this or any of our 100 shows, call us at WBEZ here in Chicago. 312-832-3380. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who has issued new orders for how I'm supposed to do the show from now on.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI. Public Radio International.