Chapter Eight: Go ClearChannel Yourself
We had gotten original member Ward Williams back. We had finally seduced Jonathan Gray away from his role of bass player with Big Stoner Creek (sorry, again, George Fox!). We had driven the downstairs neighbors out from our compound on Coming Street, and we couldnât throw a rock without hitting a sorority sister. It was a good time.
We spent a third of our evenings getting ripped off but still loving to play The Horse and Cart, a third trying to learn about rock and roll at the King Street Station, and a third on the street, busking. During the day we wrote songs, kept Ward from turning on the air conditioning, and played video games. Typical 20-something behavior.
Itâs interesting, looking back, at how long we were able to play on the street, in a town that wasnât really known for buskers. Not like Boston or New Orleans, anyway. And we were surviving. Barely, but we were paying bills. I donât remember being in massive debt or the lights going out or anything. It was a feral existence, but we made it work.
One night we were busking and a passersby handed us a card. She said that she worked at the local radio station 96Wave. Hooray! We were going to be famous, right?
Understand that if youâre in a band that plays on the street where legions of people walk by, a lot of weird stuff happens to you. Frat boys constantly yell at you to âget a real jobâ. Strangers that have no musical talent walk over with a ukulele and start âjammingâ with you. Pretty girls (and boys) flirt. Intoxicated tourists (women included) hike down their pants in the middle of the street and urinate. Drugs are thrown into your guitar case. And everyone knows someone that will make you famous, or is connected in some way to something that will make you famous. You soon realize that most people that come up to talk to you about a connection in the music industry are really not that connected at all. Itâs fine. Itâs best to be nice, give them your telephone number, and forget about it.
Which we did with the nice lady that worked at the radio station. But a week later we got a phone call from 96Wave. They were doing an interview feature on Charlestonâs local bands: a little chat, and a live acoustic version of any song we wanted to play. It wasnât the first time we had been on the radio, but it was the first time we had been on a rock and roll radio station.
This was 1995ish. It was to be one of the most positive experiences with radio that we would ever have in our careers, because very soon after our first trip to 96Wave, radio as we knew it started to die. Now, I know that radio still exists, and it might be better than what it became in the late 90s/early 2000s, but itâs all very different from pre-1996 radio. Radio changed very drastically right as we were starting our career.
Things went down like this: in the 90s, radio stations were struggling. Not all of them, but the golden days of coke-and-cash fueled payola in the 80s were winding down. Mostly because they got rid of payola. Before 1996, one person or company could only own about 40 radio stations, due to the rules against monopolies. But in 1996 the FCC got rid of that 40-station limit, and within a couple of years almost every âmom and popâ independent radio station that was having a hard time keeping things going had to sell to giant corporations that bought up almost all of them. The name âClearChannelâ became a swear word to us.
This undoing of the monopoly rules completely changed radio. Now one company owned thousands of stations, and if that one company liked, say, Hootie and the Blowfish but did not like DavĂd Garza or David Mead, the Davids would not get played on the radio. And not just one to forty radio stationsâŚthey might not get played on thousands of radio stations.
Iâm really oversimplifying this, but it hurt. We felt it immediately. Weâd roll up on a cool station that had been playing us, meet everyone there, and find out that they were being bought out, and only signed bands would get played, and that did not include Jump, Little Children, no matter how much the DJs at the station liked us. For the most part, the days of local and regional bands getting played on radio were done.
Side note for those that think that our governmentâs undoing of nationwide net neutrality laws isnât that big of a deal: I ask you to think again. To me, allowing ginormous corporations to decide what kind of internet you get is exactly like ClearChannel owning most radio stations and deciding what kind of music you get. If we donât take a stand and take care, you wonât even be aware of what youâll be missing, folks. Trust me, thatâs a very sad thing. So go out and fight for these amazing people in your local governments that are trying to create net neutrality in your state. You wonât regret it.
The silver lining to losing radio was how it inspired people to build new ways to find new music, on the internet. Eventually the true movers and shakers in music would turn to using sites and apps like Pandora and Spotify and YouTube to introduce interesting indie bands to the world. So, yeah. Letâs lobby to make our own nets neutral, please?
Anyway! Back to The Wave. 96Wave, bless their hearts, wanted to hold out against The Man for as long as they could. At the helm was a guy named Dave Rossi, and he was not going to cave. At least until he had us in the studio and recorded us playing a song. The song was called âQuietâ, and Dave liked it enough to try putting the song into a semi-regular rotation on the station, first during a âlocal hourâ and then alongside other national acts.
There is what happens when you hear yourself on the radio for the first time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EdOdfCM1hM Itâs really like that. We heard Quiet on the radio and lost our minds. Jumping around, running into streets, lots of screaming. Itâs an exciting thing.
Things changed for us very quickly - thatâs how much power radio had, back then. We had just started playing a âFree Music Tuesdayâ at the Music Farm in Charleston - no cover at the door. The first time or two we had played the Farm, the largest and coolest venue in town, there were couple dozen people or so. After Wave started playing us on the radio, the place was packed. We would play entire months of Tuesdays, even putting together âTheme Nightsâ to keep us (and the fans that were there every Tuesday) in the fun. â50s Nightâ, âWizard of Oz Nightâ, âSlumber Party Nightâ (we were running out of ideas by that point) were so fun to put together. We got better and better as a rock band, finally buying the proper equipment necessary to plug in and play shows. And it started to change our sound. We had never thought of ourselves as a rock band, truly, until that point. But play in front of a thousand people every week and you find that you have to be bigger, be louder, beâŚserious.
Our hard work was starting to pay off, and we had to start thinking about what was next. Charleston was officially our home base, and a very strong base. It was time to hit the road.
Next: Columbia (Hootieville) SC, how to apply the Golden Mean to touring, stopping to smell the Rosens, and the ParkânâFly Mach One
