Vintage FCC 'history card' for WJAR radio
Last month, an urban explorer trekked into the wilds of East Providence, R.I., in search of adventure and long-abandoned places.
Wielding nothing but a video camera and a respirator, "RnK All Day" brought his YouTube viewers along as he pored through the ruins of radio stations WHJJ, WHJY (94 HJY) and WSNE that once broadcast from the crumbling building at 115 Eastern Ave. He got more than he bargained for -- as did we.
What the intrepid archaeologist of urban abandonment found was a moldering, unsealed time capsule of mid-market AM and FM radio, circa 2002. It almost seemed as if, going on a couple of decades ago, the DJ on 94 HJY was playing Lenny Kravitz's latest CD while the talk guy on WHJJ argued with a caller about George W. Bush . . . and then the apocalypse.
The lights blinked. The phone went dead. A blinding flash. Someone spied a mushroom cloud in the distance.
Then everyone ran from the building, in a panic and in search of a fallout shelter. No one ever came back.
Yes, scavengers would go through the place from time to time. But they were looking for canned goods, cash and booze. Maybe some forgotten weed from the HJY wing. Broadcast electronics held no attraction for nuclear survivors worried more by the threat of irradiated zombies.
Fate had left these postmodern ruins amazingly intact, save for the smashed windows, some trashed rooms . . . and the mold that was everywhere.
THIS WAS the result of no nuclear detonation and the sudden collapse of civilization, though. This was another kind of apocalypse -- a corporate apocalypse.
There were no glowing zombies staggering through deserted streets searching in vain for human brains. The survivors of this apocalypse were the ones who brought it about -- the business-attired men and women walking crisply through cubicled offices in search of shareholder value.
Sometimes, they spat out glib clichés about "thinking outside the box" and "It is what it is." Other times, they merely moaned "EBITA! EBITA!"
A few years ago, one of this country's tens of thousands of "downsized" (or "right-sized" . . . or "redundant" . . . or "laid off" . . . or whatever) radio professionals -- I was told it was a disc jockey fired about 2003 -- cornered a regional program director outside the offices of a "station cluster." He just wanted answers to a few questions.
Would he ever feel useful again?
Was his training -- were his talents -- now useless?
The man in business casual was silent.
"Will I ever fucking work in my profession again!?"
Quoth the Craven "Nevermore."
Yet the suits could move three stations out of one building into another building with new equipment . . . and just abandon all the old. Utterly. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, at the time, of "utterly."
That waste represents "shareholder value," no doubt. Efficiency and belt-tightening, don't you know?
OK, I LIED about the tale of the questioning DJ. I don't know that it happened. I'll bet it probably did somewhere, however. I didn't lie about the apocalypse part. What's befallen radio -- and to a lesser extent, TV -- since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ushered in the Lord of the Flies is an apocalypse. In ancient Greek, "apocalypse" meant "an unveiling." In modern English, it can mean a prophetic revelation . . . or an inferno . . . or a great disaster.
The tens upon tens of thousands of cashiered broadcasters say, "Take your pick, man. Hard to go wrong." And millions of listeners across the land might agree.
Once, WHJJ was a big deal in Providence. Before 1980, the call letters were WJAR, and for much of its history, it was a pretty big deal in the Northeast. After first taking the air in 1922, WJAR became a charter affiliate of the National Broadcasting Co., in November 1926.
And legendary NBC announcer Don Pardo (of Saturday Night Live and every-damn-thing-else fame) got his start at WJAR in 1938.
SO LOOK at the mysteriously, confoundingly abandoned studios, once the pre-ruinous home to the jewels of the Franks Broadcasting Co., Inc., beginning in 1980. Before Franks Broadcasting, the old WJAR was the pride of The Outlet Company.
Outlet owned WJAR for six decades. Franks owned it for a few years. Then it gets consolidatingly confusing until you end up at iHeartMedia, a crapload of assumed debt and -- how do they put it? Ah . . . yes. Efficiencies, economies of scale, elimination of redundancies and . . . "right-sizing."
It sounds so much better than "You're fired." But it still means "apocalypse." And the abandoned, fully equipped ruins in East Providence still make for a hell of a metaphor for an entire ruined industry and an entire unraveling country.
What you hear wafting across the ether today is substantively denuded. The happy-clappy corporate speak of besuited Visigoths is risible -- especially if you jack up your eyelids with toothpicks, turn your radio on and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.
. . . and listen to th. . . .
SORRY. The program server had a bit of a meltdown, nobody's in the building after 5, and I had to drive in from home to reboot it.
Next time that happens, just go online and call up the iHeart station in (fill in the blank). It's playing the same damn thing -- probably at the same damn time. How're you liking those "economies of scale"?
The legions of former radio people -- the first casualties in the apocalypse, the ghosts inhabiting our East Providence metaphor in ruins, the men and women who have radio in their blood and nowhere to show it, the ones who talk incessantly about the old days on Facebook because there are no more new days -- they're not liking those "economies of scale" at all.
And they don't much care for your station, or for bombed-out radio studios full of perfectly good equipment being perfectly ruined.
Neither, I suspect, do they care for metaphors. Unfortunately, it seems as if metaphors are the only damned thing we have left in this sad, sad land.
Don't forget to call in your request to the studio line. No one will answer.