Community Radio

Community Radio Comes to WNRZ

Image caption: Larry Monroe and Mike O'Brien in the WNRZ studio. 

photo by David Fenton

Last issue we were able to announce that the Community Park Program had taken to the airwaves live on WNRZ-FM every Sunday from 3-6, and that other changes were coming down as well so stay tuned. If you put on your radio right now and tune in NRZ you can hear for yourself, but f you haven't done that yet we can tell you right here from the printed page that things are brightening up indeed for rainbow radio lovers who've been pusing their buttons and turning their dials searching in vain for radio that relates fully to their lives. Those of us within range of NRZ's transmitter out on Brassow Road n Saline can now hear Larry Monroe back on his old station, direct from the trials and tribulations of traveling to WABX 5 days a week only to be restrained from doing what NRZ has now hired him to do unrestricted except for the rules of the F.C.C. All you midnight Mike O'Brien faithfuls will now have to check him out in the afternoon; the search is on as we go to press to replace the midnight to six spot with a heavy rock and roller but nothing is set yet. Hawg Tate of the Mojo Boogie Band will take over the studios with John Sinclair every Sunday night from 7-11 for the Blues and Jazz Festival of the Air starting August 13 and continuing year-round. Plans call for local news and public service that will hip people to what's going on around here and help publicize all the activities, events, and services useful to our people and the community of the future we're trying to create together right here and now. The changes look really good, or sound really good that is, and right on time, too.

Because what's happening here, in what one Republican Councilmen is fond of calling "the dope center of the midwest," really needs a radio station in order to grow fully. The SUN with its limited number of pages and all too sparse bi-weekly publication (a direct result of poverty) just can't get enough information across to as many people as instantaneously as the radio can. Having some of the kinds of things we try to do in the paper on the air is going to be smokin stuff; the park program is now on every Sunday if you can't make it to the park, the People's Ballroom is opening soon and that might possibly be broadcast live, maybe NRZ with Larry, Mike and the rest will be bringing you parts of the Tribal Council and City Council meetings on the radio. People active in the community will have access to the airwaves at last, and you'll hear a lot more variety of music and relevant run-downs than NRZ has offered n the past or that you can hear on most any other FM station any other time these days.

As we've been saying all along, radio should be so killer and exciting that you just don't want to be without it, stimulating your cells and thoughtwaves and turning thousands of people on along with you to the new life-forms and possibilities we're all trying to bring into existence. Media in America is mostly designed to keep people trapped into manipulated and low-level consciousness so they'll keep on buying the bullshit, but it doesn't HAVE to do that, and if things continue the way they've been going at WNRZ we'll be a lot closer to the needed alternative.

We talked with Larry and Mike right after their first day on the new schedule. Also there at the time was Dan Mullaly, known as Country-Dan to the listeners of WNRS, the country station that shares the building with NRZ. Besides doing his country show on NRS Dan is one of the two salesman who have to keep the money coming into the station from advertisers (it takes money to run a station and to provide the community with live broadcasts, local news and other things NRZ wants to put together) and has played a major role in convincing the new management of NRZ, Ray Rutledge, to make these changes.

Mike and Larry both worked at NRZ before (more on that in a minute) and have been hired and fired from various different stations in their quick-changing dj careers. They cautioned us that "we've been on the air with the new times and staff for a few days" and it's still too early to tell for sure what's gonna happen.

MIKE: Radio changes quickly. If you wait long enough it'll change. They try these concepts that always fail, and it's just a matter of waiting till one fails and they're in a position where they're ready to do something different. Here now the station is finally planning to listen to people who know something about Ann Arbor, the community, and Communications...

SUN: This is really different from the trend that's affecting radio across the country now; computerized sound, the carefully selected computerized playlist, all those things are still going strong, but what's happening here seems really different. . .

DAN: Cause Ann Arbor's really different. That's the whole reason why Ray and I got this thing together. We have to program for the people of Ann Arbor. There's never been that before, and now it's actually gonna happen. But the success of t is gonna depend on the people.

MIKE: NRZ carne close before but there was never a total committment from all segments of the radio station. If the music was fine the news was back n some zone or something else. . .

Larry started at NRZ in October of 69 and has been hired and fired twice since then, if you can believe that.

LARRY: We started with free form in October of 69. I did the all-night show and Dulzo did 9-12 and at that time O'Brien was doing 6-9, coming along in the direction that we were with the music, which was a free-form presentation, without any guidelines or playlists. You play whatever you want to whenever you want to play it is what it comes down to and you try to make wise selections. We had half the station back then from 6 at night to six in the morning. Then on Friday, February 13, 1970 they changed the call letters to WNRZ and hyped what they called the "WINERZ" concept which, in the words of Larry D. was "the jingle package that would blow this market's mind." That's the way they related to the medium, because they were people with AM training and just didn't know how to do it any differently."

Soon after the format change Larry was fired ("they couldn't handle me at all.") for not following it strictly enough. He was rehired by a new manager the second week in February, 1971, and lasted about two months until he was fired again for not doing what the rules daid he had to - things like how to announce what records he played and when to say the weather. From there Larry went to

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work at WABX for a year and a half and quit on the air last month as reported in the SUN because of increasing restrictions at that station.

LARRY: Since l've been in Ann Arbor this is the third new management, and the first time that the management and the staff have lined up on ideas on how the radio station should sound, how it should be sold, and how it should relate to the community. The first two times around the managements didn't know who they should hire or what they should do with the sound of the station, so they make a lot of mistakes.

Mike O'Brien worked at NRZ and was fired along with Larry when Larry left the station the second time. After that they held a gig at WCBN, the student station, but that was only once a week. Mike is an Ann Arbor native, while Larry comes from the depths of Indiana.

Larry explained to us some more of why he ended up leaving ABX to come back to Ann Arbor after a year and a half. . .

LARRY: I got upset and discouraged by the people who were telling me the guideines I should operate within, because I didn't think those were proper guidelines. They involved doing some of the things I was trying to be an alternative to and pretty soon you get to a position where it becomes unproductive to keep what appears to be the best job on the radio dial when you know that when you go to work every day you're gonna do a whole lot of things that put you uptight. ABX is still one of the strongest radio stations on the dial - they've got a really good ibrary and good people working for them - they're the ones who in this area put the formula on the air and have been viable with it longer than anybody else. KNR came and went, RIF is doing what it's doing now. ABX chose to be the alternative radio station in town but only to a certain point. They saw how successful RIF was getting with numbers and they decided that in Detroit the national spot-buys, and remember that's how radio stations make their money, with commercial revenue, the spot-buys were going to the number one AM and the number one FM. ABX's management has made the decision to go after national commercials, and the only way to do that is to have high ratings, to beat RIF. Their determination to beat RIF is to not sound exactly like them but sound more Like them, which means repeat some of the music more than it needs to be repeated, stay on the hits a little bit longer. l'd worked in FM stations and l'd heard people say stay on the hits, but when I heard that at ABX, stay on this a little bit longer, play You Won't Get Fooled Again by the WHO a couple of extra weeks because it's starting to get AM airplay - they were throwing away the concept, I felt. Free-form means you got total freedom to go anywhere in your library and construct moods and introduce people to music they don't hear all the time. I don't want to push the new records all the time.

SUN: Really, there's so much killer music that doesn't hardly ever get on the radio... How will the advertising policy at NRZ differ from ABX's?

DAN: One of my basic things is avoiding the rip-offs as much as possible.

LARRY: I think for the first time since l've been working in radio we have two salesmen on the street who understand what we're trying to do with the airwaves, and don't want to clutter tasteful programming up with, well I hate to mention names of advertisers, but they understand we have to go after products which people who listen to us really need and want to use, and just need information about what those products are and where they can get them. They really don't need to be hyped to consumerism. That's what we're gonna try to avoid, but we're going to give a really good commercial service, where goods that people need and stores people need to know about, we want to have them on the air. And we need their support.

That's all we have space to report on now, but you can be sure the SUN will keep up with this situation as it develops because what people hear on the radio affects them, whether they realize it or not. In the meantime we urge you to listen to NRZ, and to let the people on the air know how you dig what they're doing. Cali them up at 663-0569 anytime and give them your ideas. That's what community is about. People who have things going on they want announced on the air should call the station, too.

COMMUNICATE TO LIBERATE!

- David Fenton, R.P.P. -