John Brandt always wanted to work in radio. “I didn’t know anything about the business, really. But I loved the music, the DJs, the banter. The excitement of it all. I listened all the time, and I couldn’t imagine a better thing to do with my life.” In 1964 he moved to Ogallala, Nebraska, a western cattletown and farmer’s settlement that boomed after becoming a stop on the Union Pacific Railroad, but today, after decades of agricultural decline, has a population a tad under five thousand people. “I worked in the grocery store, and then at the Holiday Inn,” Brandt told me on a crisp winter morning in 2006, with a deep, soothing voice that was made for the medium. “Then I got hired at the town’s only radio station, KOGA.”
It was a small AM station, with a 500-watt signal and a license to broadcast full power during daytime hours and low power, at 150 watts, after dark. In December, when the sun sets early, KOGA was off the air by 4:15 p.m. (AM radio signals travel farther after nightfall, and small stations were often restricted to reduce interference with other stations.)1KOGA could reach eighty thousand people. “We had to broadcast” Brandt recalled fondly. “Which means we tried to have something for everyone who could pick up our signal. And we packed the programs with local and regional content. We don’t have a lot of drama around here, no ‘if it bleeds it leads’ material. But we covered the county fairs. We announced town meetings. We did radio obituaries—which is a real service, because the towns around here have either weekly or biweekly papers, and a lot of times we were the only ones to report that there would be a funeral for someone who died between the editions. We did high school sports, a tremendous number of games, for something like seventeen schools. And we had Midwest Opinions, our daily forty minutes of around-the-coffee-table talk. Thirty-seven years later, I’m still here.”
The general manager who first hired Brandt shared his passion for radio. Ray Lockhart came to KOGA in 1967 with plans to build the sleepy station into a local powerhouse. “Before he came the owners were doing absolutely nothing,” Brandt remembered. “There were three of them—two men from Ogallala, one from Oshkosh—and they gave him a ten percent stake in the company. Ray knew that simple good business practices could make us a lot more money. You can do real well by just being professional.” Lockhart created discount pricing schemes for advertising packages and standardized the station’s billing system. But his entrepreneurialism extended beyond the financial side of the business. “Ray was an amazing innovator. He had an intuitive sense about what we could do with local radio,” said Brandt. “We did market reports all through the day. We did local talk. And all the music formats—Top Forty, big country, even a polka every hour, because the people who did music programming liked it. At the time I was on the air from six to nine in the morning. I did the morning music—Creedence Clearwater Revival, Willie Nelson. We’d have to wait for Ray to leave town to play songs like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash.’ At the time, Ray and I would do Midwest Opinions together a little after eight. Then I’d go out and sell ads for the rest of the day.”
The reforms were a hit. KOGA gained more listeners. Advertisers bought airtime in bulk and paid on time. Profits increased, and so did Lockhart’s ambitions. “In 1972 he got us a nighttime license. And then around 1973 we got an FM station.”2 By 1974 Lockhart’s changes at KOGA had proven so successful that he decided to buy out his partners, and he took over controlling interest in the company. Around that time another group started a competing FM station in Ogallala, yet it couldn’t win over KOGA’s listeners, and ultimately Lockhart bought it for himself. Although Ogallala, like many other small U.S. towns, did not have much local market competition, it did have a hometown owner committed to providing a diverse set of offerings.
THE LATE 1960S AND EARLY 1970S WERE A REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD FOR music radio, with stereo sound on the emergent FM dial attracting young listeners because AM programmers, relying heavily on the standard playlists that proliferated as leading stations used Top 40 formats to compete with television in the 1950s, had dulled the edges of the nation’s leading outlets. FM broadcasting technology, which differs from AM broadcasting because it modulates the frequency, not the amplitude, of radio waves, was invented by RCA’s radio whiz kid, Edwin Howard Armstrong, between 1928 and 1933, when it was patented. FM signals did not travel as far as then-dominant AM stations, but they transmitted a higher fidelity broadcast because they could separate and layer sounds for stereophonic effect. Armstong was certain that FM would transform the radio business, yet David Sarnoff, RCA’s general manager and future president, decided to build the company around television rather than radio innovations, and neither RCA nor any other major media company invested significant resources in FM stations until the 1960s.3
The federal government played a crucial role in launching FM music radio and, in turn, advancing its goals of increasing the diversity and competition of local broadcast media. In the 1960s regulators grew concerned that AM stations owners were using their FM outlets to simulcast AM programs (and thereby double the chance that listeners would find their broadcasts while scanning the dial) rather than play different content, and in 1964 the FCC ruled that, beginning in January 1967, companies that operated AM and FM stations in cities with more than one hundred thousand people could not simultaneously replicate more than half of their programming. The new rule forced radio stations to choose between investing in new content or going off the air.
KFRE-FM in San Francisco was one of the many stations where managers, convinced that FM radio would never be commercially viable, looked for someone to take over the studio.4 The timing was fortuitous. Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue had recently left his DJ job at another Top 40-format AM station where he was not allowed to play new bands, such as the Doors, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane, that were breaking out in San Francisco. Donahue was incredulous about the situation, in which he was a leading DJ participating in an inspiring moment of musical innovation and cultural change—one whose symbolic center was his own city—and he was unable to broadcast the sounds on local radio.
When Donahue heard that some AM stations were killing their FM affiliates because of the FCC rule change, he began dreaming about a way to resurrect them by taking advantage of the programming freedom and high-fidelity stereo sound they offered. He convinced the owners of KFRE to let him run the station. Using the call letters KMPX, Big Daddy created what the Los Angeles DJ Jim Ladd termed “the very first FM rock station on planet earth.”5 DJs such as Donahue became spokesmen for a new generation of youthful idealists. The first “freeform” FM stations did not only break rock music; they also placed “a strong emphasis on community issues affecting the young,” wrote the radio historian Susan Douglas, “and the news and public service announcements emphasized the station’s organic relationship to its locale.”
The main source of FM’s allure was that station managers encouraged DJs to explore new music, playing songs they selected personally rather than songs selected for them. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Douglas explained, marketing experts persuaded managers at popular AM music stations to rely on Billboard rankings and records of jukebox plays, rather than on the idiosyncratic tastes of on-air talent, who were susceptible to both bribes from record producers and cultural appeals to promote “race music,” such as blues and R&B. AM DJs began complaining that they had been strait jacketed by management, and many fled to the FM dial. “In 1965,” said Richard Neer, a former DJ at what was once New York City’s premier rock station, WNEW-FM, “there were a lot of stations playing forty records, and … there weren’t any visionaries in the business of radio. Everyone was wearing suits and very uptight and very programmed.” With FM, however, “the disc jockeys had total freedom to play whatever records they chose. They could say what they wanted, whenever they wanted.” According to Ladd, putting together a music program used to be “like painting a picture aurally. It wasn’t one song after another, unrelated … Back then, you were telling stories … If you picked a Bob Dylan record and followed it with a particular Stones record, there was a reason for that on many different levels. It wasn’t just that the Dylan record was hot and the Stones record was a new release.”6
The freedom to determine what songs to play was one thing, but the greatest glory and joy for DJs came from discovering new bands, and in cities with vibrant cultural scenes disc jockeys kept their ears to the ground so they could hear fresh acts. Since the late 1960s urban disc jockeys have played important roles in breaking music with a decidedly local flavor: folk and psychedelic rock in San Francisco; rhythm and blues in Detroit; funk in Philadelphia; new wave and hip-hop in New York City; house in Chicago; grunge in Seattle.7 Early FM DJs aimed to delight listeners, of course, but not simply with market-tested songs that were guaranteed to please. “We created taste,” said Nat Asch, the original programming director at WNEW-FM. “Whatever we had at that time, we presented it and said try this. If you don’t like it, we’re going to go into the toilet, but that’s none of your concern, try it. We surrounded that music with people who could extend what we presumed was interesting about what we presented … We led rather than reflected.”8
Disc jockeys at WLIR, Long Island’s famous rock station, shared this mission. The station’s official history proudly claims that “LIR was already adding cuts from Blondie, Talking Heads, and The Ramones to the latest Rolling Stones or Neil Young album cuts in the 1970s,” paving the way for these new artists on the air. Like the DJs at WNEW, programmers at WLIR featured live recordings of up-and-coming bands at venues such as CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, sometimes getting them on the radio before they had a record. Rodney Bingenheimer used the same techniques at KROQ in Los Angeles. Bingenheimer, who helped to break dozens of major acts, from the Go-Go’s to Van Halen and the Sex Pistols, told the Los Angeles Weekly that “what was fun was when bands used to come up to KROQ, like Bad Religion would show up and give me a tape, and by the time they get in their car and drive off, it’s already on the radio … I used to play Oasis before they were signed—on cassette demos!” In Boston, bands such as Aerosmith (from nearby New Hampshire) and the J. Geils Band credit Maxanne Sartori of WBCN for playing their music until it broke into the national market. Sartori, whom Rolling Stone praised for “consistently boosting] local bands,” made her biggest catch at the Newberry Street Music Fair, where a young rocker named Ric Ocasek impressed her so much that she began playing demos from his group, Cap’N Swing. Soon after, she introduced Ocasek and his bandmates to the former Modern Lovers and DMZ drummer David Robinson, and together they formed the Cars.9
DJs at small-town stations such as KOGA in Ogallala had their own aspirations. Although they were unlikely to launch new bands into fame, they played the essential role of introducing their audience to new music styles, social trends, and ideas, acting as cultural brokers between the local community and the national or international scene. Radio personalities in New York and Los Angeles may have had well-known voices, but only a rare few enjoyed the public recognition routinely afforded to their counterparts in small towns and cities, where constant appearances made their faces famous.
Paradoxically, the popularity of FM radio compromised the future of live broadcasting at small stations. While managers at stations the size of KOGA understood the importance of employing good talent, they also had a strong incentive to keep costs down and profit margins up in their modest markets—even the low salaries paid to DJs cut into the bottom line. As the FM dial gained popularity, small-station owners began to rely on automated programming technology, which could pump out a steady stream of music without a DJ in the studio. Douglas estimated that by the mid-1970s up to one-seventh of FM stations used “assembly line” systems to “stay on the air for hours with virtually no human intervention.”10 This early automation relied on audiotaping technology; in the absence of chains that could distribute content to stations in multiple markets, individual radio stations preprogrammed their broadcasts mainly by recording in their own studios. “We started using the tape automation around the time we got the FM station,” Brandt recalled. “We used an old Harris System, big reels of tape that would play music, with another machine that would play commercials.” Lockhart, KOGA’s owner, used similar devices in his other stations, where tape technology provided material for late-night broadcasts through the 1980s and early 1990s. The system worked fine—unless it didn’t, in which case the stations had to scramble to find someone who could do the show live, or else go off the air.
The technological breakthrough that would put an end to such system failures—and, ironically, also to innovative programming—was developed in the world of small radio. Kevin Lockhart, who was born just five years before his father began working at KOGA, grew up in the radio business, working as a DJ, manager, and salesman at the family stations before serving four years in the U.S. Army, where he learned some basic technical skills even though, he told me, “[he] didn’t have any real training as an engineer.” In late 1989 Kevin had just returned to Ogallala, where his father, who by then had also acquired two stations in Colorado, was frustrated because the automated tape system at one of his outlets was failing. “Replacing the old tape recorders would cost about three or four thousand dollars per machine,” Brandt explained. “And Ray asked why we couldn’t just record programs in the computer.” Kevin didn’t have a good answer, except for the fact that they didn’t have software for the job, which meant that if they wanted a computer automation system they would have to develop it on their own. “They were working in the basement of our office,” Brandt recalled. “My desk was down there, so I was around for it all. Kevin had some friends who helped. And they were trying to record a CD into a computer, to play it out, and then match the wave form. I remember the day they came running to my office in the basement screaming that they had done it. ‘We’ve got CD quality,’ they said. It was quite a moment.”
After the first breakthrough, Kevin camped out in the basement and continued developing the software. “I just played around on the computer and tried to come up with things,” he modestly explained. Not only did the new system solve the problems at Ray Lockhart’s own stations, which never numbered more than ten. “By 1991 we found something that worked well enough to put on the market.” They created a new company, Prophet Systems Innovations, and Brandt, by then a veteran sales manager, began demonstrating the computer automation system at national trade shows. “We were a small-market radio station and we developed it for small markets, that’s how we were thinking,” Brandt said. “But we had a guy who wanted to make it applicable for big-market stations, too. He helped to develop it, adding features like laugh tracks and audience applause. He made it user-friendly, and adaptable, because he knew that’s what the large stations would need if their hosts were going to tape whole shows.”
By the mid-1990s Prophet’s small staff had built a central file server that facilitated high-speed transmission of radio content, and a wide-area network system—for “WANcasting”—that allowed managers of multistation radio companies (which were then limited to forty stations nationally) to see and control what was playing on all their outlets at once. With Prophet’s sophisticated voice-tracking system, radio stations could store music or talk shows on exportable and manipulable digital files, rather than on CDs or records, and DJs could craft their programs by adding commentary, news, traffic, and commercials into the electronic mix. Computer monitors would graphically display exactly how much time each song left for opening and closing voice-overs, so programmers could avoid talking through the lyrics and ensure high-quality production values. The technology was extraordinary. Brandt remembered: “I would show people the technology, and executives from CBS and all the major stations were stunned. They couldn’t believe that we could do all this with a computer. The first group to actually buy a system from us was the Christian radio station in Las Vegas. It cut their [programming] expenses to almost nothing.”
But politics, not religion, would turn the Prophet computer system into gold. A number of federal policies worked to speed American media corporations—television and print, as well as radio—into the digital age. After taking office in 1993, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore made a high-profile push for new laws that would relax regulatory constraints on large telecommunications companies and encourage private-sector investment in a new “Information Superhighway.” The private sector responded by energetically pursuing high-tech production and distribution systems. While the Democrats, hoping to secure the financial support of major telecommunications corporations, focused on infrastructure projects for “telephony,” big broadcasting companies organized an expensive lobbying campaign to promote their own interests. The resulting Telecommunications Act of 1996 proved to be decisive for Prophet’s future. “We were developing this before the 1996 Telecom Act,” Kevin told me, chuckling a little at his luck. “We had an internal fight about it, because the programmers thought we wouldn’t get enough business to make it work, but my father and I had been following the debate around radio ownership, and we insisted that we go forward.” The Lockharts immediately understood that the new federal rules would forever change their family business. But it took longer to recognize that media conglomerates, which were prepared to begin their feeding frenzy at the moment President Bill Clinton signed the Telecom Act into law, would take advantage of Prophet’s automated programming system to transform the entire radio industry, substituting machine-made shows by “cyber jocks” who could program a four-hour segment in less than thirty minutes for the live talent and local programming that the Lockharts themselves had always valued. “It surprised us how quickly the supergroups emerged,” said Kevin. “Then we realized—oh my goodness, this is going to be something else.”
STEVE HICKS OF CAPSTAR HAD RECOGNIZED THE POTENTIAL COST SAVings from a computerized radio programming system even before he started his megabusiness. But as he began acquiring hundreds of new stations, each with its own payrolls to fill, he took an urgent interest in technology that would dramatically reduce the company’s labor needs. In January 1997 Capstar invited a half-dozen leading automation companies to Austin for a “dog and pony show,” giving each a week to demonstrate its products. Prophet was by no means the only company working on digital automation. Yet “we were,” Kevin Lockhart recalled, “about six months ahead of everyone else. We were the only one that could connect the system right there, from Austin to Nebraska.”
Capstar was at first only cautiously optimistic about Prophet. After all, Prophet had fewer than ten employees working in an unknown midwestern town of about five thousand people. The company would have to prove that it could handle a big job; to do so, Kevin agreed to connect the first eleven stations in the system at cost before scaling up. He went to Austin and managed the job brilliantly, and after the first successful implementation Capstar asked him to expand the automated system into its entire station group.
Capstar’s business model was based on replacing original local shows and the people who made them with programs recorded in its Austin facility. To do this, though, engineers would have to wire each station into the matrix, and that required traveling to the small-market towns that Lisa Dollinger called “the sticks.” In the following months Dollinger, then Capstar’s PR director, worked closely with Prophet as it fully automated Capstar’s fleet of local stations, and she has fond memories of the time. Together, Lockhart, Dollinger, and a team of engineers traveled the nation in an RV, installing the new systems in an effort they described as “Nerds on Tour.”
Back in Austin, Capstar programmers perfected the art of mass customized digital programming, in which ersatz local commentrary would be inserted into long segments of automated content. Voice tracking allowed Capstar to create the impression that the old ways of DJing remained in place, even though the on-air talent at many stations was replaced by personalities who worked outside the state where their shows aired, and the primary responsibility of the new DJs had shifted to performing the role of local radio host. With Prophet’s technology, a broadcaster committed to efficient production could have one employee record more shows in an eight-hour workday than was previously possible in a full week. It could also operate with no one in the studio, no matter what the time of day. As Prophet’s promotional Web site advertises, its VoiceTRAC software is “able to record a perfect 4 hour shift in under 30 minutes! You don’t have to be a superhero to sound like one … Record your voice tracks up to 2 weeks in advance. Read song notes and access music beds/audio via the button bar while you record. Sound live and local”11
“Capstar pioneered voice tracking,” Dollinger told me. “We hired DJs who were very good and specialized for different formats. We had thirty-five or forty DJs and these gorgeous studios, and they would voice-track for all our different markets. They would introduce songs or read the weather forecast or make a service announcement, just short messages. We also had out-of-market talent doing them for some areas. The local station would communicate with them, so the talent out-of-market knew which issues and themes to push for which place.” Capstar had indeed engineered a radical system: it helped take FM radio back to the heyday of Top 40 AM radio in the 1950s, this time updated with a fake local twist.
According to Dollinger, the net results of the conversion to digital automation included improved technical engineering and more professional operations at small-market stations. It would have been practically impossible for large radio companies to produce this blend of customized and standardized content with the old tape-recording technology, she told me.
Prophet allowed small-market audiences to get “top talent” and encouraged them to believe that the DJs knew all about their town. Steve Hicks was so pleased with the outcome at Capstar, and so eager to establish control over the technology that made it all possible, that he bought Prophet Systems and all of Lockhart’s stations for his own company.
LOCKHART’S FORMER STATIONS WERE ALREADY ACCUSTOMED TO DIGITAL automation, but workers at most other radio stations Capstar took over were less enthusiastic about voice tracking, since for them the rise of more automated production translated into the downsizing of local production staff, a loss of local control, and overall job insecurity. Tricia Nellessen, who worked as a DJ on KKIX, a country station in Fayetteville, Arkansas, described the impact of the computerization process after GulfStar Communications, a subsidiary of Capstar, bought KKIX and its sister station, KKZQ, along with two other stations in the market, KEZA and KJEM. According to a scholarly article she published with Robert Brady, before GulfStar took over, KKIX and KKZQ employed live DJs in all their broadcasts and employed program directors who selected music based on their knowledge of the local market. After the transition, GulfStar reduced the number of local staff and implemented a new production model. “Although management did not explicitly suggest that the staff should be deceptive about the station’s reliance on voicetracking,” Nellessen and Brady wrote, “steps were taken to give the appearance that the shows were live.”12
One of Nellessen’s former colleagues reported in the same article: “I know that if I’m caught in the store by a listener who asks how she could have just heard me on the air, I’ll tell her I’m voicetracked. But, honestly, we all try to keep up the illusion that it is live unless we’re backed into a corner and have to tell.” The staff worked hard to achieve this illusion. Employees were told to keep the phones on hold when airing a voice-tracked program, so that callers would hear a busy signal and believe, falsely, that the host was speaking with other audience members. “There were numerous moments where DJs were left wondering what to say when a listener called in and asked to talk to (or even meet) an air talent who was actually based out of another city. Most programming staff members usually came up with an excuse like ‘He just stepped into a meeting’ or Oh, she’s out of the control room and I’m not sure where she is, may I take a message?’”
In Nellessen’s and Brady’s view, GulfStar was using voice tracking not only to deceive Fayetteville listeners but to outright abandon them and evade its stations’ public-interest obligations. Although KKIX station managers often wrote to the automation studio to advise the cyber jocks about local issues, their messages could hardly substitute for the knowledge and experience of radio hosts who worked and lived in the area. The result was that “stations begin to sound less localized and more homogenized. Air staff used to describe local events; public service announcements were made for local organizations; and the staff was on site to broadcast the latest news and weather conditions. In 2000, the staff … mentions local conditions, but cannot provide specifics because the staff is not really at that location.” Worse, listeners complained, were the on-air personalities piped in from Austin, who often mispronounced the names of towns, neighborhoods, and prominent people in the area. If local radio once helped to create communities and build common identities, now it was estranging them by destroying the sounds that made listeners feel at home.
Capstar was not the only big radio company to use voice tracking, and as other big radio companies developed systems similar to Prophet’s, reports of lost local programming, automated news services, and the sale of radio airtime for program-length infomercials were beginning to concern the industry’s leading figures. In 1998 the former NBC News president Lawrence Grossman complained that “the new radio entrepreneurs have slashed station budgets and eliminated what they view as costly nonessential operating expenses such as news staffs and even wire services.” Moreover, he warned that “except at public radio and a few all-news stations, radio reporters have become a vanishing breed … The current trend is to ‘outsource’ radio headline news without letting the audience know—not just cutting back on station news coverage but eliminating all reporters.”13
While commercial stations across the country downsized their newsrooms and integrated voice-tracked programs into evening and, alarmingly, daytime hours that had rarely been automated, citizens longing for better journalism flocked to National Public Radio. Between 1996 and 2006 NPR’s audience of “unique listeners” (who tune in at least once a week) doubled, from 12.5 million to 25 million.14 The public broadcaster is best known for its national programs, but as radio consolidators (as the companies that acquired large station groups are commonly called) eliminated local content on the commercial dial a number of NPR affiliates discovered that they could increase their audience by increasing their supply of live, locally oriented shows.
At Chicago’s WBEZ-FM, the general manager, Torey Malatia, added original programming and cut back on NPR’s syndicated shows because he believes his station “really [has] a function and responsibility … to be a resource for the people who live here, and that comes first.” That idea, he told me as we sat in his office on Navy Pier, where the dramatic skyline unfolded before us, has “died in mainstream radio. So we have to create content that draws its distinctiveness from this place, from the stories around us, and the character of the community we serve. Our programming has to resonate with a unique and identifiable voice, because unless it does, we don’t give people a reason to feel we’re doing something that’s irreplaceable in their lives.”
Steve Edwards, a precocious talent who hosts WBEZ’s popular city affairs program Eight Forty-Eight, developed a large following among Chicago radio listeners by adhering to the programming principles Malatia established. Speaking with me on a schoolyard bench in my old neighborhood, Edwards identified the feeling that citizens everywhere experience when they hear the flimsy or fake local content produced by Big Media: “They don’t respect where I live.” “Radio is an intensely personal medium,” he explained. “You take radio with you in your car, your bathroom, your shower sometimes. You have your headphones. There’s a flavor of radio that is intimate and personal and, by extension, local. And there’s a tradition of local radio in this country. So when you’re in Chicago, it sounds like you’re in Chicago, and people talk like they’re from Chicago. They talk about Chicago things, and through that the radio station actually creates a community around it. It’s locally based. It used to be that if you went to Kansas City or Georgia or New York, you’d hear different things. And if you heard the same thing, it would be spoken with different accents and hopefully different opinions and views in each town. What strikes me as a listener is that I wake up with that same person everyday, and he or she starts my day with news and culture or traffic and a funny joke. And I know him; I know her. When that voice is piped in via satellite, when the same songs are played eighteen times a day, when the anchor doesn’t know how to pronounce certain towns in my state—that’s offensive to me. They don’t appreciate, don’t respect me. They don’t respect my family, my community.”
VOICE-TRACKED PROGRAMMING CAN DO MORE THAN ALIENATE LISTENers; it can endanger them. Years before the toxic spill in Minot, Tricia Nelleson and the radio workers she interviewed in Arkansas warned that automated stations might fail to provide emergency warnings before, during, and after a local crisis. Nelleson was confident that the Emergency Alert System would function during a major disaster. Yet she was also skeptical that the radio stations would have adequate staff to handle smaller problems, and she doubted that they would be able to provide the level of local news, service, and information that citizens need after the emergency broadcast ends and the community is left to assess what happened and recover. Employing real people to work in the studio might cost big radio companies more than using cyber jocks, but the public benefits—in good times and bad—would be priceless.
Consider what happened in South Dakota’s Grizzly Gulch forest during the summer of 2002, just five months after the disaster in Minot. For more than a decade a DJ who calls himself Jack Daniels has hosted the weekday morning program on X-Rock, a heavy-metal and hard-rock station in Spearfish, South Dakota, that broadcasts to the Deadwood, Sturgis, and Rapid City markets in the western part of the state. Along with his partners, Tom Collins and Jim Kallas (who recently replaced Collins), Daniels serves up a playlist—AC/DC, Metallica, Ozzy, Disturbed, Saliva—that’s in tune with the mythically lawless subculture of the old mining region. Like many morning drive-time programs, the show features animated and occasionally lewd commentary, along with a Web site full of bikinied models and off-color jokes. As Daniels put it, “We’re not on the level of Howard Stern, but we take some huge chances.”
X-Rock is owned and operated by Duhamel Broadcasting Enterprise, a family-run business that enjoys a loyal base of support, in part because it has been in South Dakota for over fifty years. When Jack, Tom, or Jim offends someone, they are likely to hear about it. They’ve all lived and worked in the area for decades, their kids went through its public schools, and they bump into listeners in grocery stores, restaurants, and community meetings. So does their boss, Bill Duhamel, who began his career as a late-night DJ on ????, which his mother, Helen, purchased in 1953 to prevent an out-of-state company from taking over what was then Rapid City’s only radio station. Today the Duhamel family owns and operates four radio stations in the Black Hills, a television station in Rapid City, and three satellite stations serving the sparsely populated region spanning from western South Dakota to eastern Wyoming and the Nebraska Panhandle.
In May and June of 2002 Jack Daniels and Jim Kallas were busy with their usual programming and promotional work, hosting parties at local bars and making celebrity appearances at car dealerships and weekend festivals. Although South Dakota has a small population, summer is a crowded season. Nearly 2 million travelers cross the jagged mountains, rock tunnels, and tall stone spires on Needles Highway to see American bison, elk, and bighorn sheep in the Black Hills National Forest and Custer State Park, or to gaze up at Mount Rush-more and the Crazy Horse Memorial nearby. Some half million others ride to Sturgis for the world’s largest motorcycle rally, roaring along the quiet mountain roads on Harley-Davidsons and painting the towns a leathery black. For X-Rock, where programmers describe their core audience as “eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old men in T-shirts,” early summer is prime time.
Normally the summer weather in the Black Hills is pleasantly arid, with gusty winds that circulate the sweet smells of ponderosa pine, quaking aspen, and spruce trees across the big, open sky; the 2002 season, however, began inauspiciously. In May and June a series of severely hot and dry days caused drought conditions in three-fourths of the state, leaving spring wheat, summer crops, pastures, and hay to deteriorate under the unrelenting sun. More ominously, the scorching climate parched the soil and vegetation, turning the typically verdant landscape into a tinderbox forest. West of South Dakota, similar conditions had already proven disastrous, fueling twenty major fires in nine states, including devastating infernos in Arizona and Colorado. By June 26 the flames had consumed 2.5 million acres of land, and meteorologists warned that the fire season was only beginning.
Around 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 29, a gust blew trees into a power transmission line in South Dakota’s Grizzly Gulch, and sparks from the contact ignited a conflagration. Within minutes, strong winds of up to forty miles per hour picked up the flames and carried them to adjacent trees, which lit up like kindling. Officials immediately called in local firefighters and emergency personnel, yet they were outmatched. The fire spread quickly through the wildlands, with gusts propelling the blaze several hundred yards in seconds. The flames advanced toward Deadwood, which was jammed with thousands of weekend tourists who listened as the sounds from the roaring fire and falling trees echoed through town.15
Karla Wiederhold was at home in Lead when the fire started in 2002. “My friend was out having a cigarette, and he screamed, ‘Hey, look, there’s a plume out there.’ But I didn’t think it was a fire. We’re in a mining town, and there’s smoke sometimes. Then the smoke turned black.” She turned on her radio. “I heard that Deadwood was on fire, and I panicked. My mother is there, and I couldn’t reach her by phone. I wanted to go and get her, but the police department told us to stay home.”
Deadwood was already in danger. The fire spread to one thousand acres as gusts pushed it over the highways, into the hilly neighborhoods, and close to downtown. Then governor William Janklow ordered an evacuation, and soon a long line of cars formed on Highway 85, descending to safer terrain. Local officials and the American Red Cross opened an emergency shelter on the Black Hills State University campus in Spearfish, and after it filled up, the National Guard set up another nearby. People searching for relatives posted messages at the makeshift communications center. “I am looking for Esther Roth, Lanny Roth. Please have family call Perry.” The local cellular tower and some phone lines were down, and residents struggled to get basic information about the conditions of their homes or the fate of their families and friends. With lines of communication dried up, anxiety spread through the region as quickly as the flames.
Jack Daniels does not usually work on Saturdays, but on June 29 he was doing a special live broadcast from a car dealership in Spearfish. He saw the forest fire himself, as he was driving near Deadwood after he finished the broadcast. X-Rock immediately began relaying vital information. I turned on the radio, Daniels recalled:
And Jim Kallas, my program director, is on the air, directing everybody to the emergency area where the Red Cross was. Remember, this is six days from the Fourth of July; they estimate the crowd at fifteen to twenty thousand people inside tiny Deadwood. All the hotels are totally filled, you know, and they’re knocking on doors saying, “Leave your luggage, get in your car, and get out of here.”
I drove toward the radio station because I knew we had to go on the air. I walked in, and Jim said, “Hey, you go on.” It was perfect timing, because all these people had just been displaced, they didn’t know where to go, no idea whatsoever, and I swear to you within five minutes, all our phones lines lit up. Next thing you know, I’m on line one: “Hey, my name is Gladys Johnson, I’m from Indianapolis, and we’ve just been evacuated from a hotel in Deadwood. I’m looking for my daughter.” And so it just became this gigantic, Mayberry thing, just telling stories over the radio and connecting people with other people.
Before long Tom Collins arrived at the studio, and—as all the other local stations continued with their regular programming, breaking in with occasional news updates—Daniels, Collins, and Kallas spent the next ten hours hosting an impromptu broadcast fully dedicated to the emerging disaster. Local reporters, firefighters, and residents who stayed home despite the evacuation order called in to help track the blaze, and evacuees clustered around radios in shelters, cars, and hotels to learn about the state of the homes, businesses, neighbors, and friends they left behind. According to Kallas, “We called the whole staff in, about ten people—our sales staff, our announcers, our part-timers, whoever was around. The sales staff was answering phones and taking down information.”
Carol Reif, whom I visited at the Adams Museum and House in Deadwood, recalled that “people were really frantic. They would call the station because their mother was in central city, and pretty soon neighbors would call and say don’t worry about your mother, we’ll take care of her. Jack and Tom were the main communication center. They were like the counselors, helping us calm down.” Daniels remembered hearing from the first callers that day. “They didn’t know where to turn. They would have just sat there in the dark with nothing. You listen to the other radio stations, they were acting like nothing happened.”
One evacuee remembered how her family was spread out around the area, and said that it was difficult to stay in contact. “We were in hotel rooms, we had no communication with anyone, but we had the radio. The TV wasn’t giving you play-by-play. It gave you news, not very good news. They didn’t tell us anything we needed to know. The way we kept in touch was Jack Daniels and Tom Collins. It was absolutely amazing. I don’t think they even ate.”
Daniels and Collins rested early on Sunday morning, and another crew, including Kallas and the afternoon man, Kevin Morgan, took over the live broadcast for a few hours while they slept. The duo was back on the air by 8:00 a.m. Sunday, at which point the uncontained fire spanned over 4,500 acres. Plumes of black smoke hovered menacingly above the Black Hills, while horrifyingly spectacular orange, yellow, and pink light colored the morning sky. More than 250 emergency workers were on the scene, along with forty-four fire engines and seven heavy air tankers dropping slurry from the sky. The winds calmed, but the fire moved on, feasting on the dry terrain and the buildings in their path, building energy before the next gust pushed them onward. The Grizzly Gulch fire became the top priority of the federal fire service, and hundreds more workers—including 123 inmates from the state corrections system and the most elite Hotshot crews in the federal response service—rushed to the area. By midday local officials decided to evacuate Lead, too, leaving some fifteen thousand displaced people in the hills. Stores posted signs saying “Pray for Rain.”
X-Rock continued its live broadcast, taking in hundreds of calls per day, and Duhamel management decided to run around-the-clock disaster coverage even though, Daniels said, its competitors continued to air regular programs, music, or syndicated talk shows. Daniels recalled: “We were on, like, anywhere between fourteen and seventeen hours a day. People were listening to get updates on the fire, and we weren’t going anywhere. We weren’t going to kick back into Metallica or Pantera. People knew that we were live and we were staying live.”
Bill Duhamel endorsed the decision. As he said, “At least in our company, we’ve done this [kind of special coverage] probably about a dozen times through the years with fires and things. It’s the expected thing to do. It just comes as the tradition of the company; it’s a function of our philosophy and the manager’s involvement. If you’re local, you probably have it.”
The broadcast quickly became a civic project, capturing not only the attention of people near the fire but also the interest of listeners beyond South Dakota. After learning about the X-Rock coverage, an Internet service began streaming the feed online. Soon distant listeners, many of whom had friends and family in the Black Hills, e-mailed the station to thank the staff.
The local fire story was national news, and, as Daniels explained, the small X-Rock staff was generating information from unusual sources.
There were some hill boys, you know, who have always lived out there and know that area inside and out. They made up their minds, they weren’t going to go anywhere, just weren’t going to go. So they start calling me, and they were actually doing a play-by-play of the fire over the radio. They were looking from a bird’s-eye view of the fire as it was rolling out of Deadwood and Lead. We were teasingly calling them Wolf Blitzer.
We also had firefighters coming off the lines, calling X-Rock and telling us what they were seeing. There was interaction between the firefighters and the people that evacuated and couldn’t find their kids and animals. Someone would call and say, “Tell Rose Emanuel I just picked up her Siberian husky and he’s in my truck.” Then Rose would call five minutes later, and she’d be weeping over the radio.
Eventually it got to the point where the emergency officials let our people go in. They got two of our guys, Paul James and Kevin Morgan, and took them into these places, put them in the fire suits and the hats, and actually took them to the fire lines. The local authorities realized very quickly that this radio station was voicing this whole deal, so not only did they let our people remain in there, they protected them.
The firefighters had other urgent concerns, since lingering high temperatures and low humidity levels made controlling the fire all the more difficult. By Monday, July 1, they had contained 10 percent of the conflagration, but the flames now spread over 6,200 acres, and 684 emergency personnel battled back. On Tuesday the fire remained steady, and local officials allowed residents to return to Deadwood for the first time in three days. The crews continued their battle for five more days, completely containing the blaze on Sunday, July 7. Although nearly 11,000 acres of land had burned during the weeklong conflagration, the emergency workers had protected all but seven homes and eleven buildings in the area, and not a single person had perished.
Citizens and officials praised firefighters for their extraordinary work, but they also gave special thanks to the X-Rock team for its public service during the crisis. Bill Duhamel received calls of appreciation from Governor Janklow and Senators Tom Daschle and Tim Johnson. The shock jocks got special citations from the mayors in the nearby towns. “It was funny,” Daniels said. “You do all these things for years on the radio: introduce some records, tell stupid jokes, show up on the car lot, go to the bars on Friday nights and do wet T-shirt contests. And then all of a sudden you’re placed in a position where something goes seriously wrong and you’re challenged. For that one time, you realize the importance of local broadcasters and what they are actually supposed to do.”