Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out

If you don't know what "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out" means, jump on the Google before reading...

Listened to it this morning while I worked out on the Total Gym. Still sounds as vibrant and dangerous as ever, even with the mp3 compression. The woman in the audience screaming "Paint It Black, you devil!!" The serpentine riff in "Stray Cat Blues," the sense of borderline anarchy in the crowd when they launch into that lean, menacing "Sympathy." The Stones so exotic and dangerous then, not the corporate machine they've become. Still, I couldn't help but find myself thinking back fondly to the 2001 tour opener at the Garden, when they played "Stray Cat Blues" and Mick, in his mid-50's then, lent the song an even creepier vibe when he sang "I know you're just 13 years old...I don't want no ID."

Anyway, this stuck with me all day because I had the great fortune to catch up with my friend Dave George over lunch this afternoon, boring his lovely wife Amy (and cute but oblivious year-old son) as we had our usual back and forth music conversation, an extension of a conversation that began decades ago, in junior high. We were lamenting the sorry state of FM radio, reminiscing about the good old days when we were kids and the radio was EVERYTHING, it MATTERED. It's where we discovered music new and old, listened to personalities that seemed like the coolest guys in the room and built our record collections off of what we'd heard. We're both passionate music fans in large part because of that early radio indoctrination into the Church of Rock.

Dave mentioned his love of Pandora.com, something I share. Great service-streaming music, commercial free, anything you like. Your own custom channels, as well as pre-programmed channels in formats similar to what's on FM, without the commercials and robotic jocks and the endless song repetition. No 300-song music libraries built solely on the preferences of a hundred people in a auditorium, rating 650 :30 song clips twice a year. No overpaid, ineffective and compromised consultants, just none of the things rock radio is doing wrong. Rock radio mirroring the record companies, heads in the sand as market share slowly erodes (relative to the labels)...WiFi in cars is coming boys, and when I can get Pandora or Brooklyn Vegan or Live365 in my car just as easily as any FM station, where do you think I'm getting my music from? Hell, I've listened to maybe an hour of FM radio since I left it; it's Sirius almost always. Any music style I want, commercial free, and PERSONALITIES between the records. Quick hits, not long drawn-out breaks. God forbid ANYONE violate the :30 break rule. But I digress...

So Dave and I are talking music, how we get set in our ways as we get older, dismissing new music as inferior to what we grew up with. I've heard that before, especially when I worked in radio, that the quality of new music just isn't as good as it used to be. I said it then, and I'll say it now: BULLSHIT. It's a crock. There's so much great music out there-surf the net, go to a local club and see a band play their asses off for 20 people simply for the love of making music, because they HAVE to play it. Go check out the bands selling out 2500 seaters every night across the country without any airplay, with minimal mainstream attention and a name you probably never heard. Go to Pandora or listen to Left of Center on Sirius. Educate yourself.

The problem with so many of the management types in radio at this point is that the zeitgeist has passed them by. The business has passed them by. The old paradigm is dead yet they cling to it dearly because they don't know how to build a new one, just keep tweaking what they already have. It's the equivalent of giving Grandma a boob job. It's too late to make her hot again. They don't know how to operate in a music world that no longer has a center, that no longer captures the attention of the majority, that doesn't have MTV or VH1 buttressing their programming. Grey's Anatomy is over. They aren't breaking records any more than your local FM station, save maybe the college stations. WERS in Boston is musically far more interesting than anything else on the dial and has upwards of 200,000 people listening every week. Music fans ARE out there, yet these people aren't being served because the powers that be are too busy trying to convince the public that FM radio isn't as lame and repetitive as the public keeps telling them it is. Uh, actually...it IS lame and repetitive. Don't argue the message, FIX THE PROBLEM!

In the end, over cheeseburgers and fries and a giggling baby, we compared our Pandora stations. Dave mentioning how he hears new music there that he digs, and would otherwise never have heard. Radio in Atlanta is just as disappointing as it is in Boston, evidently. Amy saying that she only leaves XM to get local news/weather/traffic, and then right back to the satellite. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...