DO YOU REMEMBER ROCK & ROLL RADIO?

Or, In Which I Attempt to Make You Think About Something You Haven't Thought About in FOREVER

(There’s a reason I’m telling you this long story about radio instead of writing about politics, bear with me and enjoy the respite from the garbage fire for a few)

You probably don’t listen to terrestrial radio anymore, do you? If you ever did, that is.

You probably have SIRIUS XM in your car, or you plug in your phone and play music from your iTunes or Spotify. Or you listen to a podcast you downloaded.

You probably use the internet to check the local traffic and weather, so why would you possibly need that free entertainment medium that still comes standard with your car and digital clock?

You’re probably aware of the few national radio syndication companies that still exist, like iHeartRadio (sure they don’t) or Audacy, which used to be Entercom and is now “restructuring” after filing bankruptcy because the internet killed the radio star.

If you’re GenX or older, you absolutely grew up listening to the radio. It’s where you found out about new bands and new music and what was happening both in your town and the world at large. You had your favorite DJs, didn’t you? You knew when they were on and you trusted them. They were there every day, hanging out with you while you listened to records together.

Maybe you were so into the music that you would CALL the radio stations to make requests. Maybe you were so inspired by the voices you heard that they made you want to be just like them.

Maybe “you” in this scenario is actually me.

I don’t know why I was always drawn to the voices I heard on the radio, but from the earliest age, I couldn’t get enough. The first DJ I remember is a guy named “Vernon With A V” who was on WNBC in New York City. He was funny and silly and I would always ask my dad to put on Vernon With A V every time we got in the car, not understanding at the tender age of 3 or 4 that Vernon With A V didn’t live inside the radio all the time.

As I got older, I found myself mimicking radio DJ’s before I realized that’s what I was doing. My parents had given me a tape recorder for my 9th birthday, and I spent hours alone in my room talking into the tinny microphone and pretending I was on my own radio station.

All the DJs I had heard were men until I discovered Carol Miller on WNEW and the women who staffed the best radio station in the history of radio, WLIR on Long Island. I could only get WLIR on my clock radio, and only if I positioned it perfectly. Aside from finding out about New Wave bands from R.E.M. to The Cure and everyone in between, there were SO MANY women on the air there. Donna Donna and Malibu Sue were my favorites.

MTV exploded at essentially the same exact time, with Martha Quinn as the living embodiment of what a career could look like for a cute petite brunette who was already accumulating a vast knowledge of pop culture and what would soon be dubbed “alternative” music.

Fast forward to 1993. I was living in Augusta, Georgia, after graduating from UGA in Athens. I moved there to be with my boyfriend, who is now my ex-husband, for his final year of medical school. I took a job waiting tables, but then met the program director for a local alternative radio station, Channel Z, because his roommate/boyfriend was in my now-ex’s class.

After sitting in for one shift with him on a Saturday, I was hired and trained on the board. The first night I walked into the Channel Z studio for my first overnight shift, I felt a huge CLICK in my chest. This is where I belong, said a voice in my head. I’m home.

I developed excellent production skills, cutting my own commercial spots on reel-to-reel tape, cutting slices with razor blades after marking the cuts with a grease pencil. The commercials were on 8-track carts. There was no automation, it was pre-deregulation, and we were a local sensation.

Two weeks after I started on overnights, they loved me so much that they moved me to co-host morning drive. I was “Tara the Newz Chick” (yay the early 90s!) and enjoyed a full year on the air before my now-ex and I moved to New York for his residency.

I couldn’t get a job on the radio or MTV no matter how hard I tried. It was heartbreaking for me because I KNEW I belonged on the air.

Fast-forward to 2004, three years after my now-ex moved us out to the Portland metro area for a better job. I was now a stay-at-home mom. Jack was 5, Ben was 14 months old, and a local radio station, KNRK, had just gone scorched Earth thanks to a horrific stunt by Marconi, the morning DJ. In its attempt to compete with another station, KUFO (who had Howard Stern syndicated in the morning and then switched to local DJs), KNRK did what it could with the shock jockery. Marconi played the audio of the Nick Berg beheading video, making awful comments and adding even worse sound effects. Listeners immediately complained, Marconi and his producer were fired, and the PD, Mark Hamilton, scorched the Earth and took the other DJs off the air as well.

For about a month, KNRK was automated, but they had rebranded and changed the format from aggro white guy crap (Korn, Limp Bizkit, etc) to classic and modern alternative. I heard The Smiths on the new “94/7 Alternative Portland,” which made me want to work there immediately. To his credit, my now-ex encouraged me to contact the station.

After some back-and-forth over email where I sent him my voiceover demo, Mark Hamilton agreed to give me “only 15 minutes” in late June because he claimed that was all the time he had. When I walked into his office and saw the framed photo on his desk of himself with Foo Fighters right before Chris Shiflett joined the band, I knew the job was mine.

“Hey, I know those guys!” I said as I sat down.

“Yeah, they’re a great band,” Mark replied.

“No, I really know them!” And then I told him my Dave Grohl story.

He was impressed. Then he asked me what newer bands I liked. I mentioned Franz Ferdinand and The Killers, who I’d just seen the week before at a tiny club called Dante’s.

“We were all there!” he exclaimed. “What did you think?”

“I thought they seemed nervous,” I told him, “but I think they just need to get used to playing shows because I think they’re going to be enormous. That record is just so great.”

We talked for far longer than 15 minutes. I met the VP of Programming, who popped his head in and asked me what I wanted. “I want to do your middays,” I told him.

“Sounds good to me,” he told Mark.

I auditioned two nights in a row from midnight to 3 am, just in case I really sucked. But I knew the job was mine when I saw the first song on the playlist.

“Heart-Shaped Box,” by Nirvana.

Which was also the first song I played on my very first overnight shift at Channel Z.

Mark called me the next day after listening to the recording of my audition. “You sound great, Tara,” he said. “Very natural delivery. But I want to hear more about YOU. Don’t think of it as, Here’s this song, that was that song. It’s okay to say you love a band, or you saw them live, or something you know about them. Think about having a chat with another music fan in a bar.”

I did that the next night. Then I waited for what seemed like an interminable amount of time, but was only three days, before I heard from Mark again. He wanted references, which was a thing back in 2004 along with radio still being cool.

The next day, while I was driving Jack home from day camp, Mark called and offered me a three-year contract.

For me to tell you how much that job meant to me would take longer than you’d want, so let’s just say it was all of my dreams come true, career-wise. But my marriage was falling apart at the same time I was building a reputation as “Tara from 94/7,” and at the back of my mind, I promised myself that if I still had the job a year later—because nothing is ever guaranteed in radio, which is an awful way to live, just FYI—I would be able to leave my marriage and have the life I wanted while still being a devoted mom to my boys.

During that first year, I cemented my legacy when I helped create and name the station’s most successful annual event that they do to this day (minus the COVID years), the December to Remember concert series at the Crystal Ballroom. Why no, I don’t get any money or credit, don’t be silly.

But I did leave my marriage after that first year. I met the love of my life at the station, who was working in Promotions. My intention had been to have some fun and then move on—he’s almost 13 years younger than I am—but we fell so hard for each other.

I bought a house. I renegotiated my contract after three years and got a 16% raise, the highest in the company’s history, an astonished Mark Hamiton told me. “You’re a tremendous asset to the station,” he told me. “We can’t imagine it without you.”

That’s when I should’ve known I was doomed, but I was too happy to know it. In love, no money worries whatsoever, my sons thriving, going to my dream job that never felt like work.

I’ve written threads on Twitter about all of the times I came up with ideas or suggested bands and artists to add to our playlist, only to be laughed at or dismissed in the moment and then not given credit later when it turned out I was right yet again. Most importantly, I was right about the concurrent rise of social media and the iPod (remember those), as well as satellite, killing terrestrial radio. “We should be streaming online,” I told Mark in early 2007. Portland was having a Moment, as they say. Pre-Portlandia, The New York Times couldn’t stop writing about our food and music scenes.

“Why would we do that?” asked Mark.

“Because people are obsessed with Portland right now and the internet is NEVER GOING AWAY,” I told him. “We need to be on Facebook. We need to stream and build up an online audience. There’s a lot of money in streaming advertising.”

Guess when they started streaming? Late 2008.

After I was laid off in 2009 thanks to the economy, I railed against the state of radio and where it was heading because all of the wrong people—most of them men—were in charge. I know I led with my emotions and made some people mad, but the truth is the truth.

I’ve tried repeatedly over the years to get back on the air here, and all of the PDs—all of them STILL MEN—have found reasons to not hire me. Just before the pandemic shut everything down, I met with someone from 94/7’s biggest competitor, KINK, legacy station that’s gone through a lot of changes—none of which made their longtime listeners happy. I was told that they were happy with their current lineup, but if anything changed, I would be the first person they called.

And, guess what? When something changed, the first person they called was my former colleague, Gustav, who did afternoon drive on 94/7 until he also became a victim of layoffs.

Sigh. I don’t get why my connectivity isn’t seen as more valuable to the corporate money machines considering I have more Twitter followers than all of the radio stations in Portland combined and then some. The revenue I could create just from streaming would be the biggest bump they’ve gotten in years.

It was this Facebook Memory that brought all of this on, along with an announcement about yet another bad local radio decision.

KUFO flipped to all-conservative news and talk in 2011 and is now KXL. They blocked me on Twitter a couple of years ago, which is a really great look for a news station that carries Lars Larson.

For the last few months, I’ve been getting Indeed emails regarding an on-air position at KRSK, which until today was known for YEARS AND YEARS as “The Buzz.” I applied with zero expectations, even though the company (formerly Entercom, now Audacy) has a long history of rehiring popular on-air talent.

After I kept getting those Indeed job alerts for a while, I reached out to the new PD there, who did the whole “We’re still figuring things out” goalpost-moving thing that radio dudes do.

Today, I learned they scorched The Buzz to the ground and rebranded it. It’s now “Bella 105.” They currently are automating until they figure out what to do about staffing any on-air personalities. At the same time, 94/7 is still 94/7, but everyone on the air is voice-tracked from out of town. No humans are standing in the studio ready to answer phone calls like I used to, none of them are in town to host concerts or the intimate 94/7 Sessions like I used to, and none of them have the visibility on social like I do now.

While it’s always good to see that humans are on the air live and in the studio, THIS IS WHY RADIO WILL ALWAYS KEEP FAILING.

Playing the shell game with DJs and formats is why you LOSE listeners, not gain new ones. The only reason people listen to the radio anymore is for the human connection with the DJs. My listeners would call me and tell me they loved my show because I always sounded so happy to be there. People who hated their jobs would tell me I made their days better.

Imagine having that kind of trust. It was so important to me to maintain it. When I was yanked off the air after a typical Wednesday show, wiped from the website before I had even signed off for the day, I wasn’t given the chance to say goodbye. I was just…gone.

This is why listeners stop listening. If you take away the people they like and trust, they’re going to stop trusting your station. People crave consistency in an unstable world. Having me there every day, doing “The 90s at Noon” segment, hanging out with them as they drove trucks or mopped floors or prepped in kitchens, made a difference. People STILL remember me from the radio. They tell me they stopped listening when I was fired.

Yes, I know I can reach more people on social or on a podcast than on the radio. But I also know that the future of radio is live and locally focused. iHeart has homogenized radio for the masses, but every city has its own unique music, arts, business, and food scenes. Every city has its own sound. Radio companies would be smart to set aside at least one frequency per market to showcase the best of what they have and support it.

This June will mark the 20th anniversary of when I was first hired at 94/7. Those years informed my book, The Sound of Settling, which is set from 2001-2006.

Everyone loves a comeback story. I have 110K Twitter followers and I have better connections than anyone in Portland. I will forever wish to get back on the air here because I know in my bones that I was born to be on the radio.