The Infinite Dial

Radio people don’t usually expect to hear their personal “oh wow” oldies on the radio. Those who even still have access to an Oldies station usually figure that if they’re enjoying it too much, the program director is probably playing too many obscure personal favorites. For a while, the proliferation of Bob- and Jack-FMs provided some “oh wow”s. Now, after nearly three years of hearing stations clone each others’ playlists, I actually find myself going, “Sheesh, ‘I Was Made For Loving You’ by Kiss . . . again?” (At least now there’s the new generation of Rhythmic AC stations and a new clump of ‘80s and ‘90s titles.)

For the last four years, my iPod has been a pretty good safety valve for letting me hear my personal faves without having to subject anybody else to them. But there are few surprises that way. If you want those, you have to depend on in-store music.

I started thinking about this one night at dinner—the pub in my Northern New Jersey suburb had one of the satellite Oldies channels on and in close proximity, I heard “Beg Borrow and Steal” by the Ohio Express, “Jam Up & Jelly Tight” by Tommy Roe, and “Heartbeat, It’s A Lovebeat” by the DeFranco Family. And if at least two of those are songs that you don't know, then you get my point.

I related this to a buddy in an e-mail tonight. He responded by telling me about the oldies diner outside Detroit and their collection of ‘50s and ‘60s obscurities. And that reminded me about the classic soul supermarket.

When I moved to town two years ago, there was a chain supermarket in the next town over that surprised me by regularly playing Classic Soul from the ‘60s and ‘70s--sometimes hits, sometimes pretty deep, and even stuff that I didn't know on occasion. After 20 years in the music business, I knew it was no longer a reasonable thing to expect from a radio station. But it was a great thing to encounter in a grocery store.

It was the only grocery store I've ever been to where people regularly got in discussions about the music. I remember walking up the dairy aisle singing along under my breath with Maybe Tomorrow" by the Jackson Five and three women rounding the corner into my aisle belting it, too. And having the guy in the next aisle turn to the stranger behind him when "That's How Heartaches Are Made" by Baby Washington was playing and announce, "I haven't heard that song since high-school."

That was by no means the full depth of it. Suffice it to say that no matter how much of a record collector you think you are, there’s always somebody out there with a thousand other songs that they know and revere just as much as your personal faves. And if it wasn’t a record collector, that programmer was pulling out some pretty odd stuff by accident.

The music also brightened up what was otherwise a somewhat dreary supermarket. It was a big store and stayed open an hour later than anybody else, but they also didn’t have a lot my staples. Didn’t matter. For my first year in town, I definitely went out of my way to shop there, not just because of the songs (some of which were on my iPod), but because I liked seeing the effect they had on other customers.

I never asked who programmed the music. Years in used record stores taught me that just because somebody liked the same oldies you did, they weren’t necessarily somebody you wanted to hang with. I never knew if the cashiers enjoyed the music as much as I did--some of them seemed far too young to be interested in Baby Washington. But I wish I had asked some of them about the music, because...

The inevitable happened. I came in one night and they were playing Dan Fogelberg. For the next few visits, the music went back and forth--R&B oldies, soft AC, regular Oldies. I told myself that maybe it was just a different manager on certain nights. Then the R&B Oldies were gone altogether. And, no, I haven't been back nearly as much in the last year.

The idea of “listening like a listener” has become a cliché. But losing the classic soul supermarket has given me a pretty good idea of what it must be like for the listeners in market after market who are losing their Oldies stations on a regular basis these days, particularly now that the stations that replaced heritage Oldies outlets are getting out, too.

These aren’t listeners who have any expectation of hearing obscurities—they were getting the same excitement from “Unchained Melody” and “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy” for the zillionth time. I couldn’t muster much of a sense of personal loss for those stations. And chances are that programmers—used to regular format churn—don’t allow themselves to get too attached to anybody else’s radio station, either. But this certainly brought it home for me.

My colleague Tom Webster has already written about the listener outpouring that ends up on this site from regular listeners any time we write about a major format change. As any GM of a beloved former station will tell you, those listeners may have not gotten diaries when it counted. But they still had the connection with the radio that we’re not doing as well at fostering in new listeners.