Whither original radio?

I stumbled on a new radio station while driving to work the other day – WHUS, Storrs, which I later learned is the college station of the University of Connecticut. They were playing John Lee Hooker, Hendrix (rare tracks) and other bluesy stuff. The DJ was about to introduce a guest to talk about “sense of place” or something when static interfered with the signal somewhere in downtown Norwich.
It’s so rare to find something interesting and unexpected on the radio these days. The dial is dominated by Clear Channel, I [Heart] Radio, and other conglomerates that play pre-programmed packages of the same classic rock hits, over and over and over. How many times can you listen to the Stones’ “Beast of Burden”? Or Steve Miller, Fleetwood Mac, AC/DC? The FCC has really dropped the ball on this one, allowing radio stations all over the country to become homogenized mouthpieces that bring in big profits for their owners but don’t necessarily serve unique community interests, or provide an outlet for artists who aren’t on their “playlists.”
I remember the excitement of discovering a new radio station back in the ’70s. If I placed our small Emerson portable radio on my mother’s washing machine and angled the antenna just right, I could bring in WSUB, Groton. They played bands I had never heard of, like Starry-Eyed and Laughing, and early Ted Nugent, when Derek St. Holmes was singing instead of Ted screaming about pussy. Then I began listening to WAAF, Worcester, which would come in on our front porch. This was back when AAF played album rock, before all that heavy metal/“Air Force” crap started in the 1980s. Back then, they were as likely to play a deep Steely Dan track as they were Zeppelin. And of course there was WBRU, Providence, with Steve Stockman and other DJs debuting early New Wave and intelligent album rock.
These stations were not slaves to formula, but relied instead on their disc jockey’s good taste. But today, the possibility to be surprised by the radio seems to have disappeared, or been narrowly confined to the low end of the FM dial, where college stations and National Public Radio live. Even NPR is often predictable, even boring, with its formula of foreign affairs reporting, notable books, and sponsored health broadcasts (as my friend Tara, a psychiatric nurse, pointed out). The sense that something unscripted might happen has largely been lost.
The Wolf, 102.3, recently replaced its morning team with a syndicated show out of California, a sort of smoothed-over Imus in the Morning, with the perennial two-men, one-woman formula (the woman is always there as “spice” or, if you will, “straight man” to the hi-jinks of the men). Somebody somewhere has decided that men listen to the radio and women don’t, just as someone at the Mohegan Sun station figured it’s cheaper and more efficient to use a syndicated service instead of a local drive-time team.
I hope I can catch this UConn station again, if only to be surprised. That evening, on the way home, the format had changed to bluegrass, with a man singing about how he’d “like to throw my cell phone out the window and live like granddaddy did.” Now that beats another round of Foreigner any day.