Tuesday, January 7, 2014

1.7.14 Bee-otch of the Day: northern Michigan radio (especially WKLT)


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Name: northern Michigan radio
Age: various
Occupation: the industry of sound up north
Last Seen: Traverse City, MI
Bee-otched For: still sucking when it comes to rock

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For a year like 2014, KLT still sounds like 1978.

It's a shame that this heap of horseshit was my childhood rock station. They seemed to only care about those born before 1970 throughout its entire history. But that's what you get for having owners from Buttfuck, ND and a clueless PD in Terri Ray who never even had a rock music background. As a matter of fact, on Ray's first day at KLT, she played an entire side of a Pink Floyd album because she didn't know when a song started or ended.

True, KLT is still the top rock station up north, but from many accounts, I've heard that their ratings have tumbled since Finster was fired from the station over "budget cuts" and that Omelette's morning show is like watching paint dry. Not to mention that the nice people at parent Northern Broadcast seem to hire and fire people at a massive rate, unless your name's either Finster or Terri Ray.

This weekend, Ray will celebrate 30 years at The Rock Station with a party for her at a bar in Grawn, a suburb of Traverse City. I find it amazing that she's still there, but so many in KLT's past got the axe of NBI's penny-pinching.

In the past 10 years, KLT's sound has gotten more and more stale. In one hour, the only "current" I saw on their playlist is a remake of "Born on the Bayou" by John Fogerty and the overrated Kid Rock. The rest is butt rock from Billy Squier, Eagles, Def Leppard, Journey, Steve Miller Band, Ted Negent and Rod Stewart. It's a shame that there's a TON of rock that came out past 1990, and the only tracks I see in two hours' time are Green Day ("American Idiot"), Johnny Lang ("Lie to Me"), Santana ("Into the Night" with Nickelback's Chad Kroeger), MORE Kid Rock ("Only God Knows Why"), EVEN MORE Kid Rock with Sammy Hagar ("Knockdown Dragout") and the Black Crowes ("Hard to Handle").

And they're honoring the woman who has made this flaming pile of horseshit with a party.

I know, I've been hard on Ms. Ray since this site started 15 years ago. I know that she's a real nice person in real life, but goddamn she's a crappy programmer. I know, northern Michigan is retirement country and the Baby Boomers would like to have their own rock station. Plus, there's Rock 105....

....Which leads to the fact that they had their annual "Metallica-Thon" Saturday night, and according to their sponsor list, a lot of the supporters were from.... TRAVERSE CITY! Yet, 105.1's signal is horrible in the Cherry Capital, plus the fact that simulcaster 95.5 flipped to sleepy AC last year, angering many active rock fans in the Grand Traverse Region. Gee, Del Reynolds! So, how is Easy 95-5 doing?

But what makes me laugh a little is the fact that KLT recently made Tom Devitt the co-host of their stupid "Afternoon Trainwreck" show. Yes, THAT Tom Devitt. He was the former morning host at the long-defunct The Zone (now EZ 95-5) in the late 90's. However, the writing was on the wall, so he ended up at a crappy Hot AC station in CARO of all places, WIDL 92.1 The Coyote (what a lovely name for a station aimed towards soccer moms) where he bombed the Michigan Radio and TV Buzzboard with spam posts promoting his shitty radio show "Rabid Radio" as "radiostudtd". Of course, he was canned from that station but somehow ended back up in northern Michigan first at Big Country 102.9 and then WMBN 1340 doing a sports show before ending up at NBI doing another sports show at ESPN 106.7/105.5 and now the Afternoon Trainwreck at KLT where he'll probably end up chopped again due to NBI's everlasting budget cuts.

Oh, and he became a darling to me when he told me that the jock known as "Ted Cramer" was fired from The Bear because of his ill-fated "opimizing" of their playlist in the mid-2000's (their playlist was pretty much Ted Nugent into A Flock of Seagulls into The Who into Depeche Mode) that caused listeners to leave in droves. Turns out that Cramer - now at some hick station in rural Indiana - posts on the Buzzboard as "Zzand", which caused a lot of people to hate my guts on there, leading to my resignation from the board. Don't you love trolls, and how they can move up in life?

You see, if you're a rock fan in northern Michigan, yeah, you have four choices: three quasi-to-full-blown classic rockers and a station whose signal sucks in Traverse City. But there's also Slacker, Pandora, Sirius or your MP3 player. As long as northern Michigan radio's Baby Boomer-friendly owners run the show, that's what'cha gonna get: oldies, classic rock, country amd AC. Are you a rock fan 18-34? Tough shit. There's Rock 105, which has a poor signal into Traverse City and ignores a ton of new rock that's out there (two notible tracks they've passed on, "Bones" by Young Guns and "Lift Me Up" by Five Finger Death Punch were two of the top rock tracks of 2013).

Video didn't kill the radio star, it's the asshole owners and the listeners who don't take shit from them.

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