Subtitles by explosiveskull
KEN ECKHART: A part of the daily routine of many Long Islanders has come to an end.
Those who regularly tuned in to 92.7 on their radio dials
to listen to the station WLIR
will no longer find that station broadcasting.
Loraine Foley explains why.
LORAINE FOLEY: As the clock neared 6:00 last night,
the WLIR DJs were saying their last farewells to their listeners.
It was the Garden City radio station's last day on the air
after losing a five-year battle to keep their 92.7 frequency.
Definitely accept no imitations.
Remember, there is only one WLIR, the original new music station.
It's a groovy thing. We are off the air,
as we know it.
♪ And now, the end is near
♪ And so I face
♪ The final curtain
♪ Unintelligible
♪ I'm not a queer
♪ I'll state my case, of which I'm certain
♪ I've lived a life that's full
♪ I've traveled each and every highway
♪ And more, much more than this
♪ I did it my way ♪
BONO: There wasn't that many, wasn't that many people playing, playing our records
on the radio, then just college stations. Things like WLIR and stuff.
(CROWD CHEERING)
They introduced bands that nobody in the country was playing, not on radio,
not on television, nowhere.
I don't think MTV would've been possible in the way that it was
if LIR hadn't preexisted it,
because what they did, especially in the New York area,
was they identified an audience for MTV.
And I know that for a fact. And, you know,
it's just one of those things where, you know,
what came first, the chicken or the egg.
In this case, it's clear, you know. LIR came first and they played music
that nobody would play.
They were finding the records. They were finding the bands and taking chances
and putting those bands on the air.
If I had found LIR when I was 13,
I would've felt
that I had found Disneyland,
but it was a radio station.
(THE CURE IN BETWEEN DAYS PLAYING)
This is studio C.
This is studio B.
BEN MANILLA: Sharon's a virgin.
It's her first time on the airline.
LARRY DUNN: This is highly classified information.
BEN MANILLA: This is where it all happens.
(THE CURE IN BETWEEN DAYS PLAYING)
BEN MANILLA: I know, we can have fun. We can have fun without him.
♪ Yesterday I got so old
♪ I felt like I could die
♪ Yesterday I got so old
♪ It made me want to cry ♪
If you were to ask me which bands LIR broke in this country,
that is a very long list.
SEYMOUR STEIN: Echo and the Bunnymen.
DONNA DONNA: The Clash. SEYMOUR STEIN: The Pretenders.
And The Replacements.
BEN MANILLA: Talking Heads, Blondie.
The Smiths. We were the first to play Madonna.
Spandau Ballet and Go West.
U2, I mean, the station had impeccable taste.
DENIS MCNAMARA: We broke Adam Ant. There's no question about it.
RAY WHITE: Psychedelic Furs. Alphaville.
MILES COPELAND: The Alarm. Wang Chung and ABC.
Nobody else was playing these bands.
BOB WAUGH: Human League.
MAX LEINWAND: We played Prince before anybody else.
Wall of Voodoo with, you know, (SINGS) ♪ I'm on the Mexican Radio ♪
XTC and Gang of Four. DONNA DONNA: REM.
SEYMOUR STEIN: Depeche Mode.
DENIS MCNAMARA: Joan Jett and the Ramones, they were like our house bands.
First Erasure then Assembly, Yaz.
RICK SHOOR: Squeeze. DENIS MCNAMARA: Big Audio Dynamite.
JOEL PERESMAN: Paul Young, Howard Jones.
DENIS MCNAMARA: First station to play Roxanne by The Police.
Pet Shop Boys, West End Girls.
I Want Candy. ANDY GELLER: 99 Luftballons.
Tin Tin, Kiss Me. ANDY GELLER: Rock Lobster.
DENIS MCNAMARA: Rock the Kasbah.
Electric Avenue.
(SINGS) ♪ We're gonna rock down to
Video Killed the Radio Star. Don't Change.
DENIS MCNAMARA: There is a Light that Never Goes Out.
ANDY GELLER: Blue Monday. DENIS MCNAMARA: Sunday Bloody Sunday.
ANDY GELLER: Burning Down the House.
DENIS MCNAMARA: Talk Talk by Talk Talk. ED STEINBERG: Girls on Film.
DENIS MCNAMARA: Pride In the Name of Love.
(ALL SAYING SONG TITLES)
Hi, this is Dave Garvin.
MALE VOICE: Depeche Mode.
Chris and Neil of the Pet Shop Boys.
BILLY IDOL: Billy Idol. MIKE SCORE: Flock of Seagulls.
JOAN JETT: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. ELVIS COSTELLO: Elvis Costello.
- FRED SCHNEIDER: Hey, this is Fred of B-52's. - MALE VOICE: Fred!
ROBERT SMITH: This is Robert from The Cure and you're listening to 92.7 LIR.
ROSANNE PALOMBA: One day you were listening to LIR
and then the next day you went to turn it on and it was gone.
(SIMPLE MINDS NEW GOLD DREAM PLAYING)
DENIS MCNAMARA: Once you get over the bridges and the tunnels and you come to Long Island,
up until just recently, this was all farmland. This is where vegetables
and fruits were grown for WWI and WWII. After WWII, people started to migrate
from the city out to the suburbs.
LIR was a very prestigious FM, the first stereo FM on Long Island.
The "LIR" actually stood for Long Island Radio,
and the station, it was in Hempstead, in a very low-income area.
BEN MANILLA: Now this is Thomas Alva Edison's original copy machine here.
This is the ladies' room. Let's see if we can get lucky.
JOHN DEBELLA: What made LIR great was we didn't have anything.
We had nothing. We had old turntables...
Now I'm picking up the tone arm, putting it on the LP...
We had a console that had knobs.
(VOLUME TURNED UP)
We had old cart machines and tape recorders,
all that stuff, and it forced you to be more creative
because all of this equipment was working against you.
We were truly underground. You had to, like, really tune the radio station
just to get the darn thing.
We had this tiny clock radio in our kitchen. And I'm fiddling around
with the sta... With the, with the radio, you know, and you hear all static
and (IMITATES STATIC SOUND)
And suddenly, real static-y, I could hear Bananarama singing,
♪ Really saying something ♪
I was like... And I'm fiddling around,
fiddling around until I got to hear a clear signal,
and I looked. It was 92.7.
♪ Bop bop shooby doo wop
It's always a joke to us like, especially East Villagers.
We had to do all these crazy things to just get the station in, to tune it in.
(THE PRETENDERS BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG PLAYING)
You're running it up your like, TV antennae,
got it covered in aluminum foil.
Sometimes you had to tilt your radio
to a certain angle to get it.
It depended on the day, the night,
the clouds, the moon, location.
♪ I found a picture of you ♪
It was kind of like a sport. How and where can you hear LIR?
My friends at Montclair State University, they would vie
for the eastern dorms because in those eastern dorms, that's where you had
the LIR reception. So you were actually more popular of a college student
if you got one of those eastern dorms.
We spent many hours listening to LIR, thanks to that antenna.
I grew up in New Jersey, so I couldn't always get the signal.
There'd be times in the city I would actually get the signal. There'd be times
on the Jersey Shore where I would actually get the signal,
but the signal kind of would always be coming in and out.
DENIS MCNAMARA: Mick told me he could only get it in the shower and he had a,
a radio you could listen to in the shower. And I'm thinking
there's Mick jumping around the shower trying to pick up the radio station.
DENIS MCNAMARA: It was a small signal. It was a Class A, 3,000 watt signal.
But in the biggest media market in the world,
stations like WAPP The Apple, WPLJ
and WNEW.FM, they would've had the equivalent of 50,000 watt signal
and LIR wouldn't have had that advantage.
And we faded back in again.
Hi. This is Part 2 of the tour of WLIR.
I'm Ben Manilla... And you're not.
That's not a new joke, is it?
BOB SHUSTER: No.
BEN MANILLA: Come this way.
BEN MANILLA: Have you met Larry "The Duck" Dunn?
He's our latest disc jockey here on WLIR.
LARRY THE DUCK: Hello. Is Dianne Ikerd of East Meadow there?
DIANNE: Yes. LARRY THE DUCK: Hi.
This is Larry the Duck from LIR 92.7.
DIANNE: Oh, my god! Larry!
DONNA DONNA: And this Tuesday night, it's the Donna Donna Spotlight Dance Dance
at the loop from the station that dares, LIR 92.7, good morning.
MALIBU SUE: At 92.7 WLIR.FM, it's the station that dares to be different. I'm Malibu Sue.
Long Tall Andy here. Delphine Blue.
BOB MARRONE: ...and I'm Bob Marrone.
BEN MANILLA: I'm Ben Manilla. BOB WAUGH: ...and I'm Bob Waugh.
NANCY ABRAMSON: You're with Nancy... DJ BIRD: I'm DJ Bird...
BARRY RAVIOLI: I'm Barry Ravioli with you...
MAX LEINWAND: My name is Max...
STEVE JONES: Steve Jones with you...
I'm Denis McNamara. Billy Idol is telling us some truths
here at WLIR 92.7.
How's it going, Bill?
BILLY IDOL: It's goin' all right.
DENIS MCNAMARA: As you got involved in music, who were the,
the people you respected the most? Who were the, heroes, the people whose music...
Denis McNamara at LIR had a real vision. You know,
that was the thing that changed radio. It was a vision.
JAY JAY FRENCH: One thing about Denis McNamara, what his voice meant,
it was the Walter Cronkite of rock, you know. Like, you had to hear this guy,
if he said you're okay, you're okay.
JOAN JETT: Denis, you're a music guy, you know, and you can tell.
And I think it's really something
special to say that you know,
so many of these songs, people heard
because it came through your station.
Without guys like Denis McNamara, that whole New Wave thing
with The Police, and The Go-Go's and R.E.M. and XTC, that, that wouldn't have happened.
I first came to WLIR in late '74,
I was 22 years old.
I started out as a part-timer, as you did back then on the Overnight,
and that would run generally from 1am to 6am.
I can remember getting in the car and going,
"Oh, my God, I'm gonna be on the radio," even though I'd been on the radio
in NYU and all that, I was gonna be on a real radio.
I was hired by Elton Spitzer.
He had become the owner of the station
a year or two previous, '72, '73.
I got there in '74 and really,
I owe Elton everything, for having the faith in me.
INTERVIEWER: How long has LIR been on the air?
19, 1959, it came on.
It was the first stereo FM station from Long Island in history,
and it was really, you know, an MOR station,
I think they called them at the time,
"middle of the road." So it played a combination of show tunes
and light, classical music.
In the early '70s, they changed format
and became a progressive rock station, the first one in Long Island.
And they played you know the Beatles, the Stones,
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,
Joni Mitchell...
It was a pretty, I won't say traditional rock station,
but it was a rock station. We called ourselves
"Long Island's original rock station."
That was our signature tagline at the time.
♪ If I had my way...
We used to make fun of it, call it Atlanta Northeast because the station
really championed a lot of Southern rock, whether it was Charlie Daniels
or The Allman Brothers, or Marshall Tucker Band...
You'd find stations in America that would play
nothing but Stairway to Heaven all day.
You couldn't skip a channel without hearing Stairway to Heaven again.
And you know, it's not that I have anything against the song, but it was,
it was literally on every channel all the time.
And Bruce Springsteen sort of had taken over
almost the entire country's airwaves.
And there wasn't really anything much new being played.
I started hearing about this music coming out of England
and I had to get my hands on it.
I had to hear what it sounded like
and also figuring which ones we could play,
but it wasn't easy to get a hold of the records,
and also, it wasn't easy to fit it in
with what else we were playing at that time and make it stand out.
I told Denis McNamara we gotta change the format.
I can't stand listening to, to Bruce Springsteen,
Charlie Daniels, The Beatles, The Monkeys...
These 100,000 watt radio stations were taking away
all the advertising dollars from, from little LIR.
We had to do something, no question. I mean, we were screwed.
♪ Hey! Ah... Eighties, I'm living in the Eighties ♪
DEBELLA: There are a lot of radio stations in New York, right?
INTERVIEWER: You're talking like, Clone Zone...
DEBELLA: Clone Zone, all those radio stations up top the dial...
- INTERVIEWER: Uh-huh. - DEBELLA: ...who are all playing the same five records.
I don't know, I haven't listened lately. DEBELLA: I know.
A record like this one here, like REO Speedwagon, Roll with the Changes.
INTERVIEWER: Roll with... Yeah.
You wanna see what I think of REO Speedwagon, Roll with the Changes?
INTERVIEWER: Yes!
DEBELLA: This is WLIR, the new music station.
(JINGLE PLAYING) All aboard!
Broadcasting from the heart of Long Island, starting now!
This is the new 92.7 LIR.
♪ On the floors of Tokyo
♪ Or down in London town to go go
♪ With the record selection
♪ And the mirror's reflection, I'm a-dancing with myself
♪ When there's no one else in sight
♪ In the crowded lonely night
♪ Well, I wait so long For my love vibration
♪ And I'm dancing with myself
When they changed format in the middle of 1982,
it was a huge change.
It was an earthquake seismic activity.
♪ Oh, dancing with myself, oh, oh.
♪ If I looked all over the world ♪
The sort of mainstream American music was very much caught up in
what was now the end of a decade, the '70s, and kind of it had turned
into almost Muzak to us.
It was, it was all very lightweight rock,
you know, R-O-K as well, it wasn't rock and roll. It wasn't sexy.
It wasn't, it wasn't breaking new bounds. It wasn't saying anything dangerous.
It wasn't... It had no new fashion sense, it was all caught up,
and very much... This is the early days of the '70s and you were watching
that burn out really, and it was boring us to death. And there was someone
like WLIR willing to sort of put uson their radio playlist,
and open our music
up to a load of young kids who would then come to New York and say to the DJs,
I wanna hear Dancing With Myself by Billy Idol,
or I wanna hear Homo Superior
from Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks. I wanna hear this new music.
I wanna hear Joy Division. I wanna hear Human League.
It was all very much being fueled in the sort of English dance clubs
and there it's being reflected in American dance clubs on radio playlists.
At the few radio stations in America,
that were playing post-punk music like WLIR.
I think it fueled the beginning of the '80s and set the pace.
The two biggest bands in the world were The Beatles and The Stones,
and they were sort of, the hallmark of any radio station,
and we took that idea and changed it to The Clash and The Police.
ERIC BLOOM: It was sort of a stab in the heart for our kind of music,
because we had a great relationship with LIR and it just went out the window.
They played our kind of music, and then they didn't.
MICKEY MARCHELLO: It was like a betrayal.
"Did you hear what LIR did? They went over to all that shit music."
You know? That's the way our fans felt about it, you know.
But you had the younger generation, the younger kids they thought that was it.
They didn't wanna listen to their, their parent's music or their older brother's music.
They wanted something for themselves.
♪ Two dozen other dirty lovers Must be a sucker for it ♪
The difference between radio in England and America was quite a difference.
We grew up as kids through the '60s and the '70s
with one radio station, the BBC.
We had Radio 1 for young people, Radio 2 for older people,
Radio 3 for even older people and Radio 4 for even older people.
So there was one radio station you pretty much cared about.
There was the sense that the BBC, which was really an institution in Britain
was pretty much governed by a half-dozen sort of middle-aged
you know, programmers and producers.
In a way, it was a sort of government-backed monopoly.
And Radio 1 on the BBC and Top of the Pops,
which was the weekly TV show, basically ruled the charts.
I mean, you couldn't have a hit without getting on Top of the Pops.
Getting radio airplay, of course, in a UK context was really very difficult
because if you were in the Top 30, you could get on,
but you know, back then most people will be
three or four records before you could maybe get a Top 30 success.
We didn't have money to buy airplay, which is what the majors did.
We, we had to rely on enthusiasm and good ideas and,
and, hoping that someone would actually like our record and want to actually play it.
I can remember walking around London literally
with these plastic bags
eating into my hands, full of records, because I wouldn't say no.
Sunday nights at 10:00, I would host Off The Boat which was an import show.
And the little secret in that was there was a record store in London
that we did same day shipping from Heathrow to JFK.
We'd meet the plane on Thursday afternoon...
Well, we would go to the airport to actually meet the plane bringing
in the imports, and we'd also use Dutch East Importers.
SETH RUDMAN: Quite often, I was given test pressings of upcoming releases
from a lot of the major labels, which we forwarded as soon as we could over to LIR.
And a few times we got in trouble because of it.
The Top 40 stations weren't gonna touch that stuff
until it was released domestically, and that could take months.
Nowadays, that, that concept of imports it's, it's not as,
it's not as important anymore, because on the internet you find anything. But back then,
you know, you were literally waiting by the shores for the records to come in.
And we were able to play that first.
The respect LIR had in England was so amazing. Many of the record executives,
especially if I went to visit there, would play me the new records, they'd pull out
test acetates of, of songs and they'd give them to me.
And we would get it and we would play it.
VINCE CLARKE: The first highlight was ever playing live.
The second one was making a single for Mute Records.
The third one was hearing your record on the radio.
You know, it was un-fucking-believable.
It was like, you heard it and you go,
you know, you want your mum to be there because you haven't taped it.
You haven't recorded it. So you have to just tell her,
Yeah. We really did get played, you know. There's an American station,
I mean, we live here 3,000 miles away.
There's an American radio station playing our friggin' record.
We knew we'd had to have been getting some airplay before we got here.
So we were coming right into these markets. We weren't too aware
of what was going on. We were just greenbacks.
We were super naive. You know, we were just South London kids
making a, a go of things. And what happened was
we got an underground dance hit here.
So we were brought over to really do that in the clubs.
And at that point we realized also that, that there were these radio stations that bore
no resemblance to the kind of formal, national programming that we had in,
in the UK.
1981, we landed in New York for the first time, and I can honestly say
I've never been so excited.
When we saw the skyline, it was all of our dreams coming true.
We, grown up loving the whole New York scene.
That whole thing was so exciting to us.
And when the limo turned off and it said Manhattan this way, Long Island that way,
our hearts sunk just for a little minute as the skyline disappeared in,
into the distance.
But then we got to the Holiday Inn in Long Island
and there was all kinds of stuff there we'd never seen. There was a vending machine
that had the weirdest things you could buy in there,
so we spent all our few dollars
just pressing the machine and getting ridiculous things out of it.
We were in New York just going, wow, let's get some pizza. Let's do this...
Everything that you could do that was American.
First thing we did, I think me and my brother was walked down 42nd Street
just to see how crazy it was.
And then we put on HBO, because there was TV all night here and there wasn't,
I think, in England at the time, TV stopped at like, 11 at night.
LOL TOLHURST: We were 21, and our only experience of America in any shape or form
was from Marvel Comics. So the first thing we did when we got to New York
was go into like, a little grocery store and buy a Hostess Twinkies bar,
because that's what they advertised on the back of Marvel Comics.
We'd never seen them and we took one bite
and we realized why we didn't really want
to eat those anymore.
LIR was really my first contact with the American record scene.
♪ I've been waiting for so long ♪
And there was a moment I clearly remember it.
Stuff had just started to take off for me in the UK,
I'd New Song, went to number three.
We got this request to do, you know, a call from this station on Long Island.
Then I spoke to Denis, you know, and he was so enthusiastic about New Song
and stuff that was just about to come out.
And the amazing thing about LIR was that
everyone was in there and making this radio. And it, it was incredible
and you felt so at home when you walked in.
I just thought, this is the way radio should be.
You know, Denis McNamara and Malibu Sue
and Larry the Duck, you know, they became like friends.
It was the launch pad for me for the whole of America.
Howard Jones was an incredibly unique artist.
I mean, how many single artists that would be on stage,
with just him and then he had a mime with him, Jed.
I mean, that was just, when you, if you decide
to call somebody up and people, "Well, can you tell me about the act?"
Well, it's about, they have three semis worth of equipment.
It's just Howard on stage with some keyboards and he has a mime.
You could almost hear people, like hanging up on you.
♪ Maha-hiya Give it to me one time now
It was changing and it was changing fast.
Record labels always wanted us to play
what they told us to play, when they told us to play it.
They had a very specific marketing plan.
You couldn't break something too soon because a tour was happening,
on this day and you had to follow that.
Well, most radio stations had to follow that, but we didn't.
♪ Relax, don't do it When you wanna go to it
♪ Relax, don't do it When you wanna come
♪ Relax, don't do it When you want to suck it, chew it
♪ Relax, don't do it When you wanna come
Frankie Goes to Hollywood was the perfect example.
The scene was exploding in the UK and Island Records was gonna bring
that domestically to the United States, and they had a very specific plan.
"In four months, they're gonna do this and six months later,
"the band is gonna come play and that's how we want the radio stations to fall in line."
Well, we didn't do that. We got the import when it was breaking in England.
It had to be about a year, or half a year to a year before the,
the label's plan in the, in the United States. Pissed them off.
But we were buying the records. They couldn't stop us from playing it.
♪ But shoot it in the right direction... ♪
There are politics behind the scenes in this game that exist
between the record industry and radio.
The running joke, because Epic stood for
"European Product Ignored Completely". (LAUGHS)
MIDGE URE: LIR went against the flow of what everyone else was doing,
to take a huge chance like that on this alien music
that was coming in, pre-MTV.
Denis was very careful about the songs that got in there.
They had to be really, really strong, and he had good taste
and he had a good ear and he surrounded himself with people that had good taste.
What attracted me to the way Denis operated is he wanted to know
what I thought, so we'd jump in a car and we'd drive around in the car,
popping in cassettes and we'd hear 25 songs to find that one gem.
RAY WHITE: Some of the new things that were coming out,
that were way ahead of their times, that were just starting
to be released in England or Ireland or somewhere.
And I got this album, Boy, with this great picture of this kid on it and I went,
okay, and he goes, this is a garage band,
a band that's been together since high school from Dublin.
♪ I will follow!
RAY WHITE: Loved it. I Will Follow to this day is one of my very, very favorite songs.
You could just sit and listen to this, this band that just was different.
They were fresh, the energy, the whole production, everything.
Did 10 years with U2, which was a great thrill,
and I remember very distinctly hearing, I Will Follow on LIR.
First U2 song I ever heard,
and I went, "Wow! Who's that?"
Music stations in, in Manhattan,
the FM stations, were WPLJ
and WNEW,
and I remember that neither of those would play U2.
They were really quite conservative,
and so it was really vital
for us that WLIR was around.
They were about the most traditionally set-up band
that you could possibly imagine, you know.
Bass, guitar, drums and an arrogant singer.
In the best possible way, a showman.
RAY WHITE: To see U2 playing on a foot-and-a-half high stage was unbelievable, you know,
and they were loud, they were good and they were just... Wow, they were,
they were just... You just knew they were great.
And this was a band that everyone should've loved, but it took albums,
I mean, it took until The Joshua Tree before people really came around.
Not the LIR listeners.
All I remember was Bob Waugh really championing U2,
and personally, I remember saying, nah, I don't really hear it.
I mean, they sound kinda weird, you know. It's not, it's not this or that.
It's, it wasn't really... We all know what happened at the end.
DENIS MCNAMARA: We believed in U2 right away. By the time they came into, you know,
Pride (In the Name of Love) and After the War album,
they had become so much bigger than we had anticipated.
And they weren't just playing clubs like the Beacon Theater,
they were headlining.
One of our bands was headlining the Nassau Coliseum, and they sold it out in a second.
Bono, you know, went on stage and actually thanked WLIR.
It was awesome, because all these kids were cheering and I, I have to admit,
I had tears coming down my cheeks because there's this guy who, you know,
since he, he hangs out with presidents, popes, he goes to Africa to cure AIDS, I mean,
he could do anything he wants, and what is he doing?
He's giving credit to us for helping them.
BONO: In 1981, we played at a small club here,
it's called the Malibu.
(CROWD CHEERING)
There was a few hundred people there.
I hope those few hundred people are here tonight.
There wasn't that many people playing our records on the radio then,
just college stations, and things like WLIR and stuff...
(CROWD CHEERING LOUDLY)
The next day, I had the soundboard recording and put it
on the air every hour, (LAUGHS) of Bono saying, "...like WLIR..."
and you hear the entire coliseum explode.
And having a small, tiny piece
of the beginning of U2's story
and to see where they got now, it's just so awesome. It's so humbling.
We learned quite early on how important radio was in America.
We didn't really have a hit record in Europe
until 1985,
with The Unforgettable Fire,
so any radio presence we had in New York
was coming from WLIR.
U2 was absolutely launched out of LIR in New York.
Everyone knows this.
♪ Once I had a love and it was a gas
♪ Soon turned out Had a heart of glass
One of the things about the New York marketplace
that was important was that it really was at that point
the center of the sort of the sort of punk rock, new wave movement.
DEBBIE HARRY: It was very important for us, you know, mentally and inspiration-wise,
to know that there were people, you know, legitimate people, with a view to the,
to the public, and, and appreciation of music.
And to be brave enough
to support unknown idiots, and,
you know, just to go with it.
There was a time when the playlists didn't really have a lot of girls
or girl musicians, even. I mean...
While the Beatles knocked it out, you know. I mean, we had the Supremes
and all those bands prior, prior to the...
Well, there was R&B, that was... Yeah.
...prior to that, and then it, then it turned,
turned into the boys' club for a while.
For, you know, 15, 20 years, whatever it was.
DENIS MCNAMARA: There was almost a bias against female vocals, you know,
Janis Joplin had been there maybe, or Grace Slick, and then we were
perhaps different because we were championing you and Joanie, but it was people like you
that kind of brought that sound and that ability to come
to female vocals in radio
and rock radio and in radio stations that might not have played other artists.
♪ Adorable illusion and I cannot hide I'm the one you're using ♪
KATRINA LESKANICH: You didn't have any problem looking for role models
if you're a woman like me looking to other women as role models
because there were only a couple, and for me it was Deborah Harry
and Chrissie Hynde. They were tough. They were cool. They were still sexy.
There was a deception during the day
that women can't rock.
Wrong! That is exactly a deception.
Madonna brought, not only a whole new genre
of pop dance music,
but you talk about Joan Jett...
That woman is a guitar goddess, and local.
♪ Do you wanna touch? Yeah! Do you wanna touch? Yeah!
♪ Do you wanna touch me there? Where?
JOAN JETT: Whether it was us introducing you to people that you met, musicians
that add to that kind of music that sort of changed the direction of LIR,
I think it's, first it's, it's awesome that you would listen and that you would
do that and be the person to bring the music
to people first.
But I'm not surprised, because you always had a great ear.
DONNA DONNA: And another New York person is live on the air right now.
Please say good morning, folks, to Joan Jett.
JOAN JETT: Hi, Donna. DONNA DONNA: How are you, Joan?
JOAN JETT: I'm okay. How're you doing?
DONNA DONNA: Good, thanks. Would you like to introduce this record?
JOAN JETT: Yeah, this is what started it all. It's called, I Love Rock 'n' Roll.
DONNA DONNA: On WLIR.
KENNY LAGUNA: So when we finished the I Love Rock 'N' Roll album,
we went right to the radio station and we took the actual master,
which is unheard of, you know, and started playing our new album.
Then about halfway through, and they said,
"Neil Bogart's on the phone."
one of the tycoons of our business and he said, "You take that off,
"that tape recorder right now, or your career is over."
INTERVIEWER: Nice. And we were sitting there in the radio station
with the actual master. It wasn't even like we had a copy.
It was the master we were playing.
So that was the debut of I Love Rock 'N' Roll.
♪ Singin' I love rock n' roll
♪ So put another dime In the jukebox, baby
♪ I love rock n' roll So come an' take your time an' dance with me
(SCREAMS)
It was, I guess ecstasy, I suppose.
It's what you dream about
when you're a kid, dreaming about hearing your record on the radio.
It's exactly that feeling. It's like, wow, I've made, I've accomplished something.
It was really a magical feeling.
We're going right on to the next number.
SEYMOUR STEIN: CBGB's kinda changed my life.
And seeing the Ramones
and signing them, and that lead, thanks to Johnny,
Johnny Ramone, I saw the Talking Heads,
who, who opened for them.
♪ I can't seem to face up to the facts...
We were very fortunate to be in New York at a time when a lot of people had
I think sort of the same idea. Bands like The Ramones
and Television and Patti Smith and Blondie,
but there weren't very many radio stations that would play the music.
One exception to that was WLIR.
♪ Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa far Better...
Everything that wasn't mainstream fell into the alternative category,
and it could be Jamaican reggae, it could be punk, it could be funk.
I will always believe Talking Heads broke up too early.
Talking Heads was just one of the greatest American bands, no question.
I mean, they were tonnage. Live, they were amazing.
The records, every record was creative and crazy and different.
CHRIS FRANTZ: We didn't really fit the punk mold so much,
so Seymour was able to say,
"Oh, but Talking Heads, they're not punk. They're New Wave."
I call it New Wave because what does punk have to do with,
with the Talking Heads, or with Television,
or Soft Cell, or any of these bands?
You know, it was a New Wave and I looked at it as a new wave for New York.
Who coined the phrase, "New Wave," that's a very complex subject, actually.
New wave means different things to different people. I think that...
I think it originally starts with French new wave cinema, and the idea that
we're getting something new, but it's this wave that's coming on us.
In some ways, it's synonymous with '80s music.
It really is a very complicated term
and nobody has really settled on what it means.
♪ Rock-rock, Rockaway Beach
Rock-rock, Rockaway Beach
♪ We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach ♪
KING ADKINS: A band like The Ramones is almost really New Wave, in some ways.
They get labeled "punk" quite a bit, but they're a very pop-oriented band.
They're playing songs that, that wouldn't be so different from a Beach Boys album,
and if you slowed down The Ramones,
you get something that sounds very much like The Cars.
I mean, was Blondie New Wave?
I guess so, especially on a fashion standpoint.
But when they went on stage, they rocked like hell.
I think there are several ways to separate New Wave.
One of those ways is to think about the difference between what's going on in America
and what's going on in Britain.
In Britain, they are dealing with post-punk,
because punk was such a major influence in the UK.
For the American new wave, it really gets filtered through the art movement,
and so these sort of "Art bands" are really where new wave takes off,
and I don't think you can underestimate New York,
but particularly the influence of Andy Warhol on all of this.
I mean, he is the central figure who has come up with this sort of post-modern idea
of what art should be and what art can be.
♪ Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo
♪ You're living in your own Private Idaho
♪ Underground like a wild potato
We were sort of part of the punk scene, the tail-end of the punk scene
before new wave was really happening. We just wrote our own kind of music,
I mean, we classify ourselves as new wave or punk or anything like that.
We were our own
Southern-fried, original music.
♪ You're living in your own Private Idaho
FRED SCHNEIDER: We were a dance band
and at the time no new wave band wanted to be called
a dance band, I guess,
but we just got people dancing and we attracted
all kinds of people from the school nerds, the gays.
Well, everybody actually, there'll be even frat boys.
We just did our own thing and you can't really say,
oh, that's an '80s song, or The B-52's are this or that,
and we just did what we considered great songs.
We never referred to the music as New Wave.
We never called ourselves a new wave station.
It was always, "The new music station," and why?
We didn't wanna pigeonhole ourselves.
My view on it was I didn't want it used or connected with the station
because I thought it was like the word "groovy." I thought that it wasn't something
that would, would work on a long-term basis, and I was determined
that LIR would be for a long as long as we could survive the thing,
and so I preferred "New music."
MALIBU SUE: I always used to laugh when the interns would talk about their key
to the building because it was a hanger.
There was like a big gap, glass doors and a big gap,
they just would, stuck the hanger through and I pulled the handle down to get in.
And our security in the building was a picture
of a German shepherd in the window,
but it was like, literally, like, this. Like, dog, like...
You know, "Beware of Attack Dog" I think it said on it.
Wow, the elevators are exactly the same.
MIKE GUIDOTTI: Not really, the buttons are different now. It has, it has, it has those,
those neon square bogus buttons.
We're going up to seven. But really, seven was six, right?
No, seven was seven. Seven was seven?
Seven was seven.
We were at the, the penthouse of our building,
which was a nice way to say,
"Tin shack on the roof."
MAX LEINWAND: The station was pretty much a corrugated metal addition to the roof.
It was a garbage can. It was terrible!
This was the way to LIR.
This was it. This was the front door.
Yup. (LAUGHS)
I think it was, I think it was marked by a bumper sticker, maybe.
DENIS MCNAMARA: Yes, it was, which always got stolen. (LAUGHS)
And then you can see the glory.
Oh, this is... Come here, we got... we gotta get this.
This is, this is unusually crappy
DENIS MCNAMARA: Every famous artist in the world who came to LIR
came up these stairs. I remember sitting here with a hangover,
talking to Malcolm McLaren on these stairs.
I never actually worked at WLIR and I never made a nickel there.
I just interned there for way too long. I think that almost everybody
you spoke to would tell you that the station was a shithole,
But there was something charming about it.
And to me, it seemed amazing because I was so into music
and you walked into this place and it was sort of cool. You know. You, you walk in,
you'd look in one door and there'd be like, two guys just listening to records,
and you go in another door, there'd be a guy like, editing tapes
and smoking a cigarette and so the place was, I, you know,
I just thought it was really cool.
The place was held together with duct tape. I mean, that's, the carpet was fraying.
We'd replace the duct tape. We wouldn't replace the carpet.
Where we sat, it was between a wall and a file cabinet.
And on the file cabinet, I think it was held together with LIR bumper stickers.
BEN MANILLA: Here, this is Larry Dunn's junk.
BOB WAUGH: Larry Dunn's junk!
It was very casual there.
It was like, you're gonna visit someone's home, really.
Beer and wine and other things popping around...
You'd sit down, have a chat, have a drink...
DENIS MCNAMARA: When we had a famous artist on here, what would happen is,
the fans would figure out how to get past the immense security in the lobby.
(LAUGHS)
And then, they would literally pile up here
in front of the door and wait
for the artist to leave so they could you know, take their picture
or shake their hand or whatever.
And also, we didn't always announce who was coming on the air,
so sometimes there'd be a burst of people would hear, you know.
Duran Duran on the air or whatever and then there'd be a burst of people
who'd come up here and stand outside.
The best things about doing a morning show was that you could be
the first person to the bank on Friday, because the, the checks,
you know, by the time...
You didn't wanna be the last person to the bank.
If you were the first person, your check would be good,
but by the 10th or 12th...
Oh, lunch time there was a caravan out of the parking lot!
LIR stood for "Low income radio,"
so we did it for the beer, actually.
MALIBU SUE: We had very imaginative promotions, for sure, you know,
we didn't have a lot of budget to work with, or zero budget to work with, actually,
so we had to be very creative and we did some really cool contests.
Yeah, and also...
And cool prizes, Julie Price.
Right.
"You've won a trip to Jamaica... Queens."
What are you gonna do with the money?
One of the airliners I worked with, Lee Cunningham,
she and I were sent out to pick out movie tickets. It was in the winter,
it was icy and snowy, and they sent me in the LIR van
that had no brakes.
There was a red light, tried to stop, and we slammed right into this car.
The guy was ecstatic that he was hit by the LIR van.
The roof was, in some ways just the sacred resting ground
to take the artist, because the inner plant of LIR, there were no meeting places.
But the roof was like, it was cool and then for a band coming from England
for the first time or whatever, it was a nice viewpoint and all that.
This never worked in the old days,
this fire exit emergency thing.
This door was never locked, Mike, right? I mean, this door was always open.
If I push this and the alarm goes off, well, we...
We'll calmly walk to the elevators, go down, and act like we were somewhere else.
(LAUGHS) And that's why he's a genius.
Some things don't change.
RONALD REAGAN SPOOF VOICE: Maybe I'll go to congress
and have them outlaw Ramones records.
NANCY REAGAN SPOOF VOICE: Meow-meow, Ron. I don't think
that's a good idea. That'll just make these kids who dare to be different
even more vile. I think you should try some reverse psychology and endorse
The Ramones. Urge every man, woman and child in America
to call WLIR airlines at 4850927
and vote for the Ramones for Screamer of the Week.
(VOICE SCREAMS)
♪ Brothers and sisters Pump up the volume ♪
Screamer of the Week, they would play, I believe it was five songs
And it was new songs that week.
Everybody called in to vote what was their favorite song.
I always liked the original screamer was (SCREAMS).
(SCREAMS) I couldn't even repeat it.
It's awesome.
I don't know of any other station that sort of picked out a song to make,
as their special song of the week. And so I know a lot of stations do it now,
but people weren't doing it then.
I told my staff, I said, you gotta have LIR tuned on 24/7 when you work here.
They had three or four in the running every week,
you had a certain period of time to vote.
Each of the jocks had to select a song out of a set of new songs each week,
and we fought over those sometimes, yeah.
Yeah. Did we have to rush to do that? Like, first one in...
You know, there, there came a time when I think Denis had to tell us
that we weren't allowed to sneak in or call in or pick after midnight or something,
because people, were you know, getting the jump on other jocks and there was a lot of battling
going on about it.
And all week long we'd promote it on the air. So every time you,
you played the record, you say, "And by the way, that's my pick for Screamer of the Week.
"Make sure you call and vote. You can vote early." But on Thursday was Screamer day.
DENIS MCNAMARA: This could be history. Depeche Mode could win the most Screamers in history
this evening, passing the Thompson Twins who they are tied with at this point in time.
However, in their way, is a gentleman named Lou Reed.
♪ You broke my heart And you made me cry
♪ You said that I couldn't dance But now I'm back...
As the voting progressed, it reached a crescendo at 10 p.m.
(IMITATES DRUM ROLL)
We'd tally the votes and anoint a new champion every week.
And then that song just went into the highest rotation you possibly could.
♪ ...Suzanne, you do anything once ♪
MAX LEINWAND: Record companies like Sire Records. I mean, they would choose
their next singles based on what the Screamers of the Week were.
LIR was selling records. Their Screamers, you couldn't compare the kind
of exposure that a band would get having a Screamer of the Week on LIR
to anything else that was going on in the area, promotion-wise.
You always wanted to get the Screamer of the Week you know,
and your local Capitol Records rep would always be saying,
"Well, we're hopeful that we might, but we don't know this time..."
Screamer of the Week in, on LIR was a big deal.
We had 11 Screamers of the Week.
We had 13 Screamer, 13 Screamer of the Weeks?
One thing that kind of ties myself, my band, The Rattlers,
and my brother and WLIR together, The Rattlers had a song called,
I Won't Be Your Victim, which was nominated for Screamer of the Week.
My brother used to call up quite frequently, like, every five or ten minutes
and vote for The Rattlers. Three weeks in a row we were nominated,
but by the third week, my brother had been calling so often,
that the receptionist finally answered,
"Joey, is that you?"
♪ Ooh yeah, yeah
♪ Said you're gonna punk Your punk your punk ♪
I did Punky Reggae Party, which in '81, '82, '83
Sunday nights was a reggae-orientated,
Dare To Be Different show.
♪ It's a punky reggae party
♪ New wave
And what I did was, I played reggae songs
that could enter into the main format.
♪ Wo, wo, wo, yeah
♪ Oh yeah
And it just became an alternative, even though it was reggae
or punky reggae, acts that, you know, there was a lot of bands now
coming out of England that were doing punk reggae.
♪ Can I take you to a restaurant That's got glass tables
♪ You can watch yourself While you are eating ♪
♪ ... ammunition Police and thieves
♪ In the streets, oh, yeah ♪
If you wanted to hear a reggae format like mine, you would hear it on a college station.
There were no commercial stations, no commercial stations
in America doing a reggae show.
♪ I say Pass the dutchie On the left hand side
♪ Pass the dutchie on the left hand side It a gonna burn,
♪ Give me music make me jump and prance It a go done,
♪ Give me the music make me rock in the dance
Musical Youth, which had a song called Pass the Dutchie,
which was, you know, it became a Screamer of the Week.
♪ You could feel it 'cause it was the month of June
Chi-ca Chi-ca
♪ So I left my gate and went out for a walk
♪ How does it feel When you've got no food?
♪ As I pass the dreadlocks' camp I heard them say
♪ How does it feel When you've got no food?
♪ Pass the dutchie On the left hand side, I say
♪ Pass the dutchie On the left hand side It a gonna burn
♪ Give me the music make me jump and prance It a go done
♪ Give me the music make me rock in the dance... ♪
We went ahead and we helped Blondie's management get her
a rock steady song called, The Tide is High,
which became a pretty big song for her,
thanks to Denis McNamara and LIR.
♪ The tide is high But I'm holdin' on
♪ I'm gonna be your number one
♪ I'm not the kinda girl
♪ Who gives up just like that,
♪ Oh no ♪
♪ Free Nelson Mandela
♪ Free, Free,
♪ Free, free, free
♪ Nelson Mandela
We were messengers for the musicians
and we were taking the message to our listeners.
♪ Free Nelson Mandela
Well, you know, we were playing Free Nelson Mandela
and people thought we were nuts.
♪ Shoes too small to fit his feet
♪ His body abused But his mind is still free
♪ Are you so blind That you cannot see
♪ Free Nelson Mandela
Well, you know what, our audience picked up on it. They made it a Screamer,
they agreed with us and also, it was cool. It was musically hip, it was reggae, it was,
and also, you know what, it was wrong.
What was going on in South Africa was wrong and it woke us up to it.
Probably the best example I could give though,
of how people really were caring about things and the music was presenting it
to them was Live Aid.
BONO: We're an Irish band. We come from Dublin City, Ireland.
(CROWD SCREAMING)
Like all cities
it has its good, but it has its bad.
This is a song called Bad.
It was great that someone like LIR did broadcast the audio
from the concert,
because a lot of people didn't get the visual feed
from the first half of the concert in the, the UK because
of the time differences. And, I believe that a lot of television
here in America
chopped it up into chunks, I mean...
Money speaks louder
than what was going on then, so the commercial breaks ended
right in the middle of performances,
so a lot of the performances that were coming
and being fed from all around the world weren't actually broadcast very well.
So with LIR broadcasting the audio, that's fantastic,
that people actually got a chance to, to hear what was going on.
Live Aid took place on July 13th, 1985.
It was a big date for us.
And it was a dual concert
set up in Philadelphia and in England at Wembley Stadium,
and it was a fund-raising concert for famine relief in Africa.
♪ Share the light of love
DENIS MCNAMARA: It was Sting and it was Paul Young and it was the Durans.
It was such a blur. What I can remember is the promoter,
the famous Bill Graham coming up and saying like, "You know, you gotta get on there.
"The presenter is gonna come up to you and he'll have a word with you
"and then he'll go on." But he didn't say who the presenter was.
It was Jack Nicholson. And we were like, wow... So I remember the main...
I think we only played 20 minutes Live Aid, but I think I spent
the first 18 thinking, "Jack Nicholson."
♪ You know I would if I could
♪ I would let it go
DENIS MCNAMARA: It was put together by Midge and Bob Geldof who were friends of ours,
because you know, Midge was Ultra Vox, Bob was the Boomtown Rats.
Both of them played on the concert.
It was something that we could be proud of that those were our artists.
Those were the people that we'd championed,
and they were doing something good for the world.
♪ Throw this lifeless lifeline to the wind ♪
For me, a good lyric was often inspired by
just the irony, the subtext of a headline.
Back then, one of the big influences for me was the sense of impotence
between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
They were the big champions of capitalism
and this easy credit was coming in and it was like the first sedative.
Put people to sleep with instant gratification whilst we can march around
and just change the whole political map.
With Margaret Thatcher, that was definitely the undoing of British society,
where people started to treat each other as competitors,
instead of neighbors.
There was the imbalance of the extra-rich and the not so,
and they really like, you know, almost like two different wars going on.
The content of punk music affected us lyrically,
in the way we sort of wrote songs
and what we talked about, because it was now acceptable to get out there
and just complain about stuff.
I remember when Reagan got reelected, I played The Ramones'
I Wanna Be Sedated 15 times in a row.
♪ All around me are familiar faces
♪ Worn out places, worn out faces
♪ Bright and early for their daily races
♪ Going nowhere, oing nowhereg
CURT SMITH: I think we played our first gig as Tears For Fears
the day the Falklands War started. It was the first time
that I'd ever experienced something that was like a war to me.
♪ Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow No tomorrow, no tomorrow
I think it was pure, beautiful coincidence
that I Ran happened to be our song at exactly the time
that the Iran situation was happening.
♪ And I ran I ran so far away
And I, I think that a lot of people listened to that song in the first place,
because that's what they thought it was about. And then when they'd listened
to it a couple of times, they went, no, it's just a good, good song, you know?
It was a grand opportunity that you could sing about that sort of stuff,
whether it was about social politics
or whether about gender politics.
But I guess there was that whole, you know, with Top 40 radio stations,
there was that whole kind of macho,
kind of like, rock band, kind of image,
and we didn't necessarily fit into that.
VINCE CLARKE: Andy's always been very honest and upfront about his sexuality.
And I've always supported him. You know, that, that's what we are. That's who we are.
We've never tried to hide or shy away from that, from that fact,
or tone it down
for the sake of Top 40 radio, for instance.
♪ I hurt inside out Oh l'amour
♪ Broke my heart ♪
♪ I'll stop the world and melt with you
♪ You seen the difference and it's getting better
♪ all the time ♪
When you hear I Melt With You by Modern English, it brings you back.
But who knew that it was about making love
when a bomb is coming at you from Russia?
DAVE WAKELING: But it was, really, just starting to form the opinions
of that whole generation of students, who now are a whole generation
of vice presidents and presidents and executives, who are going to be
the ones in the next year or two who will make that change,
because social change takes ages, doesn't it, you know.
You're meant to be young and impetuous and then think that it's all for nothing
and we didn't change the world and oh, what happened, and it felt like we were going to
but anywhere from 15 to 25 years afterwards, you start
to see the social implications of the way people had an opportunity
to look at the world differently.
♪ When I'm standing here lookin' at you What do I see? ♪
I hear music today and I hear the influences of that,
some of our artists have on artists today, like The Killers and The Strokes.
New Order is a big influence on some of the bands today,
as is Joy Division on acts like Interpol.
If you ask them, they'll, they'll say, "We listened to Duran Duran.
"We listened to The Replacement and The Clash," and you can hear the influence.
The '80s music had an element of fun to it, and when the late '70s hit,
to me that's the best time in music, when the switch happened, you know.
Hearing things like Gary Numan or Elvis Costello or getting into Devo and things like that.
We would say why does everything have to be separate?
Why can't we put things, let's just take the rock and roll world, the dance world,
the funk world, the gospel world, let's stick it all together.
It just had something so different. Adam & The Ants, I mean,
Kings of the Wild Frontier, that record is probably
my favorite record that's ever been made.
♪ That music's lost its taste So try another flavor
♪ Antmusic ♪
I still think to this day it's adventurous and different,
and who makes a American Indian/ pirate/
Try and categorize that record and you can't.
And there was a lot of things like that back in that time,
and I think it was a rebellion to the stagnation of, of sonic approaches
that had been taken for the decades past.
You've got to think outside the box to try and make something that's different,
that's radically different from what has been before.
Rock music hasn't really changed an awful lot since the 1950s.
We still use guitars. We still record them the same way.
We're still making noise.
Jimi Hendrix made a feedback-y noise with his guitar.
We still do it today so it hasn't really evolved an awful lot.
And so to do something radically different,
it's not just the instrumentation
that's important, it's how you think.
And the instrumentation,
all of a sudden, synthesizers became accessible.
Synthesizers were coming out at the time too, which the punks hated,
because it wasn't just crashing on a guitar, but to people like me that was atmosphere
and that was really what we were after.
♪ I walk along the avenue
♪ I never thought I'd meet a girl like you
♪ Meet a girl like you
People that were interested like, that were like, going, wow,
you're not like a "rock band" rock band.
You're this strange combination of things.
And they would be interested in just seeing how it was put together.
How do you integrate synths and lead guitar?
They didn't understand how it worked.
And we always used to get people after shows coming up and going,
"How did you workout what the synth's gonna do
"and what the guitar's gonna do?" And of course, we'd just go,
"It's easy, when I can't play a bit, he'll play it."
This is Depeche Mode. Right behind me you will see New Life.
♪ I stand still stepping on the shady streets
♪ And I watch that man to a stranger
There is no question that we emerged at the same time
as the synthesizer emerged as this incredibly important instrument.
It was a movement in technology, and the difference between
what Vince Clarke or Martin Gore, as opposed to what Keith Emerson could do,
was completely different. The battery of keyboards that Wakeman and Emerson
had to have on stage, I was the biggest Yes and the biggest ELP fan,
so I loved the sound of the Moog synthesizer but that was not a portable situation.
It took up a wall. You know, these things, you had to be
a brain surgeon to operate these things. You had to be a scientist
to figure out how to patch it up.
♪ ...your shadow's red Like a film I've seen, Now show me ♪
For Depeche Mode, when they first did
their earliest gigs in Basildon, those guys used to stick their keyboards
under their arms, and they were lucky to be able to afford them. But they could stick them
under their arms and take them to the local club and play gigs. And that's how they started,
and that's why they were able to change music in the way that they did.
And it's not like music just changed, it's not like Depeche Mode just came along,
or the Human League just came along and everybody said, "Oh wow, look at the future."
They were despised, and laughed at, and ridiculed by almost everyone.
There was a real backlash, you know. I mean, it's kinda interesting
that, you know, for a lot of middle America, the lack of guitars and big hair
and stuff like that was a problem. You know, they would say,
they would describe, this as wimpy. You know, they would say, well, it,
it's not real music if it's done with electronic instruments and so on.
And we sort of laughed at that really, and pushed past it.
Back then, anything that didn't have a guitar in it was considered
not to be music by some people, you know. (LAUGHS)
They did a piece on me that said, oh, Howard Jones
doesn't need to turn up to his shows because he just sends the equipment.
DENIS MCNAMARA: Quite often, people would say synthesizers were too wimpy.
It's true that some of them were really cheesy-sounding.
It was like, homogenized. The drum machines, the exact bass drum,
the exact snare drum, everything was homogenized.
Drum machines was called quantized.
They had to quantize everything to get it to sound a little bit live,
but it wasn't happening.
There wasn't like a John Bonham who played a little behind the beat.
You know, everything was right on it, just sterile.
And they had a very different take on what music should be.
It was all about creating the imagery, the atmospherics,
the cinema elements of, of the music.
Our sound was intergalactic space music, basically.
Space love songs and it was a, it was science fiction.
This produced most of the drum sounds for the early records,
and it would be one sound at a time.
Daniel's big thing was making kick drum sounds out of it.
And it used to infuriate us, because he'd be like, all day
and he'd be... (MIMICS THUMPING SOUND)
and he'd be change... and we'd think... And nothing would change,
as far as we were concerned. It was just the same sound.
He would drive us crazy.
DENIS MCNAMARA: Depeche Mode, of course, and that was led by Vince Clarke.
In another life, Vince might've been Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton
if he played guitar, only he happened to play synthesizer.
MICHAEL PAGNOTTA: Vince Clarke writes, you know, in Yaz and in early Depeche
and certainly in Erazure, you know, has written pop songs
as simple and beautiful as
any '50s pop song you have ever heard.
It's a completely different process now.
Anybody can do it, I mean, any kid with an idea can turn on his laptop
and his little Casio,
and make a record, and that's a wonderful thing the flip side of that is
not everybody who has a Casio and a keyboard,
should be making music.
But you know, but at the same time, who are any of us to judge?
ANNOUNCER: Malibu. Dance and alternative music.
Two rooms, two DJs.
Malibu, Lido Blvd., Lido Beach.
If music were a religion, Malibu would be its cathedral. Malibu.
♪ Everybody, it's a good thing
♪ Everybody wants a good thing
♪ Everybody, ain't it true that,
♪ Everybody's looking for the same thing
♪ Ain't it true, There's just no doubt...
DENIS MCNAMARA: Every generation of kids wants their own music. I mean, it doesn't mean
they hate their parents, but they enjoy getting music to piss off their parents.
They want their own, they want their own stuff.
♪ Ain't it true as the sun that shines
DENIS MCNAMARA: These clubs opened and they became this really cool place
where you can go meet friends, hang out, fall in love
and dance, but most importantly,
hear more of that LIR music that you were loving so much on the radio.
DENIS MCNAMARA: And we really started working with the people at the clubs
and I started hiring people who were legitimate club spinners,
so there naturally became a symbiotic relationship
between the clubs and LIR.
They'd advertise with us. We'd do special nights there.
And together we created a scene
that wasn't precedented on Long Island,
because the radio station got the word out to the masses.
We were grassroots.
Everybody loves to be turned on to new music. Now, for the first time,
they were hearing the new music on the radio, they were buying the records
and then they were coming to see them live. And we all made some good money
from it you know, and, and we had some great times too.
And we also had some disasters. (LAUGHS)
Oh, sure, that was...
The radio stations that played the music we wanted to hear
weren't radio stations. They were clubs. And then all of a sudden LIR came out
and like, there was a station that was actually playing the things
that we were dancing to at those clubs.
We started going to Spit every Wednesday night and every Friday night.
I loved it. I lived it. I dressed it. I slept it.
You had your Monday night thing, your Tuesday night thing,
your, your Wednesday night thing.
I went to Paris, New York, I went to Spize.
We went to Spit only you know, Wednesdays and Fridays were the nights that.
Sometimes Sundays in the summer.
Yes. It was sometimes Sundays in the summer.
I went to Malibu... uh, I went to Spit,
I went to Thrush,
I went to 007.
My first club experience was at Spize.
We were too young to be in there.
We'd have a couple of drinks in the car before we would go in.
In the glove box, we used to have a pint of vodka,
a knife and some lemon wedges.
And we would drink, and we would go in, and we would just party.
Yup, and then we'd have all the boys buy us drinks.
You know, it was like, "Oh, 007's. I'd love to go there if only I wasn't afraid of it."
The girls would come with their poufy skirts and their hair spiked up.
Pale face, red lipstick, I was out the door. And I was good.
Great hairstyle, I used to have back then you know, whatever.
And it's like, "Oh, I used to wear those pants."
I went to a place in the city, in the Village, and they, they shaved
one whole side of my head, and the other hair, half was just kinda
hanging over the front of my face.
♪ I want Candy
The first thing I get to hear people say when they remember me
from the '80s is, you know, "You had a great Mohawk." You know, and I said,
"Yeah, I had a lot of colds too with that Mohawk," because I used to get
a lot of colds with no hair. You, lose 10% of body heat through your head.
People, you lose 10% if you wanna go baldy.
We had short hair. We had straight trousers.
Hair changed. Shoulder pads got wide.
I used to have the hair spiked up and the tails,
and I used to have balloons holding my tail up.
♪ I want Candy
BETH FRIEDMAN: It was the time of like, the tank tops with like,
the off-the-sleeve sweatshirt.
I had my poufy hair...
CYNDE DANIELS: We would spike our hair up like Flock of Seagulls.
We'd go into the city and you know, go to like,
Unique Clothing and Zoot and get, you know, like the Morrissey shirts,
you know, that looked like something Morrissey would wear and...
We definitely dressed like Madonna with you know... Yeah, yeah.
We would wear our hair like Tom Bailey from the Thompson Twins.
We seemed to be something of a magnet for the misfits and the freaks,
who wanted to come out and wear their fancy, you know, weird looking clothes
because they saw in us some kind of kindred spirit.
We wanted to make the bands of the '70s look outmoded.
We wanted it to be an instant change, that,
that it was very obvious this was a new decade.
Fashion's not about wearing something and just looking perfect.
It's wearing it the way you wanna wear it.
♪ Life is so strange when you don't know
♪ How can you tell where you're going to
♪ You can't be sure of any situation
♪ Something could change And then you won't know
♪ You ask yourself Where do we go from here
If you got a record added to LIR,
it was guaranteed
that it would break nationally. That's just the way it was.
♪ I don't know what this all means to me
Because you're dealing with a really targeted,
passionate, loyal audience
that did everything that the station said to do,
which is the power of radio at that time.
That was a lifestyle, LIR. It wasn't just a radio station you put on,
say okay, I'm gonna hear the Top 40 songs. People just lived it.
♪ I guess it doesn't matter anyway
♪ Life is so strange ♪
KEVIN MCPARTLAND: Well, the record stores started to move product all of a sudden.
They're not supposed to be moving this product in this marketplace at that point.
All of a sudden, they're selling a ton more records
and LIR became, I mean, they were, you were their best friend all of a sudden
because you opened up this new marketplace for them.
Now all of a sudden, this little radio station
in the number 11 market is getting a 1 share,
a 1.1 share, a 1.2 share
in New York City. We're taking
millions of dollars' worth of advertising away
from these big radio stations.
LIR was plowing right ahead, moving forward with the times,
and everybody else was like, well, uh-oh, what are we gonna do now?
LIR and KROQ were the first wavers,
and once they had success,
there were radio stations in Asbury Park, New Jersey
and KQAK in San Francisco
and 91X in San Diego.
They became the second wave. They said, wait a minute,
I see what they're doing. It's working.
If the promo people can say, "You guys and LIR
are the only stations that are playing this music.
"You are all we have right now."
And so that's how I knew how important WLIR was.
People were just lined up to get anything that had WLIR on it.
They sell tickets because their listeners
are fan...
They're fanatics, true fanatics.
They had an incredibly loyal fan base that just grew and grew.
I mean, Yaz sold out Madison Square Garden.
You know, how does an act like that sell out Madison Square Garden?
We had such a great audience. Ratings go way up.
The audience loyalty factor is unbelievable. Not only do we feel it,
you see it in the business. You know, the concerts were all selling out.
The clubs were all filling up. The labels liked us.
Even the car dealers are selling cars to our listeners.
I mean, money is coming in, but we had a big problem.
Denis would do staff meetings. And he called a staff meeting together
and I didn't see this coming at all. He announces to the staff that he just got
a letter from the FCC that we were gonna have our FCC license pulled.
And in the next breath he said, "But I know how we can beat it,
"and I know how we can get around it."
The way it was explained to me, when I got there as an intern,
was that it was a paper work snafu and Elton was going to get this whole thing figured out
that it was really just a mix up and once he got this whole thing figured out
you know it'd be done. I think I found out years later that he'd might not
have ever really had a license. It was always so hard to decipher.
There was the battle for the interim license before they figured out
who would get the permanent license
and Elton had applied for the interim license. And that would be the license
of who would run the station while they did the search for the permanent license...
That was secretly talking a group that would, that applied for the interim license.
There were four claims in the petition to deny against WLIR.
One was the unauthorized transfer of control.
One was that the station had changed its format without notifying the FCC.
Three is that the station's ascertainment of community needs was somehow deficient
and four, that the licensee did not have appropriate character
because they had "stolen Mr. Wolfe's tapes
and because Mrs. Rieger had
"put in for unemployment when she was employed."
The FCC license.
Oh, yeah, that's confusing. Here's what kinda happened.
The trouble started in 1972.
The station was owned by a man named John Rieger.
John's wife, Dory, had a debilitating illness.
John wanted to take care of her,
so he tried to sublet the radio station to someone else.
The FCC didn't like this. To complicate matters, a man who recorded
a weekly show for the station, Franklin Wolfe, had a beef with John and Dory,
something about taping over his audio tapes.
He was so mad that he tried
to get LIR's license revoked and given to him.
However, in a karmic twist of fate,
Franklin Wolfe went to one of Long Island's beautiful beaches,
and a gust of wind blew a beach umbrella into his head,
severely injuring him, and he dropped his challenge for the license.
But the FCC decided to pursue the case anyway.
For 15 years, Rieger and his partner, Elton Spitzer
fought the FCC, trying to get the license back.
But in 1987, WLIR went off the air for good.
I kind of came in to, I hate to say, like a sinking ship,
but it was like, "Hey, everybody!" and they're like,
"You know you're on the Titanic, right?"
The notice came over the AP wire that we had to cease and desist.
It was you know, very scary. You know, they actually said,
"Cease and desist."
And like, in a moment, I looked at the phones in my office,
because I was standing in the hall, now they're all lighting up.
Part of the daily routine of many Long Islanders has come to an end.
Those who regularly tuned in to 92.7 on their radio dials
to listen to the station WLIR will no longer find that station broadcasting.
♪ Unintelligible
♪ I'm not a queer
♪ I'll state my case, of which I'm certain
DENIS MCNAMARA: The last song that was played on WLIR was My Way
only it was the Sid Vicious version,
and it was a "Fuck you" to the FCC.
♪ I've traveled each And every highway
REPORTER: So what happened here today?
Well, WLIR is leaving the frequency 92.7. After a legal battle
of about 15 years, it's all come to an end, finally.
We've lost the license for this frequency.
REPORTER: Who did you lose the license to?
We've lost the license actually, to Jared Broadcasting.
We didn't even really lose it to them. This is the man to, to ask those questions to.
REPORTER: Would you tell me about Jared Broadcasting?
I don't know much about them. They're a company that won the award
for the station after... They also had a five-year battle to win it.
REPORTER: How did it feel to, after how many years, go off the air today?
Terrible. It's very sad for us.
It's funny because today,
it's like a ray of sunshine in the clouds.
We were just told by a trade publication called The Gavin Report,
which is a tip sheet for not just this format of radio, but all formats,
adult contemporary, Top 40,
that we're now nominated for Station of the Year.
That's one in five stations across the country.
That's a great honor. I mean, whether or not we win it,
it's irrelevant. The fact that today of all days, right,
we found out that we're nominated for Station of the Year.
It's just hard to close this chapter because this battle has been
so close to us for so long and this station has been so close to our hearts.
Everybody that works here loves working here.
Nobody works here just because they like radio,
they'd rather work in the city.
It's WLIR that means a lot to us and this music.
BOB WAUGH: It was a sad day, and it really was emotional for me
and I remember walking out, thinking, "I'll never have this again."
We were devastated. There was a huge void in my life
when WLIR, so to speak,
not, well, folded. I guess folded.
It was a happy time.
It was a great time and hearing you know, if I hear a song, it just brings me back
to the LIR days. It, it does.
There's, there was nothing like it. I don't think there will
ever be anything like it ever again. It was just, it was that good.
There's no other stations that, you know, we didn't have the internet,
so what am I gonna listen to? There's no other stations that even come close to WLIR.
When WLIR went off the air,
people cried,
and I mean, cried. We all did.
It was a very sad day. I remember being in high school and everybody talking
about the day that LIR went off the air was... That's all you heard. I can't believe
they're leaving us and, and, and what are we gonna listen to?
I had to pull off on the side of the road and catch my breath.
If I had a paper bag, I would've been hyperventilating.
I was truly upset. I cried.
The other radio stations were playing very processed,
commercial Top 40 music or hair bands. They weren't focusing
on all this incredible world music that they brought to these kids in Long Island.
This is what LIR did for people. It made them say,
"Of course you could do it. Who cares if you look like a freak?
"Who cares if people make fun of you? You can do it." And we did.
There was a time where people were fighting
to get the LIR license in every unethical way possible,
hiring these expensive lawyers
to go in and manipulate politicians and, and to manipulate
a political governing force
known as the FCC, the scary, you know, thing that oversees
all of communication on the public airwaves, and it's total bullshit.
That is an agency that's been fraught with stupidity
and really ignorance about the business that it's involved with,
and at the same time, it's gone hand-in-hand with major corporations.
Look what happened to radio in America.
What are they, two people that own almost
every radio outlet in America? That's wrong.
These are public airwaves, and also,
it has cut down on the diversity of sound,
it has basically made for this horrible,
formulaic state of radio that is...
You know what, under-financed, over-valued and,
and loaded with commercials, and now people have gone out of their way to find
other things to replace it with and you've got an era now, where we've got Pandora.
You're gonna turn to that instead of using the public airwaves and,
radio in America has always been a great artistic culture, and it still is
in many countries in the world that have not had the kind
of corruption that has existed in this country, and the kind of corruption
that brought down WLIR.
I think the legacy of LIR speaks for itself really.
You know, all the artists that were around at that time
who went through that experience and rose up through the ranks
of alternative radio realize the importance
of what Denis did.
LIR was important as it picked up imports from Britain.
It picked up unknown bands
and it championed them on the airwaves and
we really need that again.
Rock and roll needs that to, to move through this period where
it doesn't maybe have the same impact it used to have.
I think a lot of people want to know where the roots of music have come from.
Where did what's happening today come from?
Where, where did the ideas
of today, even the technology that's working today, where did it come from?
How did it begin? What, what got us here?
I think people always want to know that
and they always want to know what the triggers were, what the mechanisms were,
what the thing that pushed the wheel of life forward, the wheel of history,
the wheel of musical history forward
and kept it going to where we're still excited.
We're still dancing
and going out of our minds to great music somewhere.
And if we're not, we're thinking about how to make that happen.
They were doing the same thing that the bands were doing, where just by being different
and outrageous, they were saying,
"Hey, guys, move out of the way. We're here now."
Maybe that's an interesting way of looking at it.
They were using the same kind of dynamics as the bands themselves,
to say it's time for a change.
It was a fantastic period for music.
We generated en masse
some fantastic songs we had great songwriters.
We were doing revolutionary things with record production.
So you can look back at that period
and just about anyone who has played on LIR, you know,
whether it's Depeche Mode or The Cure,
they all had something that was different from the generation before.
They all created something that was really new and exciting and vibrant,
and I think part of that was that, that what happened at the end
of the '70s, early '80s, was...
The punk era had kind of set the attitude.
You know, you can do it yourself.
You don't need the big record companies to do this.
You can go and you can pick up a guitar,
learn three chords, get a few mates and make a band.
And that was the attitude. I think that early '80s period was just
as important musically as the early '60s was with The Beatles, and The Stones,
and The Who, and Gerry and the Pacemakers and all of those bands, the first,
kind of British wave that came to America, I think the '80s did the exact same thing,
but in a very different way, because those songs are still being played on the radio today.
Those songs don't go away.
WLIR, you know, had soul. And corporations, they don't have soul.
And as long as you understand that, it'll all make sense.
I don't think Sire would've been the label it became
without WLIR.
I'm very, very grateful.
You know, the tagline, "dare to be different" is a really important thought.
And this radio station embodied that, lived it, encouraged it's audience
to do that, and that's important in life. It was expressed through music,
and a love of music, and a connection to music. But if you look at that
as a philosophy, it's a philosophy worth sharing.
JOAN JETT: The Long Island Music Hall of Fame
pays tribute to one of its own board members.
He's the man whose voice we all remember...
I love this man.
Music in America would not be the same without Denis.
I am proud to call him my friend. Denis, congratulations!
No one deserves this more than you.
(CROWD CHEERING)
The crazy thing was, we thought we were gonna survive, all together.
Elton had plans to move to another station.
We are, at this time, working on getting a new station for WLIR.
We will continue to be known in 1988 as WLIR when we come back,
as we move up the FM radio dial.
We just filed for a station today.
It's out in River Head, Long Island.
It's now commonly known as WRCN, and when we take over the license
and when it's approved by the FCC, it will be called WLIR.
It should be pretty much the same station.
We'll have the same nutty crew, the same records,
the same kind of an attitude towards music,
and it should be good old WLIR.
Hopefully, we'll be on the air.
I think that's around the time we'll be on the air.
Can you imagine if we won Station of the Year,
and we weren't on the air yet?
I don't think that's ever happened in broadcasting history.
How can you make a station, Station of the Year and not be on the air?
Rock and roll has definitely fallen out of favor, somewhere,
but who knows man, it can make its evil comeback and that's what we're always waiting for
something loud, smelly and nasty! Yeah!
(JOAN JETT & THE BLACKHEARTS DARE TO BE DIFFERENT PLAYING)
♪ Wanna play, won't be the same
♪ I'll go with all the rest Just playin' a game
INTERVIEWER: What does 92.7 mean to you, Joan Jett?
92.7 is WLIR, and... Hold on...
I'm waking up.
♪ Well you can rock or you can roll
♪ Well you can break the rules or do what you're told
INTERVIEWER: What does 92.7 mean to you, Joan Jett?
92.7 is... Shit. I keep fucking it up, man.
♪ You've just got everything to gain
♪ So let's dare to be different
INTERVIEWER: What does 92.7 mean to you, Joan Jett?
92.7 is WLIR
and waking up every morning with John DeBella.
♪ Well take a chance, don't be afraid
♪ You just got one shot so let's be brave
♪ Take aim, take aim, let it fly
♪ You only lose when you don't try
♪ So let's dare to be different
♪ Let's go against the grain
♪ There's no point, it's no fun
♪ If we all look the same
♪ Look alive, jump at life
♪ Just ain't no kind of life
♪ Don't walk in step with anyone
♪ You must be true
♪ Just be you And do what you want to do
♪ Take my advice, it's more fun
♪ To dance to your own drum
♪ Now I know that it ain't easy
♪ But you got what it takes, I hope you believe me
♪ 'Cause right now it's your time
♪ You got nothin' else to do but shine
♪ So let's dare to be different
♪ Let's go against the grain
♪ There's no point, it's no fun if we all look the same
♪ So let's dare to be different
♪ Let's go against the grain
♪ There's no point, it's no fun
♪ If we all act the same
♪ I'm a heartbreak beat
♪ Yeah, all night long
♪ And nobody don't dance on the edge of the dark
♪ We've got the radio on
♪ And it feels like love,
♪ But it don't mean a lot
♪ And it feels like love,
♪ And it's all that we've got
♪ There's a heartbreak beat playin' all night long
♪ Down on my street
♪ And it feels like love
♪ Got the radio on and it's all that we need
♪ There's a heartbreak beat
♪ And it feels like love
♪ There's a heartbreak beat
♪ And it feels like love
♪ Well, the beat don't stop ♪
♪ We talk so tough
MALIBU SUE: The guy who truly dared to be different, who owned the radio station
and allowed us to just run amok with it, let the lunatics run the asylum.
I'm sure you all know his name: Elton Spitzer!
(CROWD CHEERING)
This is the man who gave us the freedom to do WLIR, Elton Spitzer.
Subtitles by explosiveskull