[Landline] Gratitude and best wishes for 2024

And: goodbye to the Lonesome L.A. Cowboy

Hi all,

Hope you’re doing okay.

I thought a few brief words of gratitude to the Landline folk would be a nice way to start this new year. So:

Thank you to everyone who’s shared their work, finds or personal experiences with me — I’ve appreciated everything, even if I haven’t always found a way to include you in Landline just yet. Keep finding a way to do your thing!

Thank you to everyone who has commented, publicly or privately — your feedback/encouragement/criticism has been invaluable, and has kept me at the Landline typer instead of (say) losing another game of online chess. I’m truly grateful!

And finally, thank you to everyone who subscribed — or donated — or gave me a book I was desperately seeking (!) during 2023. I am so fortunate! With your help, I’ve been able to increase the frequency, scope and depth of Landline in 2023. For 2024, I hope to increase the frequency further — as well as the quality. I know I can commit more time to Landline, and do it better.

The Landline accountant says there is still time to make your subscription a paying one — at a 50% off discount, meaning only $20/year! — that’s $1.67/month, friends! cheap! — via this button. Please help me keep the lights on, if you can!

AND NOW, FORWARD INTO THE PAST, WITH FOOTNOTES TO SPARE

I saw in the New York Times the other day that legendary KLOS/KMET/etc DJ Jim Ladd, the self-styled ‘Lonesome L.A. Cowboy,” died on Dec. 16.¹ Ladd was The Sacred FM Commercial Radio DJ in the ‘80s/’90s for the smug boomer set that smothered rock/etc music for decades, the kind of people who could not abide Beefheart or the Ramones or the Cramps in the ‘70s, much less (say) The Smiths, Husker Du or Sonic Youth in the ‘80s, and so on. In the late ‘90s, Ladd’s frequent on-air spiels about how rebellious his show was against the corporate masterverse often made me groan “okay okay, we get it already” and flip the dial...

…but despite all of that, I also kinda liked the guy, and wrote a profile/thinkpiece feature on him—and more broadly, the idea of commercial, free-form radio—back in 2000 for my wonderful editor John Payne at the LAWeekly.

Jim Ladd (left) skins one up for his friend Tom Petty.

I did the best I could on the feature, interviewing Ladd in person at KLOS before his show. “I can play anything I want,” he told me. “The emphasis is on ‘classic rock‘—but that covers a lot. That covers from Bob Dylan to Creed, it covers from the Beatles to U2, from Bruce Springsteen to Collective Soul. That’s a lot.”

I thought listening to this kind of crap with a straight face was a lot, but whatever, it was 2000, I was 30 years old and I was, of course, smug in my own way. It was weird being in the presence of guys like this, who’d reduced everything great and expansive about the genuinely adventurous ‘60s FM rebels² into a narrow Jann Wenner/Lee Abrams-style pantheon of platinum seller dullness — who genuinely felt they were somehow Carrying the Torch for the Counterculture into the 21st Century by earnestly bringing you Don Henley's latest golden turd.³

But that's who he really was,⁴ and maybe that’s the best he genuinely could do. To be fair to the guy, there were an awful lot of people who didn’t even bother to try.

Above: Jim Ladd. We all know people like that. And those people all liked Jim Ladd.

Anyways, here’s the piece:

DEAD AIR: Jim Ladd and Free-Form Radio’s Vanishing Act (LAWeekly, Dec. 8-14, 2000

with love to everybody,

and best wishes for a joyous, peaceful, beautiful and unbearably righteous 2024,

Jay

1. Fair warning: The NYT obit is extremely overheated and over-generous. Ladd was influential, and beloved, but hardly a pioneer.

2. The Jive 95: An Oral History of America’s Greatest Underground Rock Radio Station, KSAN San Francisco by Hank Rosenfeld (2023) is pretty good but of course limited to a single station. I haven’t yet read Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America by Christopher H. Sterling and Michael C. Keith (2003) but it looks thorough. I’m going to assume there are probably histories out there that are focused exclusively on American free-form FM radio’s early years, but I haven’t researched the subject lately. If you know of any, please enlighten the rest of us in the comments…

3. In retrospect, I think I had unreasonable expectations for what Ladd could actually do on his KLOS show — basically, he couldn't be John Peel. (That Ladd was also incapable of being John Peel, because his taste and curiosity were so much more narrow, is beside the point.) I had/have a soft spot for True Believers, and he was one of them, for sure. 

But you know something? In the last 25 years I've spent an awful lot of time looking at the '60s/'70s counterculture — reading original documents, reading histories, doing countless interviews, exchanging info all over the place with people who were there, or who've studied it — and, honestly, it was so much more wild and sprawling than what it's been unnecessarily winnowed down to in the intervening decades via the Jann Wenner-Lee Abrams axis. And Ladd played his part in doing that.

4. And perhaps I’m more like him than I’d care to admit… Doh!