Bud Ballou, WMEX's nighttime disc jockey, explained selecting songs like this: "It's all comparative . . . people changing. They're looking back on the day. I try to get every one of those moods they're in. Not only the moods everyone's in; but one person--all the moods he goes through."

It is through the understanding of the importance of comparison that we can begin to see the explanation for one of the most "unnatural" things about our radio experience. Why does Andy Klein include "Wichita Lineman" in his list on page 3 of the best singles of last year? We don't objectively like "Wichita Lineman." But it's there. We can understand by beginning to intuit how all different kinds of sounds work together much better if they are different.

Rock radio is a method.

I was riding in a car coming down from New Hampshire at night in the middle of last week. An intensely bright, almost full moon was shining through the passage of dark clouds which completely blotted out its round light when they moved in front of it. It seemed that the moon, itself, was rising and falling behind the clouds. When it came out, it lit up and caught shadows on the white fields of snow drifted deep on both sides of the road. We were following the white line for a long time going down towards Cambridge swinging back and forth across the road, going into curves, and coming out of them. I was with some friends and we had tuned in to the radio. We would change stations with New Hampshire towns. There was a lot of crackling, and indecisiveness about the way what we wanted to hear was picked. I had been awake for 36 hours, and was wordlessly tired. It turned out that someone had a notebook right on top of the speaker the whole way. But through it the radio gave up some unbelievable sounds. It was good because otherwise we would have had to speak. . . .

The basic format for rock 'n' roll stations was started in Omaha in 1954 by someone named Bill Stewart. He began programming his radio station to play the records that people liked "most." He went around to the record stores and found out what sold. He figured what people would listen to if they heard a lot more of what they really liked. But also he was introducing a new definition of the medium.

He defined rock radio as we know it now--to be not a presentation of what we might like, but a presentation of what we have already indicated we want. In doing this, he limited the number of different songs down to a few that were really popular. It was this "unnatural" kind of limitation that his competitors thought was especially loony. Well, his idea got a tremendous amount of response and radio stations all over the country started picking up on it.

In Boston, as far back as I can remember, there's been WBZ and WMEX. As far back as I can remember is 1956. But BZ and MEX never seemed to really compete with each other. They had divided up the town, and seemed to each feel that they were realizing their potential quite well. The contentment of those first ten years is remarkable only as compared with the all-out competition in Boston now.

This early Boston listenership was divided up by economic class rather than by age group the way it is now. BZ scored with the upper middle class suburbs and the college kids. One of its advantages was that it had a 50,000 watt transmitter, which MEX didn't have. With all that power, BZ was unchallenged to build a little kingdom of its own in eastern New England. It developed an incredibly good market for advertising; and, indeed, to those of us who have recently heard as many as 24 records played in one hour, it is awe-inspiring to think that we used to listen to only 8 or 9 surrounded by avalanches of consumer appeals.

Another thing that bothered one during that era was to come home and find your mother listening to your radio station. It gives you an idea what BZ sounded like if the grown-ups listened to it too. They played about zero black music of any kind, no progressive rock, but no more Frank Sinatra than most stations play now. They were basically Top 40, WBZ is playing a weaker version of it now; it's known in the business as "the Chicken 40."

Meanwhile, WMEX's signal didn't get very far away from Boston, but it reached all the lower middle income suburbs. Their programming seemed to really zoom right in on the tougher crowd in and around the city. They played a lot more of the really silly, shangalang-alang type of music that was around at the time; and their disc jockeys were, like, a lot more into the idiom than the college-oriented BZ guys. Or so I remember it. The easiest way to tell the difference was in the places they mentioned in their advertising. I'd never heard of any of the places, even of many of the towns, that MEX talked about. There's social stratification for you.

Anyway, onto this hopelessly archiaic scene burst WRKO in the summer of 1965 or exactly two and a half years ago. The first manifestation of WRKO was as a computer. As a machine, the station did six months on FM of solid music, nothing else, the same top twenty songs over and over again. It shook things up; the storm clouds gathered.

That next winter WRKO stuck in disc jockeys, played lots of music, and came on 50,000 watts strong on AM. When the station management had decided they were going to go into the top music area in Boston, they had handed the enterprise over to Bill Drake. Bill Drake is an entrepreneur who's got a system for running rock radio stations. He completely controls the programs of lots of different radio stations all over the country. He lives in California, doesn't leave it often, and identifies himself as a consultant.

Part of the Bill Drake idea is "more music." More music is what we think we want out of radio (actually, all we want is a really good flow). Not only did WRKO, called R-co, keep playing stuff all the time, but they made a big deal out of it.

Another part of the Bill Drake idea is to define what the hits are and keep it to that. Radio stations used to hold as their claim to fame how many nationwide hits they broke first on their air. You could only get a few each year. But you had to play many that flopped to get the one or two hits. The Bill Drake system abandoned breaking hits to stick with what people were sure to like.

R-co totally blitzed Boston radio. They went shooting up to number one, dropping BZ to a confused second, and WMEX to a fading third. It was very exciting when it was happening. I remember you could feel it like a movement rippling through the people. Then finally it showed itself. A theatre in downtown Boston offered a free sneak preview of the new James Bond movie to all who wore a trench coat and arrived at three o'clock in the morning. R-co did most of the heavy advertising. Everyone in the world knew about it. On the night of the show, the theatre was filled and ten thousand people turned away by 2:00 a.m. By 3:00 there were twenty thousand new people in the streets, some of them rioting. The flood of people became so heavy that those near the theatre couldn't leave. Windows were smashed, and the police poured in; but no one knew how to handle all this youth in the streets. R-co had created the first up-rising.