Monday,
April 05, 1993
CHRIS DAFOE
Things look
pretty bleak for David Marsden, general manager and program director of
Vancouver radio station COAST 1040. His ratings stink. The radio station, if it
remains on the AM band, is expected to lose $800,000 a year - forever. To make
matters worse, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
(CRTC) has turned down his application for an FM frequency. And the owners,
after absorbing losses approaching $12-million over the past five years, have
put the station up for sale.
But if
Marsden is on the ropes, he's not going down without a fight. That much was
apparent to anyone who saw Marsden's performance at a recent benefit concert in
support of the station.
"Sign
those letters and petitions," Marsden told the 1,000 or so listeners who
gathered at Vancouver's Commodore Ballroom to protest the CRTC's decision.
"You've got to keep up the fight. Because the CRTC has a little problem
with their heads up their asses. . . ."
Not exactly
the most diplomatic approach, but after 30 years in radio, Marsden has a
reputation for running off at the mouth. He first made his mark in Toronto in
the early 1960s as motor-mouthed DJ David Mickie, even earning a reference in
Marshall McLuhan's book Understanding Media. McLuhan, to illustrate the difference
between the spoken and written word, transcribed Marsden's radio patter -
" 'That's Patty Baby and that's the girl with the dancing feet and that
Freddy Cannon there on the David Mickie Show in the night time ooohbah scubadoo
how are you booboo' " - and observed that he "alternately soars,
groans, swings, sings, solos, intones and scampers, always reacting to his own
actions."
Marsden
also did time at Canada's first progressive rock FM station (Montreal's CHOM)
and at CHUM-FM in Toronto.
Over the
past 15 years, however, he has become best known as Canada's most persistent
proponent of modern rock radio. The format, which emphasizes new music and hip
attitude, grew out of the punk boom of the late 1970s, which was all but
ignored by mainstream Top-40 and album- oriented-rock stations. Today, there
are about 100 modern rock stations across North America, only three of them in
Canada.
The oldest
of the Canadian stations is CFNY, which went modern rock in 1977 under program
director David Pritchard. Marsden took over as program director in 1979 and
built the station into a significant player in the Toronto radio market.
CFNY never
got huge ratings - at its best, it pulled about 500,000 listeners a week and
about 5 per cent share of the total hours tuned. But its willingness to take
chances on new acts - it helped break bands such as U2, Talking Heads and
Depeche Mode - gave it greater influence than many stations with similar
ratings. The station even gained a profile outside Toronto in the 1980s when the
CBC broadcast the CASBY awards, CFNY's annual music awards show, across the
country.
After
leaving CFNY in 1987, Marsden moved to Vancouver to produce Pilot 1, a
late-night CBC variety show aimed at young viewers. The show was cancelled
after less than one season and, by 1990, Marsden was back in radio.
He
persuaded Western World Communications, the owners of a small, money-losing AM
station in the Vancouver suburb of Langley, to try out the modern rock format.
The station went on air in 1991 as COAST 800. While Marsden brought along
CFNY's slogan, The Spirit of Radio, and even some of that station's gimmicks
(such as paying listeners if they caught the station playing the same song
twice in a day), COAST hasn't enjoyed the same success as CFNY. Even after WWC
spent $3.5-million to move the station to 1040, an AM frequency that gave them
a clearer signal in the downtown Vancouver area, COAST was stuck with the
lowest ratings of any commercial station in the city, with only 60,000
listeners and a 1.2 per cent share of total listening hours.
Marsden
blames the low ratings on a number of factors.
Part of the
problem, he says, is that the station is still on the AM band, which has
steadily declined in popularity over the past 15 years. While COAST last year applied
for one of the two remaining Vancouver FM frequencies, the CRTC turned down the
application, pointing out that the station had told the commission it could
make money at 1040 AM and that, since it had only just moved, it was premature
to say it couldn't succeed there.
As well,
says Marsden, it takes time to educate an audience and advertisers in the
different approach of a modern rock station.
"Advertisers
assume that everyone who listens to the type of music we play must dress in
black and have purple hair," says Marsden. "And that's just not true.
If you look at the successful modern rock stations, they've been around a long
time. It's taken a while for people to learn how to listen to us and for
advertisers to understand what we're doing."
Yet some
observers say it tends to take even longer with Marsden's stations than with
other modern rock outlets. While U.S. stations such as KROQ in Los Angeles and
WDRE in New York have successfully adapted the Top-40 format to new music - in
effect making their own hits by repeating records until they catch on - Marsden
favours something closer to the progressive rock FM of the early 1970s. In
talking about his approach at COAST, he says, "This is not a format in the
truest sense of the word. We're always evolving, responding to our
listeners."
While that
sounds good in theory, it leads to a number of problems in practice, according
to those who have studied the format.
"One
of the problems is that you tend to be held hostage by your core
audience," says Sean Ross of M Street Journal, an industry newsletter. A
former modern rock programmer (at WDRE) and radio editor for Billboard
magazine, Ross speaks from experience. "Even if you play records half as
often as Top 40, that's too heavy for your core audience. And you can't survive
on that core audience. Your secondary and tertiary listeners - those people who
make you one of the buttons on their radio - make the difference between making
a living and not."
As for the
move to FM, Ross says that it might help, but notes that not all of the
station's problems are related to being on AM.
"Would
it do better on FM?" says Ross. "Sure. But there are a whole range of
other things it would need to change to succeed on FM."
In reality,
it's a moot point. For the short term at least, an FM frequency is out of the
question. While COAST listeners have flooded the CRTC with letters and
petitions - as of last week, the Vancouver office had received 1,340 letters on
the subject - the commission seldom reverses a decision. Meanwhile, WWC is
looking to unload the station, which had lost $9-million before Marsden signed
on and has lost another $3-million since. "We're looking at a range of
possibilities, including selling the station and bringing in a partner,"
says WWC president Clint Forster.
Marsden,
however, has not given up hope. He's cut staff, trimmed expenses and has even
ended the policy of paying listeners $1,040 when the station is caught playing
the same song twice in a day, all in hopes of making the operation financially
viable.
Asked if
he'll try to pitch The Spirit of Radio elsewhere if Forster or the new owners
pull the plug, Marsden sighs. "I try not to think about it, because it
would be admitting defeat. We are going to keep on going as long as we can.
We're going day by day. If you check my history, I never give up when I believe
in something. And I believe this will work in Vancouver."
***
If YOU WERE a rock radio fan in southern
Ontario in the '60s or '70s, then the name David Marsden probably strikes a
chord.
In 1965,
the heyday of such TV rock shows as Shindig and Hullabaloo, he was fast-talking
boss jock Dave Mickey. He had his own TV show, Mickey A-Go-Go.
In the late
'60s and early '70s, when progressive FM was the name of the game and Toronto's
CHUM-FM was the trippiest station in the country, David Marsden was the
trippiest radio jock extant.
You had to
get up pretty early in the morning and out of a strange bed indeed to out-weird
Marsden.
"Go to
your front door and turn on your porch light," he'd intone in the slowest,
mellowest tone imaginable. "Turn 'em on, man. Turn on your lights for
love. Let the love light shine. And to kind of help you along, why don't I
just, um, ease your ears here with Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger and the Trinity
and Season of the Witch. Oh my yes, brothers and sisters, this must be the
season of the witch."
A rock
legend, the Zaphod Beeblebrox of Canadian radio broadcasting.
STRANGER
things may have been heard on Canadian airwaves, but not by reliable sources.
And here he
is today, sitting in the second-floor Langley offices of Coast 800 - "The
Spirit of Radio, 800 on the AM dial, Cable FM 88.5" - launching himself
once more into progressive rock radio.
Marsden is
director of operations and programming at Coast 800 and the station's new
format, now in its 11th week, is pure Marsden.
"Most
stations, the maximum number of songs, the absolute maximum in rotation, is 500
songs. Most are much, much less. Our rotation is 10,000. You aren't going to
hear the same thing every couple of hours here. We've got songs in 30- and
60-day rotation; hey, we've got songs on a lunar cycle."
The station
is playing rock, but not "classic" rock or top-40 rock. "We're
playing what we want to hear and what our listeners tell us they want to
hear." This means you get Paul Simon's The Obvious Child sandwiched
between Dead Milkmen's Punk Rock Girl and John Cale and Brian Eno's latest.
(Not
everyone's cup of ice tea, but refreshing. I've noticed that so-called
"classic" or oldies stations that play the songs of my youth tend to
wear thin quickly. Constant repetition robs the songs of their time and place
and the memory associations that made them meaningful in the first place.)
AS MARSDEN
notes, there is a sameness about commercial radio in the Lower Mainland.
"I've nothing against classic rock, or top-40, or any format, but when
everybody's playing the same thing, whew. Let's have an option. Let's have
current music, some old music, some surprises. Let's have some respect for
local music, the independents, and if they've got the good song, then give them
air play."
Marsden has
brought in such Vancouver radio legends as J. B. Shane and John Tanner to give
the station the proper "authority." "We're not going to be the
biggest station around, but we're going to have a loyal following."
Marsden
figures rock radio has come full circle. "Rock was born on AM. Then, as AM
stations tightened their playlists, the music moved to FM stations. Now that FM
playlists are so tight, it's going to be AM stations that loosen it all up and
move it forward again. It should be fun."