by Anotherwpgguy » Tue Nov 09, 2010 9:59 pm
Presuming I am one of the two "thick skulls" that you may be sanctimoniously referencing, its a shame you never experinced the thrill of doing a radio show, or being a a part of an operational team at one of the top five radio stations in North America. It was "a real hoot," and the peak of the profession in the day which few achieved. I was fortunate enough to have been one.
Pulling rank, I therefore must say you have no idea of the damage done to the on-air product by a scummy politician grubbing for a couple of hundred votes, and a group of beaucrats that saw only an additional level of salary classification by supervising additional staff at the CRTC.
You ask "so why didn't those directly affected just get over it?"
Well, ask somebody who has had his historical family farm expropriated for an airport development, or a proud homeowner whose house was torn down to make way for a highway widening project ... or to take it to an extreme, why not tell residents of Taiwan to "just get over" having their land stolen from them, and run off the mainland by Chairman Mao.
As Mr Cleaver has stated, there just wasn't the product in the marketplace to play and be credible to immediately go to 30% right off the hop ... argue all you want based upon your external view of the business ... I was the one there in the control room trying to figure out how in the hell was I going to mix Led Zepplin, and Aretha Franklin with The Irish Rovers and Paul Anka because the quota said thats what I had to work with in the next few minutes.
Rant all you like about people like Cleaver and I being "thick skulls," but we were there doing the job day in and day out while you were sucking on lollipops in your strollers. I believe unless you were there, you can theorize after the fact all you like and rewrite history, but are clueless as to the job that had to be done at the country's largest broadcast outlets because of an arbitrary quota system, driven exclusively by political forces.
That CANCRAP LAW caused me to abandon my previously held pride when I would hear a Canadian group ... for example ..... Guess Who cut, and revel in them being from Winnipeg, and doing well on the world stage. Or a Gordon Lightfoot, and marvel at his expressive writing in a song like "Beautiful." It got so I was so disgusted by any..... and almost all of the "legislated music," that immediately after the intro was completed where I had hyped some piece of overplayed crud out of profesional requirement and PD issued memo directive, and hit the vocal, I'd toss the headphones onto the console and turn the monitor off until the last ten seconds on the clock, then turn up the monitor to do the next mechanical action, like a "More Music" fast to fast jingle into a laid under instrumental hitpoint, and then be enthusiastic about playing something that was on the playlist because it was a "real hit" around the world instead of a subsidized, underwritten, overplayed, overexposed, mediocre piece of drivel that should never have made it on-air, and the record should have been held over a gas stove and turned into a salad bowl.
But then, you just wouldn't understand what it was like to have mix after mix, after mix ruined because of a slimy Liberal Party of Canada politician.
Anotherwpgguy