Dr. Demento, Jim Ladd, Mary"The Burner"Turner, Trisha Halloran,KMET, KPOI, KTYD, KGB, KPIG... Murray the "K", B. Mitchell Reed and Deirdre O'Donohue"The disc jockeys have become robots, performing their inanities at the direction of programmers who have succeeded in totally squeezing the human element out of their sound, and reducing it to a series of blips and bleeps and happy, oh yes, always happy, sounding cretins who are poured from bottles every three hours. They have succeeded in making everyone on the station staff sound the same -- asinine. This is the much coveted 'station sound.'" --AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves, Rolling Stone 1967
One day Murray received a memo telling him that only certain albums and certain cuts had been cleared for air play."At first I laughed," Murray remembers. "Then I knew it was all over. The Drake formula was coming in. I wasn't going to conform to any play list. I had promised I wouldn't quit on the air. I sent a telegram saying I couldn't conform to these regulations. Then I went to see Bob Smith. "Bob is a very smart radio man. He runs the most successful station in the world, WOR-AM. WOR-FM had been his baby. He said, 'Murray, there's no one for me to turn to. The people above me are lawyers and accountants. None of them know anything about radio. All they know is that Drake has taken station after station out of the red. There's no one to explain to what kind of culture we've created here.'"-The Black Listed Journalist"
"The freeform-radio DJ will be gone soon, perhaps banished to the purgatory of a low-profile specialty show on noncommercial radio, or a lost-in-the-fray, delocalized Web “radio†station, or a subscription-based car-only satellite radio service. But ultimately, he will cross-fade from the FM airwaves completely, disappearing into myth like the other American folk heroes before him. The radio DJ, always invisible, will then be silent, too."
-Jay Babcock
