Essay: Death of a Rock Radio Station: How WPLJ Became WOLD

“Those call letters [WPLJ-FM] are a legacy in the New York market and to see them disappear along with a whole staff of talented people is sad and disappointing for the future of New York radio. The replacement will be syndicated programming not connected to NY at all."— Jimmy Fink, former WPLJ disc jockey, quoted in Rodrigo Torrejon, “WPLJ Announcement: Legendary New York Radio Station's Last Broadcast Date,” The Record (Bergen County, NJ), May 9, 2019

The other morning, listening to a lifelong friend broadcast from a local college radio station, I stopped in my tracks when he said that WPLJ was coming to an end. In one fell swoop, a part of my youth—really, for me and thousands of others in the tristate area, even an indelible cultural influence—would be no more.

I hadn’t heard that PLJ—95.5 FM, around these parts—had been acquired from Cumulus by Educational Media Foundation (EMF), a Christian radio broadcaster, less than three months ago, as part of a package of six stations for the ungodly sum of $103 million.  I was all the more surprised, then, to read that the station’s format (most recently, “adult contemporary”) and letters ("a legacy," in Fink's words) would vanish.

Over the years, the King and Queen of Adult Contemporary, it can be said, are Michael Bolton and Celine Dion. Programmers have tried to make the AC market younger in recent years, as outlined in this Rolling Stone article, but the tendency remains the same: safe and boring.

When I compare the “adult contemporary” format to the rock music coming to me over the airwaves as a teen, what comes to mind is a phrase from Bob Seger’s mid-Seventies hit, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Never Forgets”: “a little bit older and a lot less bolder than you used to be.” If I became discontented with what I heard on my first choice in rock ‘n’ roll, WNEW-FM, I’d move left on the dial to PLJ.

WPLJ—which, I’ve just learned, took its letters from “White Port and Lemon Juice,” a 1950’s rhythm-and-blues song covered by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention—did not have the extended run in free-form radio enjoyed by WNEW. 

But, when I first started listening to the station 45 years ago, DJs like Fink, Pat St. John, Jim Kerr, Tony Pigg, John Zacherle, and Carol Miller used the then-new album-oriented radio (AOR) format to air “deep album cuts” that could go considerably beyond the top 40 hits by artists like Led Zeppelin, The Beatles,  Jimi Hendrix, Cream, The Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, Elton John,  Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, David Bowie, The Allman Brothers, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder and Carly Simon.

What another local DJ, WQXR's Paul Calvaconte, called the station’s Seventies-era “loose underground vibe” became history, resulting from the same forces that would overtake WNEW in the 1990s: consultants and program directors who micromanaged deejays and set lists to a fare-thee-well. They didn’t trust audiences to reach across genres and burst out of their preconceptions. They didn’t credit listeners with enough intelligence to connect the new music with the old. 

Whether the form was adult contemporary or “classic rock” (WNEW’s final incarnation), the puppetmasters of the airwaves left audiences with increasingly confined musical tastes, not terribly far removed from the conservative inclinations of the older generation they had once rebelled against.

Sometimes over the years, I have felt that my own exposure to new music stopped not long after college. In the case of WPLJ, I might catch, while out in my car on a Saturday night, an “oldies” show—meaning, in this case, the 1980s. But I felt further and further removed from it all. 

The sense of discovery and experimentation once fostered by WPLJ and WNEW  had slipped irretrievably into the past, like a long-lost chord.