Listening for Detroit Radio History with the Vertical File Carleton Gholz
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
1 The Scream and Other Tales: Listening for Detroit Radio History with the Vertical File Carleton Gholz We sway the minds of our community and if we can’t stand up for a principle, we don’t need to be on the air. — Martha Jean the Queen (Brown, 1970) While [sic] all the daily tales of defaulting cities, pro- posed increases in income taxes for city residents, cuts in services and threatened layoffs, a little non-static music really clears the clutter from the brain, thus per- mitting fresh perspectives to enter. Music can be much more than a part of the décor in an airport waiting room and its values go beyond its use as a substitute for novocain [sic] at the dentist’s office. — Ken Cockrel (Cockrel, 1975) “They say radio is war. It may be a physical war, but it’s not a mental war. What gets played here shouldn’t be judged by what’s happening in New York or Los Angeles,” [Mojo] says. “They should take a look at what’s happening here in Detroit, at unemployment. They should count the raggedy cars and the people walking around at 3 a.m. with nowhere to go.” — Electrifying Mojo (Borey, 1982) In the E. Azalia Hackley Collection’s “Detroit Radio” subject file at the Detroit Public Library, a handful of newspaper clippings describe a radio strike held on then AM radio station WJLB. The Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, and Michigan Chronicle picked up the story. The first week-long walkout ended just before Christmas 1970 after then black program 12 The Scream and Other Tales 13 director Al Perkins had been fired (Wittenberg, 1970). Detroit News writer Brogan quoted “disc jockey” Martha Jean as saying, “I’ve been in radio 15 years … and I’m still not able to be an individual. … It’s pathetic to have [to] take a black or white side but we’re fighting for everybody in this radio industry. Black disc jockeys are insecure because we have so few places to work (1970a).” Strikers asked for support from the AFL-CIO (Wittenberg, 1970) in addition to existing representation by the National Association of Television and Radio Announcers (NATRA) (Brown, 1970). At one point the strikers, who were also supported by the NAACP, moved their picket to WJLB’s Booth Broadcasting owner John L. Booth’s home in the East Side Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe Farms (Detroit News, 1970a). Though a Wayne County Judge declared the picketing illegal (Brogan, 1970b), “sympathizers” eventually joined strikers outside the station’s downtown studios in the Broderick Tower with signs that read “Black management for a black community” and “We don’t need a plantation station!” (Michigan Chronicle, 1970b). The strikers initially “won” the strike, with Perkins reinstated and Norman Miller hired as the first black general manager (Detroit News, 1970b). But by January, black staff understood that promises had not been kept and Miller was General Manager in name only. That’s when the Queen screamed. A Free Press writer wrote, “Startled listeners heard Martha Jean Steinberg, a popular personality who conducts a program of music and phone con- versation under the name of Martha Jean the Queen, gave [sic] a little scream, and then all was silence” (Mackey, 1971). Another Free Press reporter elaborated: “The scream brought a deluge of telephone calls to Detroit police from concerned listeners who feared she [the Queen] had been hurt” (Wendlend, 1971). Steinberg and several others locked themselves into the on-air studios and held a sit-down strike. Another clipping in the file, from the Detroit Free Press, shows a photo, taken by Free Press photographer Dick Tripp, of Al Perkins reading a handwritten note from behind the studio glass, the door blockaded with chairs (see Figure 1.1). Memory of this strike, as well as evidence that it ever happened, is largely gone except within the dusty, yellowed, aging vertical file in an archive established in 1943 and dedicated to blacks in the performing arts. The legacy of the strike – what’s at stake in remembering it today – is at the heart of this chapter. Here I make two related arguments. The first follows radio scholar Newman’s (2000) position that post-war black radio stations (in her research, Memphis station WDIA) provided “a new space for entertainment, information, music, citizenship and ‘goodwill,’” 14 Figure 1.1 Mackey, R. (1971) Employee Sit-In Silences Radio Station for 3 Hours. 12th January. Used by permission of Detroit Free Press The Scream and Other Tales 15 and, “led to the increased participation of Memphis African Americans in the mainstream of commercial life of the region” (pp. 76 and 236). Drawing from the Hackley vertical file, I will provide evidence that WJLB participated in creating a similar place for black Detroiters’ enter- tainment, news, and, at times, protest, for over 70 years. At the same time, I extend Newman’s argument by diachronically following the ver- tical file beyond the immediate post-war period into the 21st century. The goal here is to, for the first time, set down an archival spine for an integral history of Detroit black radio history. WJLB, its managers, and on-air talent continue to struggle, as the Queen and her cohort did forty plus years ago, over what exactly constitutes radio as a space of listening not only in Detroit but, through corporate ownership and online-streaming, nationally and internationally. This chapter then pre- sents a provisional narrative that I hope will encourage future research, including my own, on exactly what is at stake in recovering the cultural laboring of radio in a city like Detroit. Aural History Why is this narrative of the classical network era to the convergence era so ephemeral in Motown, the capital of 20th-century music? The status of the Hackley Collection (HC) within a 150-year-old, under- funded library, and the lack of archives within the station itself, go to the heart of how we listen to our past and present. In recent years, the City of Detroit’s economic struggles, including its cultural expressions, have become focal points for discussing the health of the American Dream. However, this discussion has rarely strayed from the use of hackneyed factory metaphors, worn out success-and-failure stories, and an ever-narrowing cast of characters. The result is that the com- mon sense understanding of Detroit’s musical and cultural legacy tends to end in 1972 with the departure of Motown Records to Los Angeles, if not even earlier in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1967. In my larger research (2011), as well as my activism as Founder and Executive Director of the Detroit Sound Conservancy, I provide an oral history of Detroit’s post-Motown aural history and in the process make available a new urban imaginary for judging the city’s well-being. To do this I utilize archival research and interviews in order to recover the life stories of a group of Detroiters in their struggle to change and be changed by Detroit’s soundscape during the post-Motown era. A diachronic study, my work starts by revisiting Detroit’s role in the modern soundscape from musicians, dancers, promoters, and critics 16 Carleton Gholz who experienced the city’s numerous ballrooms and clubs, listened to its charismatic radio DJs, and produced its studio-driven sound. However, I also pay special attention to the emergence of a new sound- scape in the 1970s with a new set of heroes – club DJs – and an audience that both reflected and resisted the racial, sexual, and class hierarchies of the time. Detroiters experienced the impact of this subterranean population in the ensuing years as the genres of disco, hip-hop, house, and techno emerged and the city’s residents mixed together as they had rarely done before or since. This chapter then is one piece of this larger argument. Arnold (2008) argues that the 1996 Telecommunications Act has not increased diversity in ownership or encouraged “localism,” local pro- gramming “in the Public Interest.” He then argues that stations and the Federal Communications Commission need to maintain better records so that communication researchers can hold them accountable to “local- ism,” what Arnold summarizes as “local community standards” (p. 8). This is just one consequence of Detroit’s sonic aporias. The other, broader consequence, is the one already foregrounded by Barlow in Voice Over, his 1999 ground-breaking primary-source work on black radio. Barlow contends that: Especially since the late 1940s, when it emerged as African Americans’ most ubiquitous means of mass communication – surpassing the black press – black radio has been a major force in constructing and sustaining an African American public sphere. It has been the coming-together site for issues and concerns of black culture: lan- guage, music, politics, fashion, gossip, race relations, personality, and community are all part of that mix. Moreover, black radio has been omnipresent on both sides of the color line, part of the shared public memory that dates back to the 1920s and has deep roots in the broader popular culture. (p. xi) Despite Barlow’s confident claims, cultural spaces like radio continue to be relegated to the background by those who claim, like Martelle (2012) and Thompson (2001), to want to know what has gone wrong in Detroit and what might happen to change it. By grounding my work in the world’s oldest still extant, but largely undatabased, black performance archive, as well as a selection from its 275,000 vertical file items (Minor, 2015), I supplement those political-economic findings by dislodging Detroit radio history from the nostalgia genre where it currently resides (Carson, 2000).