The death of iconic WXRT-FM disc jockey Lin Brehmer not only left a hole in Chicago’s once mighty rock radio landscape, it’s a further reminder of the slow fade of the age when big personalities dominated radio and influenced the musical tastes of millions, writes William Lee at The Chicago Tribune.
Brehmer, 68, who died a week ago Sunday after battling prostate cancer, was part of a pantheon of esteemed DJs who ruled local radio and launched the careers of untold artists by simply playing their music on the air. Brehmer, who once earned the nickname “The Reverend of Rock ’n’ Roll,” combined an encyclopedic knowledge of music with heartfelt personal commentary.
Brehmer’s time on radio hearkened back to simpler times when a trusted DJ was like a member of the family much in the same way as local TV news anchors. During radio’s golden age, through the 1950s and 1960s, Chicago was full of popular DJs from Dick Biondi and WLS’ stable of young disc jockeys to Herb Kent and his fellow “Good Guys” deejays on WVON.
“Whether it was R&B radio or a progressive rock station, the success of those stations was tied as much to the personalities of the people playing the records as it was the records themselves,” said former Tribune rock critic and author Greg Kot.
“Radio was the primary way that people found out about new music and that’s no longer the case — it hasn’t been for 20 years now,” Kot said. “People don’t need the radio to find new music. It’s a click away on their cellphone.”
Industry insiders say terrestrial radio DJs will likely never reach the heights of earlier eras following the corporate takeover of radio during recent decades, though local DJs can still thrive and turn people on to new artists despite radio’s overall shrink. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that deejaying and radio announcer jobs will continue to decline, with jobs slated to sink by 4% through 2031.
By the 1970s, influential DJs gave way to more comedic on-air personalities who not only had less say over what music was played on the air, many also prerecorded their segments for play at another time.
Today, voice-tracking, or prerecorded segments are obviously “not live,” said Dave Plier, a weekend talk show host on WGN-AM 720 and board chairman of the Museum of Broadcast Communications. “It’s made to sound live. You don’t know if that host is local or not. Somebody might just be listening to that station because of the genre of music they’re playing when people used to tune into music radio to also listen to the personality.”
While radio eventually fell to a secondary medium behind television, terrestrial radio — and its larger-than-life DJs — continued to shape the musical taste of generations of listeners. As a small example, Steve Dahl’s infamous “Disco Demolition Night” served as the death knell of disco worldwide.
“By the time the 1980s arrived, you had people on air — Jonathon Brandmeier, a Steve and Garry (Meier), a Kevin Matthews — they weren’t disc jockeys, they were radio personalities,” said Plier, host of “The Dave Plier Show” and “The Sinatra Hours.” “There was good conversations happening and yet music was just a piece of that.”
“Local DJs will probably remain present because radio is still a local medium, but the amount of national DJs that feature on stations has increased due to corporate consolidation,” said Daniel Makagon, program chair at DePaul University’s college of communication and an expert on the radio industry. “It seems like the big personalities are used for morning shows. Beyond that, the notion of an influential radio DJ is probably a feature of radio in the past.”
An ominous sign of this was radio giant iHeartMedia’s pivot toward using artificial intelligence instead of human radio programmers.
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