Bloomberg News

By Mark Beech

March 21 (Bloomberg)—On a wet, gloomy night in 2002, eight actors huddled in an old printing plant in Washington to recreate Orson Welles’s ``The War of the Worlds’’ broadcast, one of radio’s most daring moments.

Their mission: to provoke a stir for upstart XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. At the time, Programming Director Lee Abrams was urging his staff to use ``Morse code, radio dramas, phone, nature, sampled harp, bagpipes’’—whatever it took to set XM apart. ``If you sound like FM, you’re fired,’’ he said.

That scene is recounted by Marc Fisher in ``Something in the Air,’’ one of two new books that celebrate the birth, metamorphosis and potential future of radio in the age of iPods and YouTube. Taken together, these volumes show how radio became an enduring force in American culture.

``Something in the Air’’ traces the evolution of U.S. radio from tiny backyard stations into what became the omnipresent hum of music, news and opinion waking Americans up before dawn, keeping them company during rush-hour commutes and lulling them to sleep late at night.

People who changed the medium along the way included disc jockey Alan Freed, who played the music that became rock ‘n’ roll, and the man who auditioned Elvis Presley, Sam Phillips. Over the years, Americans grew up to the warm tones of Brucie Morrow, the chatter of unhurried ``night flies’’ such as Jean Shepherd and the gratuitous rudeness of Howard Stern and other ``shock jocks.’’

``American radio—like the pop culture it has helped to create, like the country it speaks to—is ever adapting,’’ Fisher writes.

`Is Radio Doomed?’

A Washington Post columnist, Fisher unwinds the story through telling anecdotes. The book opens, for example, in 1949 with Todd Storz, the 25-year-old son of an Omaha brewery owner, raising cash to buy KOWH, his first radio station. His timing seemed off: Jack Benny, Bing Crosby and Johnny Carson had already migrated to television. That same year, Life magazine asked, ``Is radio doomed?’’

Storz hit on an answer while hanging out in diners and nightspots, where he saw clients feeding nickels into jukeboxes to hear their favorite songs time after time. So he decided to give people what they wanted by introducing a Top 40 play list.

His success both made history and fueled an enduring argument over whether he had cheapened culture. Storz pleaded no contest: ``I do not believe there is any such thing as better or inferior music,’’ he said. ``If the public suddenly showed a preference for Chinese music, we would play it.’’

`Me and Mrs. Jones’

Fisher, who spent his teens with one ear glued to a transistor radio waiting for songs like Billy Paul’s ``Me and Mrs. Jones,’’ argues that the medium created a ``shared pop culture.’’ It broke down color barriers and became a ``birthing room of the counterculture,’’ changing everything from fashion to politics.

He accepts that many listeners are now tuning out, as they switch to iPods and radio becomes ``less fun, less creative, and just plain less worth listening to.’’ Yet he sees hopeful signs in digital radio, pointing to the rise of Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and XM, the company it’s seeking to buy.

While Fisher contemplates the place of radio in American culture, Steve J. Wurtzler presents in ``Electric Sounds’’ a painstaking history of how innovations in the recording and transmission of sound spawned radio networks, advertising-paid broadcasting and the music and movie industries.

Entertain—or Educate?

The book traces the birth of companies that grew up to be AT&T Inc., Time Warner Inc. and CBS Corp. It shows how they grappled with hard choices between rival sound systems as well as questions about whether their job was to entertain, educate or simply make money.

Wurtzler, who has taught film and media studies at Georgetown and Illinois State universities among others, wisely buries his weighty academic source notes in 100 pages at the end. The resulting narrative remains educational and exhaustive, though its duller passages have dead air—something absent from Fisher’s entertaining volume.

``Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation’’ is from Random House (375 pages, $27.95). ``Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media’’ is from Columbia (393 pages, $34.50).

(Mark Beech writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Mark Beech in London at mbeech@bloomberg.net .

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