Please join me for my Cool Tunes radio show Saturdays from 10PM to Midnight (Eastern) through the airwaves (91.3) in the Cleveland/Akron area, or for the rest of the world, via the WAPS web site. I play modern rock, punk, electronica, jazz, reggae, ska, roots rock, Americana, blues, world, funk, hip hop, avant garde, and a fair amount of whatever.

It is the greatest pleasure to have a radio home where my eccentricities are not only tolerated but appreciated. PD Bill Gruber is one of the last of the real radio men in an era of soulless, formulaic programming by vast media corporations that have sucked the imagination and individuality out of commercial radio, rendering the national airwaves into a monolithic, homogenized cloud of conformity.

Though greatly facilitated by FCC deregulation over the last 10 years, the process has been under way since the mid-'70s when someone realized that money was to be made from the static-free, stereo, music-friendly FM bandwidth. A perfect synecdoche of this entire process is Cleveland's own WMMS. The legendary "Buzzard" has evolved from a free-form "progressive" station in the early-'70s, through various forward-looking rock-oriented formats, scandals, and revolutions, living off a reputation for breaking new music matched progressively less and less by reality, arriving at the cookie cutter ACDC-Metallica-Linkin Park agg-rock mess that it is today. Adding insult to injury, the station is only manned by local (utterly generic) jocks from 3PM to 6AM, relying on syndicated Clear Channel ciphers for the key morning and afternoon slots.

This from the station whose reputation and clout (along with free lakefront property from the city) literally brought the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to Cleveland. When you ask someone why the Rock Hall should be in Cleveland, they mutter something about Alan Freed inventing rock and roll radio on WJW here in the early-'50s (his Moondog Coronation Ball in '52 is believed to be the first rock and roll concert), but of course Freed came to real prominence (and eventually shame, degradation, and death) after moving to WINS in New York (establishing a pattern of chronic talent drain that is the area's bane to this day), which they don't mention. They also mention WMMS' importance in breaking Bruce Springsteen out of his NY-area stronghold, giving David Bowie a foothold in the US, before they finally mention something about Cleveland historically having higher-than-average record sales figures. They attribute this last dubious claim even more dubiously to WMMS' reputation for breaking new talent, helping establish the Cleveland public's "voracious" hunger for new and adventuresome music.

Even these weak claims to rock and roll importance are crap - the last major bands Cleveland help break in the US were probably Roxy Music and Queen in the EARLY-FREAKING-'70s, talk about living on faded glory; I won't even go into the scandal involving 'MMS stuffing the ballot box in the Rolling Stone radio poll every year they won it. Cleveland's "voracious" appetite for new music is better reflected by the fact that it didn't even have a commercial modern/alternative rock station - WENZ "The End" - until 1992. My grandmother had an alt rock station before that.

The defenders of the Rock Hall in Cleveland don't bother to claim that Cleveland is a spawning ground of major artists. Other than Freed, no one inducted into the Rock Hall has any strong connection to Cleveland unless you include Joe Walsh as a member of the Eagles. Walsh isn't even from Cleveland, he's from New Jersey. He went to Kent State and formed the James Gang there. He didn't even join the Eagles until they were already established - he was basically brought in as a hired guitar gun for Hotel California.