D Nuts || November 5, 2007

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a belated Dd anniversary rant, aimed largely at Dallas-area media's failure to live up to its artistic responsibilities. The rant put more heat on the Dallas Observer's recent failings in music coverage, but that's only because I've already spent the majority of my music writing career aiming a target at local stink-station 102.1 The Edge. Did I really need to restate the obvious?

Apparently, I did.

Josh Venable's two biggest buddies have posted their takes on the man's firing from the only "modern" rock station left in town, but both of their accounts come off as restrained. I have the convenient luxury of not being buddy-buddy with Josh, as he's done his best to ignore me ever since I threw off the gloves at my first day at work. Figures he'd take offense to this line: "Someone is green-lighting The Edge's repetitive, '90s-dwelling playlists. Make them stop."

Let's not forget in the wake of Venable's firing, and the dismantling of his award-winning local/independent show The Adventure Club, that Venable was among the green-lighters called to task. I never got a direct response from the progam director, nor Venable (the music director), about what I had to say, but about a year ago, Venable made his case in an interview with our good friend Cindy Chaffin:

It's a business. The goal is to be the "them" instead of being "the little guy." ... Everybody wants to be Goliath and have a little bit of money and decent ratings. That's another thing that people don't ever remember when they talk about the good ol' days and how much better the Edge was then and how the edge sucks now, blah blah blah, all that crap. The Edge had pretty terrible ratings back then. More than once, there was a good possibility that the Edge was going to go away. I don't want to work for a station where I"m constantly in fear of my station turning into a Hispanic station or a country station or a whatever station.

I've heard the same story from other folks in the lamer side of Dallas music--such as the Club Clearview guys, who told me very similar "we gotta make money" rhetoric as they gutted the building's innards days before losing the lease. Still, it's easy as an outsider to forget that at the end of the day, even the dreamers have to pay bills. But put the above quote of Josh's right next to these quotes of his, also from the interview, in which he gushes about his days as a 17-year-old, dying to work at The Edge when it sat at 94.5 on the dial:

I was so excited there was a radio station that was playing music that I listened to.

It was amazing to me that Lollapalooza 1 sold out two days at Starplex with a bunch of bands that weren't big bands.

It's sad to think that the same guy had been part of the long Clear Channel chain of recent, awful, national playlists for so many years. Josh talks in the Chaffin interview about how DJs have been receiving required playlists far longer than we might want to think, but man, you worked at the Edge because you trusted the people picking the playlists then. It's nice to romanticize Josh as the guy who was holding on with his own fiercely independent show--and I'm not here to trash The Adventure Club. The only fault to the show, honestly, is that its very narrow tastes aren't complimented by other thoughtful, interesting specialty shows around North Texas (with the obvious exceptions of 90.1 At Night and The Good Show). Still, I'd argue the "fiercely" part, based at least in part on The Adventure Club's inclusion of awful emo songs throughout 2005 and 2006 that were clearly out of sync with Venable's Brit-pop leanings. Was the show meddled with in any way?

But even that "fiercely" question still misses the point--that Venable settled into the comfort of putting check marks and signatures on daily playlists full of Slipknot, Seether and '90s rock retreads (or, worse, baffling replays of acts like Cypress Hill). Did he fight tooth and nail to include as much quality and local material on the air as possible? The answer might very well be classified as an internal Clear Channel matter, though from what I can tell, the station didn't sound like he did. But I noticed something interesting in the Chaffin interview--Josh laments a few rule changes in the industry that mean unpaid interns can't be paid in swag and free tickets. Kids now couldn't have a job at the station the way Josh started out over a decade ago.

Thing is, Josh, you're close to the real issue. Kids now wouldn't have a job at the station, because, well, who's gonna play the music that the next Josh is into, that would make the next Josh stalk the radio crew and beg for a job? Who'd want to work for free at The Edge now based solely on the playlist? You grew up, Peter Pan. You blew your responsibility for the sake of job security, and Clear Channel has thanked you for your tireless efforts with a big Captain Hook. Here's to hoping you think about that 17-year-old kid in your new spare time. -SM