by Jeff Sharlet
Near the end of a song called “Hey, Hey, Hey,” Teko jumped and landed on the two-step riser at the front of the stage and it betrayed him, sliding away like a ship leaving and sending him crashing backward. He landed on the crown of his skull and his body followed, flattened, and shuddered, his left hand clutching the mike into which he continued to scream, his right flailing its beat even faster. We all saw it at the same time: the sign, the proof, that the Riverboat Gamblers were going to save us, that Teko was, in fact, the Future of Rock: The hand in the air had begun to bleed at the palm.
We were wrong, of course. The Future of Rock has nothing to do with a sound or a mood or a pose. Of the many brilliant paradoxes spawned in the age of big media, the cleverest is this: Not even self-destructive ecstasy can cause a rumble of indigestion in the belly of the whale that has swallowed rock, pop, and radio whole. Not even nihilism matters anymore.
Teko jolted off the floor, bit the mike, and launched into another song: “I get the feelin’ you’re gonna need a feedin’! / Let’s eat! Let’s eat! Let’s eat!”
A few minutes later Clear Channel’s man jammed himself into the edge of the crowd, grinning and rocking his head as the singer leaped from the stage and drove into the audience, swinging his bloody hand like a wrecking ball. Clear Channel’s man loved it. Bryan Dilworth was a big guy with small eyes and a head of thinning red hair that brought to mind Curly of the Three Stooges, and when he was in what he called “that moment,” he looked like a joyous idiot savant of rock, a true-heart, whammy-bar metal monster. He grinned and rocked his head; he stopped scanning the room and actually watched the band. He elbowed me, nodding toward the Riverboat Gamblers, as if to say, See? See?
When the song ended Dilworth stepped back from the crowd, returned to the bar in the next room, and ordered another Jameson’s.
“Dude,” he said. “That is what I’m fucking talking about.”
Meaning the scene, the variables, “the combustibles”: everything he claimed Clear Channel could never buy. That included him. At various times, Dilworth told me he worked for Clear Channel, or didn’t work for Clear Channel, or Clear Channel simply didn’t matter. Sometimes he called Clear Channel “the evil empire”; sometimes he said it was the best thing that ever happened to his town. It was hard to know which Dilworth to believe: the one who took me up to the cluttered office of his private company, Curt Flood Booking (named for the legendary center fielder who fought for and won free agency for players), two stories above the Khyber Pass, to play me tracks from a band he’s managing, the Burning Brides, on a cheap boom box perched on a chair in the middle of the room, accompanied by his own Van Halenesque air guitar; or the one who took me on a tour of a Clear Channel hall and conceded that the paychecks that mattered came from Clear Channel, that he had a Clear Channel e-mail address and a Clear Channel phone number, that he was in truth a Clear Channel “talent buyer” responsible for filling the calendars of a dozen Clear Channel venues around the city. At times Dilworth spoke of Clear Channel Philadelphia in the first person. “I am living proof,” he told me more than once, “that Clear Channel Philadelphia is going to rock.”
This flexibility was what made Dilworth such a valuable asset. Unlike Starbucks or Chipotle, Clear Channel does not build its empire from new outlets but rather goes from town to town and buys local operations. “They look for the super cool indie guy,” a booking agent in Chicago told me, describing Clear Channel’s decision to put Dilworth on the payroll. Clear Channel has Dilworths in every city with a scene, and what makes them so effective is precisely that their affiliation with the company is subject to doubt, even in their own minds. Dilworth develops “baby bands” in clubs like the Khyber on his own time and filters the most marketable of them to the more lucrative venues he books as his alter ego, a Clear Channel talent buyer. Such a double role appears to be part of the Clear Channel business plan, in which the independents who should be an alternative to Clear Channel instead become the company’s farm team. As a result, live music is following the route taken by radio. Songs that sound the same are performed in venues that look the same and even have the same name: identically branded venues, all controlled by Clear Channel, brick-and-mortar embodiments of KISS, the FOX, and the ZONE.
“Everything is so fucked,” said Dilworth, another shot of Jameson’s at his lips. “Music business my ass. Take the ‘music’ off and that’s what it is.”
Dilworth drank the shot. Then he was talking about the Riverboat Gamblers again: Those dudes got it, they’re going places, and Dilworth would take them there, Clear Channel all the way. That’s not monopoly, said Dilworth, it’s business in America. “Deregulation set this table a long time ago. I’m not taking a ‘can’t beat ’em then join ’em’ attitude, but . . .” He trailed off because, of course, he was.
One night, when Dilworth and I were in his office, he showed me his first gold record, awarded for a small role he had played in the success of the band Good Charlotte. A very small role, he said; gold records get passed around freely when a record company sees a future in a relationship.
“A down payment?” I said.
“Yeah, man, it’s like, a favor for a favor.”
“What’s the difference between that and payola?”
Dilworth guffawed and looked at me like I was the dumbest kid in school. “It’s all payola, dude.” Then his shoulders slumped, and he stopped laughing.
AT TIMES DILWORTH SEEMED like an old whiskey priest, in love with an institution that always let him down. He said he believed in rock, said it had never failed him. He knew that comparing rock—or any pop music—to religion is a cliché, but like so many people in the music business he was equal parts faith and cynicism. And he was right: Pop is religion, a source of stories and a conduit for myths, the smoke and mirrors by which large groups of people get together and, as Clear Channel CEO Randy Michaels put it, get “vulnerable.” By pop I don’t mean just bubblegum but also “alternative rock” hip-hop, “urban,” bebop, “golden oldies,” funk, “smooth jazz,” postpunk, and even the tuneless monologues of bullshit artists and confessors talking for hours about taxes and wars and whether or not you should leave your husband, any sound that seems to gain its vital force not so much from the particular notes played or the words raved as from the fact that listening to them is experienced as some kind of shared revelation.
That’s a renewable resource, and so long as it keeps coming you can keep selling the same epiphanies wrapped up in new packaging. Clear Channel didn’t invent this business model, it merely refined it, dreamed not of owning the means of production but the means of distribution, looked out across the airwaves the way cattle ranchers once gazed upon the open prairie, saw that what was on paper ours, could, for all practical purposes, be theirs. The idea of public airwaves is a compelling notion of how media should work, but as a reality? “There is,” FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein told me, “virtually nothing left. We’ve almost completely lost that ideal.” That ideal is what might be called a “legal fiction,” in the sense that we must continue to operate as if the airwaves were public, since to acknowledge otherwise would require either conceding the last meaningful commons altogether, or a kind of radical action that would demand more of our nation-under–rock and roll than our devotion to our favorite bands, no matter how good they make us feel or how hard they rip it up or how true their lyrics seem. What do the commons matter, when Clear Channel gives us what we want?
What matters is not a zeitgeist or a paradigm or anything that can be dismissed simply as fashion. It’s not even greed. What matters now is the process. “Cross-selling.” “Clustering.” A confluence of car radios and concert halls, the drinks at the bar, the ticket that gets you in the door, the beat you dance to. “Anything you can do to be associated with the music, you try to do,” a Clear Channel executive with forty years in radio told me. This is not sinister, nor is it especially new. The mus
ic business, in its varied forms, has always depended on symbiosis. Clear Channel wants you to identify with the brand so fully that you don’t recognize it as a brand at all but rather as yourself. The executive gave me an example. “Suppose you like Dave Matthews,” he said. “We like Dave Matthews. We have Dave Matthews together.”
To achieve this mind-meld, Clear Channel has designed itself as a self-contained, nationwide feedback loop, calibrating the tastes of its listeners and segmenting them into market-proven “formats.” Clear Channel operates in thirteen major formats, and although some of them are nearly indistinguishable, they are nevertheless finely tuned: For example, listeners can choose between “AC” (Adult Contemporary) and “Hot AC,” or among “CHR” (Contemporary Hits Radio), “CHR Pop,” and “CHR Rhythmic.” John Hogan, the radio division’s CEO, boasted that in a single year the company would make more than 2 million phone calls to survey its listeners, a process that would produce around ten thousand local-audience research reports.
As these reports are generated, the company can respond rapidly. “If we have a CHR PD”—program director—“in, you know, Dayton, Ohio, who figures out a great way to package up a bit, or a great promotion, or comes up with something clever and innovative, we can almost instantaneously make it available to CHR radio stations across the country.” Then, for a given advertiser, the company can align all its CHRs to hit one “formatic target”—a demographic. Hogan suggested teenage girls. “A great advertiser would be the Crest Whitestrips. In the past, if Crest had wanted to use radio, they would have had to call a different owner in every market. There would have been no way to link together those stations with, you know, a common theme. A common execution.”
Such harmony extends to the company’s concert business as well. “There’s a lot of conference calling between cities,” a booking agent named Tim Borror told me, “these former independents talking to one another, letting each other know what’s going on.” Another independent booking agent and a Clear Channel talent buyer, neither of whom would allow themselves to be named, confirmed this practice, adding that such calls take place almost on a weekly basis. The calls can launch a band or flatten it. “At a certain point, there’s only one place to go—Clear Channel—and it doesn’t matter whether or not they make you a fair offer,” Borror said. “And pretty soon they don’t have to make you a fair offer. And they can decide what band is playing and what band isn’t.”
I asked John Hogan why I should believe that Clear Channel would never use its combined dominance of radio and live events to punish an artist—or a politician—who did not cooperate with the company. “I can’t imagine a scenario where it would make any business sense at all,” he replied. To use the power, he said, “would be to damage it.”
Clear Channel doesn’t have to actively be “the evil empire,” because everyone knows that it could be. With so much of music and entertainment determined by, produced by, broadcast by, measured by, and defined by Clear Channel, the company need not exercise its control in order to wield it. Clear Channel is a system so pervasive that it relieves its participants—consumers, bands, employees, even executives—of the responsibility to object, and of the ability to imagine why they would ever do so.
CLEAR CHANNEL’S HEADQUARTERS are in San Antonio, but its heart, such as it is, is in Denver. In Denver, Clear Channel owns half the rock stations on the dial, as well as the region’s number-one station, the news/talk KOA. It owns the Fillmore, co-owns the Universal Lending Pavilion, controls the rights to the Pepsi Center, home of the Broncos, and in 2001 pried a sweetheart deal out of the city for booking shows at the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre, a venue that’s carved out of the bloodred stone of the Rocky Mountain foothills and is as much of a temple as pop music can claim. The city is spoken of within Clear Channel as a sort of wind tunnel where it can, depending on how you look at it, try out new tactics or see what it can get away with. Or, as a Clear Channel DJ called Uncle Nasty put it, “Denver is the farm.” Uncle Nasty’s Denver show also broadcasts as “local” on Clear Channel stations across the American West. “I take all the Denver shit out,” he said, “and repackage it for wherever ever it’s going. Radio went from pulling records to pulling CDs to having a password.” Now, he said, it’s not even that; he just pushes buttons.
I went to Denver to meet Jesse Morreale, an independent promoter who was suing Clear Channel. Morreale was one of the biggest independents in the country, but he was also one of the last. He’d persuaded one of the so-called Big Four law firms in Denver to represent him, but even if they could prove that Clear Channel Radio and Clear Channel Entertainment work together to shut out other promoters and threaten artists who work with them, there was a good chance his company, Nobody in Particular Presents, would be out of business by the time the case reached any kind of conclusion. In the meantime, Morreale had been silenced; Clear Channel won a protective order from the court, and although Morreale was happy to complain, he could not give me particulars.
Nor would the minor rock stars who came through town while I was there. Morreale took me to shows by arena rockers, alt-country crooners, and bands so bland that they could not be classified. The best was Cradle of Filth, a death-metal band from England with a cult following. The show featured a trapeze, lots of sparks, and a stilt walker costumed as a giant lobster; the band, dressed in leather bondage gear, sounded awesomely like a car running out of oil crashing into a lawnmower grinding up gravel. But afterward, on the tour bus, the lead singer assured me that he would “never” say anything against Clear Channel; he hoped his loyalty would be rewarded with a radio hit. Another band, a punk-pop threesome called the Raveonettes, at first said they hadn’t heard of Clear Channel, then admitted that they had, and then offered me a beer and asked if we couldn’t please instead talk about rock-and-roll music. At another show, while a band called Revolutionary Smile played, a record-company agent clinked shots with me and said, “Rock and roll!” but when Morreale told him I was writing about Clear Channel, he asked for my notes. “I’m going to need those,” he said, trying to sound official. I would have said no, but since all I had written down was “Fred Durst,” lead singer of Limp Bizkit, and the guy looked like he might cry, I tore the page out and gave it to him.
So I was driving around Denver thinking that my trip was pretty much a bust, when I heard a prerecorded spoof ad for “Butt Pirates of the Caribbean.” It consisted mainly of the DJ reading, in a sneering lisp, a list of actors he considered “homo.” This was nothing unusual. I had been listening to Clear Channel radio all over the country and had found that gay jokes ran second only to “camel jockey” or “towel head” humor. In the age of media consolidation, gay bashing is good business, sensational without requiring the wit involved in actual comedy, rebellious without really threatening the status quo. Like the knee-jerk distortion of a Limp Bizkit song, the fag gags of the local morning crew are there to assure listeners that someone, somewhere, is being offended by what they themselves are pretending to enjoy, that by tuning into Clear Channel you’re proving your independence from a homogenized culture.
Back at my hotel I called the local Clear Channel headquarters and asked for the man in charge. I was surprised to get a call back from Clear Channel’s regional vice president, Lee Larsen, who invited me out to see him that very morning.
I wasn’t dressed for the meeting—the same jeans I’d worn to see Cradle of Filth, muddy boots, and a hangover—but Larsen put his fine leather loafers up on the coffee table between us and his arms behind his head and made me feel right at home, enjoying his 270-degree view of the Rockies. At fifty-eight, Larsen still wore his sandy hair in a modest pompadour, and although he had some girth on him, his tall frame and thick shoulders gave him the look of a linebacker. He started on the air forty years ago but made his career as a manager. “Lee is a great example of a guy that was successful under the pre-1996 deal,” John Hogan later told me, speaking of the days w
hen working in radio meant working for yourself or for a small company. “And one of the very few that made the turn to what is really a different business.” On a pedestal near the center of his office sat an antique wooden radio, flanked by actual Broncos helmets. He told his secretary to hold his calls and told me to fire away: He loved talking about radio. When I asked him what he liked to listen to himself, he replied with a long and diverse list of stations—none of them Clear Channel—that marked him as a man of broad but refined tastes.
Which, he said, he would never inflict on his listeners. He was a staunch believer in Giving the People What They Want. “This whole society,” he said, “is based on majority rules.” There is no such thing, he said, as “lowest common denominator”; there is only democracy, and in the music world Clear Channel is its biggest purveyor. The best thing about democracy is that there is so much of it. He likened it to pizza. “If I take one slice of the audience, and it’s the biggest slice, and it’s the ‘lowest common denominator’ slice, whatever you want to call it, guess what? There’s lots of slices for the other guy.” As evidence of this bounty, he gestured over his shoulder. At first I thought he wanted me to look at the view of the Rockies behind him, but it turned out he was thinking of the franchise-lined highways I’d driven to get there. “Who’d have thought there could be so many different fast-food restaurants as there are?”
