It’s 4:30 on a sweltering late-summer afternoon, and WXRT program director Norm Winer is worrying about everything but programming. He’s just returned from watching a shoot for the station’s second round of TV commercials in a year. The first–an elliptical, gnomic series featuring psychedelic lizards and bowling balls rolling backward, with suggestive slogans like “Think for Yourself” and “Move Someplace Cooler”–was the crown of an extraordinary promotional campaign that has the 18-year-old rock ‘n’ roll station flirting with its highest ratings ever. The new spots debut in just a few weeks; Winer has spent the afternoon in an un-air-conditioned north-side studio watching experimental filmmaker David Wild film a plate of spaghetti. That’s the only detail Winer will vouchsafe about the new campaign–that and a hint that the station is thinking of beckoning advertisers to a special showing of the spots with an invitation that reads: “If you liked our lizard, you’ll love our lobster.”
“Once we get a sellout,” he continues, “we can turn it into a broadcast show as well, which we’ve found has worked really well in the past.”
“Right now, Jam is talking to Cray’s manager. He may say, ‘Fuck the Loop, we don’t care.’ But the first single is probably his best shot.” The Loop–WLUP–is the biggest album-oriented rock station between the coasts; any number of conservative midwestern stations watch its playlist and follow its lead, Winer explains; if the Cray people don’t go along with his little deception, they’re probably kissing a lot of airplay good-bye. “I think they should at least give it a chance,” he says.
Of course, such constitutional consistency creates a consistency of listenership as well–one that has given the station, over the past five or six years, flat ratings. But beginning last year, possibly worried that such an extended situation did not bode well, ‘XRT began doing something about it. The daily “featured artist” component–possibly the station’s most distinctive programming element, apart from the music itself–was summarily dismissed. At the same time Winer began to tighten up programming, banning some softer and older music from the evening hours and letting more of the harder stuff creep into the days in an effort to make the station more contemporary sounding. And then there were the promotions–a slick new logo, for one, and then the TV commercials, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth, the largest and most daring move the perennially cautious station had ever made.
There are other considerations as well. Certain songs may be restricted to morning play (“-12,” for before noon), others evenings (“+6,” after six). There are also special green asterisks for the evening hours–these indicate cuts that are “familiar” only in the context of the station’s harder-edged nighttime sound. And of course some songs are “plagued”: these are the mega-hits–Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” say, or O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” or Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy”–that the station played early in their lives but are now banned on grounds of overexposure.
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“One of the most fundamental things about WXRT is unpredictability,” says Winer. “I don’t want people to be able to guess what’s going to happen from one song to the next. But I also want people in retrospect to be able to say, ‘OK, I can see why they played that.’ I don’t want us to be out of reach. I want people to figure us out.
