What’s Up at the Loop (Part 1)
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Howard Stern spent his first few days on the local airwaves calling Steve Dahl, his new morning competitor, a “big fat pig.” If you were curious, that’s about as clever as Stern gets–and as close to the bone, for that matter. Dahl’s problem isn’t that he’s fat, it’s that he’s witless–though he’s a regular Dick Cavett compared to Stern. Stern got a lot of attention for his appearance on the MTV video awards show as a character named Fartman. There his flatulence was the digestive kind; on radio the gas collects in his head and he farts with his brain. Of course Dahl and Stern are “competing” only in the personal sense, if at all: since the stations they’re on, WLUP FM and WLUP AM respectively, are owned by the same company, their “feud” is more than a bit convenient–it’s the Loop making the best of a tough situation. Perennial ratings king Jonathon Brandmeier, simulcast on both AM and FM, finally tired of the grueling morning shift and asked for afternoon drive time. The station complied (his contract was nearly up) and moved Dahl to FM mornings. On the AM side, for those listeners (A) for whom Dahl is too sophisticated and (B) who don’t mind listening to a show that originates in New York City, there’s Stern. I gotta say that B is the one that kills me: I mean, Dahl’s a dope, but gosh darn it, he’s a Chicago-based dope.
The Loop FM’s music station was a hybrid: a cross between a classic rock station and the worst sort of restrictive album-oriented-radio blandness. Benson’s add policy was tight even by AOR standards, with no room for even Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which dominated stations from top 40 to alternative. But Benson was always a sharp-tongued defender of the Loop’s policies: to him, “serving the audience” meant getting the most listeners, and by that criterion the Loop was indeed a “good” radio station for some time.
