What kind of radio station is worse–too boring or too loud?
Depending on the decade, that was choice provided to Los Angeles
listeners, according to The Times' radio critic.

Don Page called radio in 1969 Los Angeles "worse than
terrible–you're just dull." His big issue was too many stations with
the same format. "It isn't a question of being good, but a matter of
being so incredibly alike, boring each other [and the audience] with an
indistinguishable ooze," Page wrote. Probably could write the same
thing today.

He attacked the various formats and the competition–talk, rock and
what he called middle-of-the-road music: "You're lazy and you cop out.
You're fickle and gutless. You lack imagination and foresight." Sure
wish he'd just come right out and tell us how he felt.

Ten years earlier, in a column on April 5, 1959, Page had other,
seemingly simpler concerns. "More and more stations are adopting the
blasting jingle, the outer-space newscasts [you know, those blips that
call one's attention to the latest news flash] the way-out announcer
and that agony stuff they call the Top 40," he wrote like a parent
having a bad day: "Turn down that radio!"

I was too young to notice the outer-space newscasts and the volume
increase but I remember well L.A. radio in the late '60s. The first Top
40 station I listened to was KFWB, before its shift to all news. I
heard Wolfman Jack on KDAY, thanks to my older brother who was trying
to enlighten or corrupt me. Stations such as KRLA and the early FM
stations seem so brave and wild now, I wonder how they would do on
today's airwaves (Jim Ladd still provides a glimpse of non-programmed
radio late at night on KLOS).

I'm certainly too old for most radio demographics but I'd listen just for that chance to hear something different.

–Keith Thursby