Without a promotion and marketing budget, the WMMS staff had to make do with its wits. When RCA Victor bought the side wall of the Music Grotto, which was located across the street from the Cleveland State University campus, John Gorman convinced the label and Shelly Turk, the store owner, to add the then-unofficial WMMS Buzzard logo. John Gorman / GRAY & COMPANY / John Gorman
WMMS mascott, the buzzard
A Buzzard memoir
Man who ran WMMS comes to Lodge Sunday to talk about new book
By CARL E. FEATHER - Lifestyle Editor - cfeather@starbeacon.com Star Beacon
“It wasn’t so difficult writing the book as deciding what stays in and what gets pitched,” he says.
Gorman says he wanted to capture the feeling and excitement of the era. “So much of the music we played new back then has stood the test of time,” he says.
To complement the book, Gorman created a Web site, buzzardbook. wordpress.com, which is slowly uncovering that which Kiefer could not have done – archive thousands of hours of original programming. Gorman says it’s not that station didn’t make recordings. There was a room full of them, but the tapes were reused or stored under conditions that ensured their demise.
“So much of the archives, 95 percent, were destroyed,” Gorman says.
Listeners, however, were running their cassette recorders and capturing bits and pieces of favorite Buzzard broadcasts, station IDs and on-air personalities. Since releasing the book and creating the blog, much of this material has been offered by readers and is being archived at the Web site. Both audio and video, as well as still images, are available there.
Gorman, who makes his living as a consultant to the industry, describes the current state of commercial radio as “paralysis by analysis,” but still believes there is hope for terrestrial radio if someone were willing to take a chance, like he and his staff did back in 1973.
“I still feel terrestrial radio can re-invent itself,” he says. “Every car still has a radio. The reason people are not listening is that nothing is compelling right now.”
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