These were voices seeking a calling, not a career - voices that clicked with audiences seeking the same thing. Most of these FM disk jockeys, such as Tom Donahue in San Francisco, followed music more than political movements. This was activist radio, in which listeners were exhorted to support Greenpeace or to jam the White House switchboard in 1977 as part of a successful campaign to repeal funding for paraquat poisoning of marijuana plants. Ironically, success helped close the window on such behavior by the 1980's. Whiffs of increased revenue led the Merlins of market research to create formats that were unimaginative, shrunken, repetitive and safe as often as they were successful.
Nobody wants to hear all that political junk anyway.
By then, rock itself had fragmented, become less racially integrated, more producer-driven, more about tunes than about transforming society. Mr. Ladd devotes just one-sixth of his book to the period between John Lennon's murder in December 1980 and the day in 1987 when he and his colleagues at KMET were replaced by an announcers format. Eight radio stations, including Mr. Ladd's longtime employer, bear altered call letters, even though promotional materials identify KMET as the radio station where Mr. Ladd did his major work before hitting the format wall. Maybe a lawyer quailed before drug references or unflattering incidents involving program directors and general managers. This methodology seems a tad hallucinatory to be history.