"The best suggestion so
far is (engineer) Scott Saxon's:the Drive Without Duff" says Melnick in sly reference
to the CJAD host whose program grabs the largest share of Montreal English speaking
listeners tuned to AM radio during the weekday afternoon drive home time slot.
Cute idea, but what's Plan B?
At this point, Melnick doesn't have one. He and sidekick Terry Haig are
making this up as they go along, filling three hours of CIQC airtime with radio that isn't
like anything else on the dial.
"Who doesn't like movies
and music?" Melnick asked rhetorically. "There will be a lot more talk
about that on the show, more comedy bits. We've been playing Bill Hicks all week -
it's taken a lot of editing."
Hicks was a wildly funny Texan
who skewered everything that was phony, superficial and fundamentally dishonest in
society. The latter-day Lenny Bruce died of pancreatic cancer three years ago, too
young - he was all of 32 - and long before he'd run out of material.
Bill Hicks's act included a
suggestion for a new weekly half hour television series: Let's Hunt and Kill Billy Ray
Cyrus: "Each week, we let the hounds of hell loose and we chase that jarhead, no
talent all over the globe."
And for a sequel, Hicks
pitched Let's Hunt and Kill Michael Bolton. Another one of his pet hates was George
Michael, whom the incorrigibly politically incorrect Hicks described as "a big
girl."
Hicks was not a comic whose
work you're going to hear on Jim Duff's show any time soon. But in trying to
kick-start his late afternoon CIQC show, which has never got the ratings his talent
merits, Melnick has decided to do three daily hours of defiantly un-CJAD radio.
Heeding, the timeless advice
of his hero, Bob Dylan, who observed that "when you ain't got nothing, you got
nothing to lose," Melnick is throwing out the radio rule book.
Last week's show with No Name
included an excerpt from the old National Lampoon Radio Hour in which Michael O'Donoghue,
another dead madman, does his gruesomely hilarious impression of Ed Sullivan having
knitting needles pushed into his eyes.
"People who are a little
warped," says Melnick, "will fit into the show nicely."
Last week's shtick list also
included an On the Waterfront "prequel" in which Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger
do their famous taxi scene as infants in a sandbox ("I could been an anal
retentive").
Melnick is playing
music:Dylan, of course, plus Loudon Wainright III, Frank Zappa - artists that the dreadful
FM stations wouldn't touch with a 10-foot transmitter.
Bill Lee, the cerebral and
funny former Expos pitcher who's a daily guest on Melnick's show, has been given free rein
to talk about his many interests beyond baseball. A recent broadcast has Lee
recalling the 1968 Robert Kennedy assassination, an event that Lee saw on the television
in California while everyone on the East Coast was asleep.
"I'm too interested in
other things beyond sports o not talk about them," Melnick says. He will try to
restrict sports talk to the final hour of his 4-to-7 show, leading into Expos game
broadcast on CIQC.
"This isn't
Toronto," Melnick says, somewhat wistfully. "This market is pretty
fragmented, and I think we have most of the listeners who are interested in hearing sports
talk at that time of the day. We have to reach beyond those people."
Having given it his best shot,
Melnick has concluded that it is impossible to do three hours of sports phone-in
"unless it's the day that Patrick Roy is traded." And he admits:"I'm
getting a little bored."
If Melnick finds his gig
behind the microphone monotonous, he should try listening to what pours out of radio
transmitters and into the ears of long suffering listeners. As a friend in the
business confided the other day, the current awfulness of Montreal English radio just
takes your breath away.
We talked about Dave Patrick,
the legendary DJ/raconteur/card-carrying wildman who died last month. Patrick's
passing occasioned rueful memories of the days when originality wit and modicum of good
taste in music characterized Montreal's air waves.
Personality radio has gone the
way of great Canadiens hockey. What we hear now is mindless, soulless, thoroughly
homogenized pablum spoon-fed to program directors by radio consultants who are less
adventurous than pension-fund managers.
Where do you find good music,
or talk that isn't a soul-sapping rehash of the winning we've heard for 20 years?
"There's a void,"
says Melnick, "and there's been a void for years. No-rules radio can work if
done properly. I think people are looking for something different."
I hope he's right.
