As I have noted earlier on this blog, I grew up in Wantagh, on the south shore of Long Island, where 92.7 FM belonged to WLIR. LIR was my beloved radio station when I was in college, and it has an amazing story to tell, one that is captured in the film New Wave: Dare to Be Different (2018), directed by Ellen Goldfarb and available on Amazon Prime. This post is my detailed summary of the film, an homage to an institution that had a LOT to do with my musical evolution and sensibility.
The movie begins by noting that WLIR was the first station in the United States to play music by the following bands, all of which are now household names: The B-52s, Billy Idol, Blondie, The Clash, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, The Go-Gos, Joan Jett, Madonna, The Police, The Pretenders, Prince, The Ramones, REM, The Talking Heads, Tears for Fears, and U2.
LIR was also the first U.S.station to play a whole roster of other influential “New Wave” acts, including ABC, Adam Ant, Bananarama, Echo and the Bunnymen, The English Beat, Erasure, The Fixx, Flock of Seagulls, Howard Jones, Human League, Pet Shop Boys, The Psychedelic Furs, The Smiths, Spandau Ballet, Thomas Dolby, The Thompson Twins, Wang Chung, XTC, and Yazoo.
WLIR was the first FM station on Long Island. It began broadcasting in 1959 with a programming mix of light classical music and show tunes. By the 1970s, it was doing album-oriented rock, calling itself “Long Island’s original rock station,” playing bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, The Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, Blue Oyster Cult, and the like.
But LIR was a tiny 3,000 watt station located in Nassau County, trying to compete with 50,000 watt mega-stations like WPLJ and WNEW from nearby New York City that were playing the same music. As a result, LIR couldn’t get any advertising revenue.
According to DJ John DeBella, “What made LIR great is that it didn’t have anything. All the equipment was old and broken. It forced you to be more creative because all the equipment was working against you.” LIR broadcasted from a corrugated metal enclosure perched on the roof of an office building at 175 Fulton Ave. in Hempstead, which the employees lovingly referred to as “a tin shack,” “a garbage can,” and a “shit hole,” a place “literally held together with duct tape and bumper stickers, but there was something charming about it.”
The in-house joke was that LIR stood for “low-income radio.” The management realized they needed to do something drastic or they were going under. Program Director Denis McNamara was the one who had the vision to “dare to be different,” which became the station's mantra and motto. “We had to do something,” he recalls, and what they did was to find new music coming out of England and become the first station to broadcast it over U.S. airwaves.
As Billy Idol puts it in the film, “American rock at the end of the 70s wasn’t rock anymore. It was lightweight. It wasn’t sexy, wasn’t breaking any new bounds, wasn’t saying anything dangerous, and it had no fashion sense. Kids didn’t want their parents’ music, and they didn’t want their older siblings’ music. They wanted something for themselves.” So when LIR went to its “new music” format on August 2nd, 1982, becoming “The New Music Station,” it was a “seismic change,” according to Idol.
LIR’s change of format was a massive opportunity for these young British acts as well. Getting played on WLIR gave them a way to get around the stranglehold the BBC had on British radio.
But it was hard to get the records. They were all imports. There was no internet. You had to have the physical, vinyl records to play them on the radio. So McNamara found a record store in London that did same day shipping. The planes would leave Heathrow Airport late on Thursdays, and on Friday mornings, the DJs would go out to JFK Airport, meet the planes, and get the week’s shipment of new records.
Then – and now, of course – record companies would dictate what artists and what songs could be played and when, and radio stations simply had to fall in line. As McNamara says, “LIR went against the flow of what everyone else was doing,” and they thus angered record companies by playing songs and artists months before the dates prescribed by the corporations’ marketing plans.
The LIR DJs were real people, with distinct personalities: Denis McNamara, John DeBella, Nancy Abramson, Ben Manila, Donna Donna, Bob Waugh, Malibu Sue, and Larry the Duck Dunn.
And these DJs picked the music they would play, not some corporation. They discovered it, curated it, broadcast it, and championed it. For instance, when WPLJ and WNEW would not play U2’s first single, “I Will Follow,” WLIR did, and it is credited with launching U2’s success in the U.S. As Debbie Harry of Blondie puts it, “These were people with an appreciation of music who were brave enough to support unknown idiots and just go with it.”
A programming staple on LIR was the “Screamer of the Week” competition, in which the DJs would nominate five of the brand new, just delivered songs, and listeners would call in and vote for their favorite. Getting your song named Screamer of the Week was “an incredible honor and huge promotional bump,” according to Billy Idol. “If you got a record added to the LIR playlist, it was guaranteed to break nationally. That’s just the way it was.”
In addition, LIR had a social conscience and agenda. At a time when many in the industry believed that “women can’t rock,” LIR was the first to play numerous female artists who are now all appropriately famous, including Madonna, Joan Jett, and Chrissie Hynde. In like manner, LIR occasionally played overtly political songs like The Specials’ “Free Nelson Mandela.” “People thought we were crazy,” McNamara recalls. And when Ronald Reagan was re-elected President, Ben Manila played The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” fifteen times in a row.
All of these dynamics came together to create a passionate, loyal audience that felt like they were part of the station and so did everything the station told them to do. They were true fans – fanatics who sold out the concerts and filled the local night clubs that were mentioned on the air. LIR wasn’t just a radio station: it was a lifestyle. People lived it. And as a result, LIR was now taking millions of dollars of ad revenue away from other stations, while continuing to anger record companies by busting their marketing schemes.
So when the station applied to renew its license in 1987, the FCC rejected it for a variety of spurious reasons. The real reasons, McNamara says, were corporate interests and corruption in the FCC. According to Larry the Duck Dunn, “Politics ruled the day and killed what was probably the greatest radio station ever.” In an arch bit of irony, LIR was nominated for station of the year on its last day of broadcasting. The final song they played on the air was Sid Vicious’s deranged version of “My Way.” To the very end, then, they were utterly fearless about music.
The obvious legacy of WLIR is that the station brought a world of new music to Long Island and the U.S. Indeed, there are many who argue that MTV could not have come into existence if WLIR had not pioneered new music programming, which was quickly followed by other radio stations around the country. Over 700 artists got their first airplay in the U.S. via WLIR, and these acts sold over half a billion records.
But the real legacy of the station, according to McNamara, was that “WLIR had soul, and corporations don’t have soul.” A DJ from a competing station notes that LIR told its audience to “Dare to be different. Dare to be different is a really important thought. This radio station embodied that, lived it, encouraged its audience to do it, too, and that’s important in life. It’s a philosophy worth sharing.” Or as one of the station’s fans puts it, “LIR told you that of course you can do it. Who cares if you look like a freak? Who cares if people make fun of you? Of course you can do it.”
And that sense of being pointedly alternative, of “celebrating the freaks and misfits,” of consciously and bravely pushing back against – indeed, ignoring – the cultural norms of the time is what drew me to WLIR and its programming, and what makes me smile even today when I think about the music and its effects on me.
If you would like to hear some Screamers of the Week, some kind person (not me) has created a comprehensive chronological playlist on Spotify: