ABSTRACT
According to most broadcasting histories, the seminal moment in the development of radio as a mass communications medium occurred in the fall of 1920, when Frank Conrad, an engineer at Westinghouse, began transmitting programming from his jury-rigged ‘‘station’’ on the roof of his workplace. While radio had functioned as a point-to-point medium (and concomitant industry) for over 20 years, and amateur operators not so different from Conrad were already technically ‘‘broadcasting’’ (i.e., transmitting their signals over long distances with the intent that unknown others would receive them), it was Conrad’s operation that most publicly ushered in what we recognize today as not only broadcasting, but commercial broadcasting. Westinghouse, after all, soon furnished Conrad with better equipment, facilities, and even personnel in order to utilize the station, christened KDKA, as a form of advertising, to promote the sales of their radio equipment. From this quasi-mythical origin, the dominant model of broadcasting
in the United States was organized almost entirely around its ostensible technical properties (themselves a truncation of existing two-way radio technology) rather than its content. The decisive fact of broadcasting then remains the same now: that multitudes of people could be reached simultaneously with the same programming. Whether they were reached by a newscast, soap opera, baseball game, cooking show, dance band, superhero adventure, or murder mystery was, by contrast, a secondary concern. This does not mean that content per se was and has been unimportant, but rather that the primary business of U.S. broadcasting was broadcasting, i.e., transmitting a signal that the consuming public received. Regardless of the content of that signal, the radio industry
promised listeners (and, more to the point, advertisers) a distinct cultural experience, based on a rarefied physical presence, rather than a commodified copy, as with other, older cultural forms (e.g., publishing and film). In other words, if you tuned into NBC on Tuesday night, you would hear Jack Benny. Not a cheap copy of Jack Benny, nor a mere photographic image, but Jack Benny, in person, via your radio speakers. This ‘‘live,’’ commercially-directed presence (‘‘brought to you by Jell-O’’) functioned as a primary nexus of the ‘‘American system’’ of broadcasting: the organization of radio into a for-profit, one-way, hear-it-now national communications medium. As Michele Hilmes notes, the logic of this system was not only commercial; radio had a significant role in the construction and elaboration of American identity during one of the nation’s most trying periods.2 However, by the end of the 1920s, less than a decade after Conrad’s station had ostensibly inaugurated the Age of Broadcasting, the idealized vision of this ‘‘American’’ system of unique, live broadcasts was already being seriously challenged by its aural opposite: the recording. This chapter concerns the transition of radio from a live to recorded
medium, a shift that set the stage for television’s similar move in the 1950s. As the previous chapter showed, by the early twentieth century, culture was already mass-oriented, industrialized, and commodified. Physically extant cultural objects ranging from prints to poems were bought, sold, traded, copied, collected, adapted, and commercially reproduced. Phonograph records were among these objects by the time radio technology began to spread in the 1910s and 1920s, and amateurs and professionals alike were already regularly broadcasting them, despite the emerging dominant industrial, cultural, and legal orientation of the medium towards live programming. As the national network-based American system took hold, recordings were simply more convenient and affordable for stations seeking to fill empty schedules and sell local sponsorships. Moreover, in addition to standard, domestic phonograph records, entire programs were being recorded by the end of the 1920s, or rather pre-recorded, in the form of electrical transcriptions, produced for later playback rather than live transmission. While the independent firms that produced these high-fidelity recordings, such as the World Broadcasting Service and the Frederick W. Ziv Company, agreed with the major networks that radio was premised upon reaching audiences, they disagreed about the means to do so. Instead, they bypassed the idea of liveness entirely, selling their programs directly to radio stations and advertisers on an ad hoc basis. The networks’ vision of radio was national and simultaneous; the transcription companies’ was local (or regional) and asynchronous. However, as the use of transcriptions and records expanded and became more accepted, even the networks eventually embraced the logic of recording by the late 1940s. Along the way, critical debates about the industrial, legal, and cultural status of broadcasting
recordings occurred in the pages of Broadcasting, at the annual National Association of Broadcasters’ convention, in Federal agency hearings, and in hundreds of meetings nationwide between stations, advertisers, and talent. The very forms of broadcasting were taking shape in these evolving discussions and practices, resulting in decisions and standards that would affect not only radio, but continue into television several years later. By the end of the 1940s, industrialized repetition had become standard
practice on radio, as recordings were the dominant program source, with live material reduced to an increasingly marginal status. However, even though these programs existed in tangible forms (i.e., as transcription disks), and even though recorded music on radio was becoming a massively repeated national standard (via the development of formats and the postwar resurgence of the record industry), reruns, as we would recognize them today, were still largely an alien concept. While thousands of older episodes of programs physically existed on transcription disks, they were rarely ever heard again on radio. The development of repetition on radio from the 1920s through 1940s was thus concerned more with the principle of fixing program material in mutable, transportable forms, forms that represented fixed capital, but were in practice only potentially repeatable. Regardless, the eventual dominance of this principle fostered a technical, cultural, legal, and industrial environment in which extant texts were eventually repeated, although it would take a new medium, and new priorities, to establish this practice in American culture. Before exploring the uses of recording on radio, it is worthwhile to
briefly consider how this medium repeated so much of the culture that preceded it. Like publishing and film, radio drew forms, genres, and texts from familiar cultural sources. While each of these forms had to be adapted to an aural medium, they all retained enough of their original elements to constitute a form of repetition. That is, when Lux Radio Theater presented ‘‘Dark Victory,’’ for example, they were presenting it primarily as an adaptation of the film, rather than as a distinct radio production. Comic strips were a ready source of radio material, since they already provided known characters and situations, and were followed by millions daily. Several popular strips became long-running radio serials at this time, including Little Orphan Annie, Superman, and Tarzan. These adaptations indicate how repetition continually evolves with new industrial, cultural, legal, and technological forms and practices. Indeed, the owners of existing cultural properties typically seek out these new avenues, as the two main newspaper feature syndicates, King and United, did in the mid-1930s in soliciting the radio rights to their popular comic strips and columns.3 Thus, even though radio was certainly a ‘‘new’’ technology and cultural form, and even though the dominant model of broadcasting was premised upon liveness and simultaneous presence, as a medium it was as reliant upon established industrialized cultural forms as the audio recording and film industries had been a generation earlier.
Live vs. Recorded
