This story is featured in CityBeat's April 5 print edition.
When Robin James was a student at Hopewell Junior School in West Chester Township, she loved the B-52’s and their massively successful, danceable 1989 hit, “Love Shack.”
When she shared that information with a school friend, she was told about a low-wattage FM radio show out of nearby Oxford that only played that kind of music and was an alternative to the hard-rock and classic hits played on bigger Cincinnati stations. That station not only spun lots of B-52’s, but also other sometimes-edgy and thoughtfully inventive modern voices like Talking Heads, R.E.M, Siouxie and the Banshees, Tracy Chapman, the Smiths, the Cure and many more.
And so, James discovered WOXY-FM, an Oxford, Ohio-based station better known as 97X for its 97.7 FM frequency. It used the exciting slogan “97X — The Future of Rock and Roll” and positioned itself to the left of Cincinnati’s often-staid and conservative popular culture. That slogan became even better known as “97X— BAM! — The Future of Rock and Roll” after Dustin Hoffman’s character in the 1988 film Rain Man, filmed in Cincinnati, vocalized the short, punchy musical break between “the” and “future” in the station’s promos.
“I thought, ‘This is really cool.’ It really is the kind of music I liked,” James tells CityBeat.
To say James still likes it would be an understatement. When she realized the 40th anniversary of modern rock station 97X would occur in 2023, she decided the time was right to pursue a book on its long history. The result, The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence, will be released May 2.
In her book, which CityBeat previewed, WOXY’s history is a proud and memorable one, though the FM station struggled to be heard in the metropolitan Cincinnati and Dayton areas because of its limited 3,000-watt power. In 2004, after the terrestrial radio station was sold, WOXY.com continued as an early adopter of internet-only broadcasting, finding an international audience but facing ongoing funding problems and ownership changes that forced it to cease operations in 2010. In the book, James does an excellent job of following and explaining all the twists and turns of the station’s legacy.
But she’s not the only one celebrating the station’s 40th anniversary. Perhaps the station’s signature event was its annual “Modern Rock 500” countdown, drawn from songs that the station’s staff believed to be influential to modern rock’s evolution. It began during the Memorial Day holiday in 1989 and continued, with one break, until 2009, and it’s back in a special edition this year.
As CityBeat’s Allison Babka has previously reported, it will be broadcast on Inhailer Radio’s website and app as well as on WGUC 90.9-HD3 in Cincinnati. The countdown will air in five 100-lap segments May 22-26 and will be repeated May 27-29. It had previously aired on 97X between 1988 and 2003 and continued on WOXY.com from 2005 to 2009.
James says she has kept the station in her mind and heart for all these decades, even as she went on to become a philosophy professor at University of North Carolina-Charlotte, an editor for philosophy and media & culture studies at publisher Palgrave Macmillan, and a busy writer who specializes in music, pop culture and the contemporary politics of gender, race and sexuality.
In her book, James celebrates how the station’s owners — Doug and Linda Balogh, Chicagoans with experience in television and advertising who paid $375,000 for the existing station’s license in 1981 and sold it in 2004 — set a role model for good radio that is still valuable today. They listened to their staff, their station’s followers and their community, James asserts, and they took seriously the spirit and lyrical, progressive pointedness of many of the “alternative” songs the station played by the likes of U2, Elvis Costello or the Pretenders. Those acts did have occasional hits on more mainstream rock stations, but WOXY did more than play them — it identified with the artists.
As part of finding out what listeners wanted, Linda Balogh in 1982 asked a group of Miami University students their thoughts. One of things people said was no one was playing the new wave they were seeing on MTV, James says.
“So that connection was there in beginning,” she says.
But 97X went way beyond that video-music cable station. Really, James says, 97X’s guiding light wasn’t MTV but rather the Clash. The British band with punk roots ironically all but formally ended in September 1983 — the same month 97X’s modern rock format began — when its critical member Mick Jones was fired.
“Their music is the quintessence of the future of Rock and Roll,” James writes in her book. “First, the Clash has released songs in many of the various genres featured on WOXY’s regular and special programs: punk (obviously), hip-hop (‘Magnificent Seven,’ ‘Lightning Strikes’), disco (‘Ivan Meets G.I. Joe,’ ‘Lost in the Supermarket’). And second, the Clash’s music expresses a worldview that resonates with WOXY’s philosophy themes of anti-racism and anti-imperialism, critiques of the mainstream music industry, and the importance of collective action and shared struggle recur throughout the band’s work.”
WOXY also brought support to a local segment of the Cincinnati population that was suppressed — young people “on the losing side of the culture war,” as James says. She came to recognize that when Hamilton County’s conservative political leaders fought against Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center in 1990 because that art museum showed some sexually controversial photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (A jury acquitted the museum of obscenity).
“I found it really interesting to think about the Mapplethorpe obscenity trial from the perspective of Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe being best friends,” James says. “She’s one of the foremothers of modern rockers, one of the original punk artists in New York. The local government literally took to court the kind of art related to the music 97X was broadcasting. That was really informative for me. I was getting a sense of what the (local) atmosphere was like politically and culturally.”
Besides being a remembrance and celebration of WOXY’s history, the book also is something more. It’s a thesis, in a way, that in its ownership, programming and outreach, the station was a role model for how to ethically seek independence in America today. According to James’ research and remembrances, it requires creating a community, not rejecting one in order to go it alone. It also requires progressivism and development of support systems, not anti-community lonerism.
“In the tons of archival material, there are people saying that 97X represented independence — it’s a value people associated with the station,” James says. “I thought this is what they mean: It’s independence to as opposed to independence from. It’s an independence that requires support. What WOXY’s history shows is the idea of ‘independence to’ really works.”
Robin James will speak about her book at 6 p.m. May 11 at Mercantile Library, 414 Walnut St., Downtown. Info: mercantilelibrary.com.
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