That Was Then. This Is...Then

Up on stage, John Tenaglia looks satisfied. The boxy WSHE owner holds a microphone in one hand, shields his eyes against the glare of the spotlights with the other as he beams out at the crowd of about 200 -- station personnel, advertisers, local ad agency reps, and sundry listeners and well-wishers -- gathered inside North Miami's Greenwich Studios to celebrate WSHE's ostensible format switch from classic rock to alternative rock. As the throng downshifts out of nosh-and-schmooze mode to listen to Tenaglia, he thanks everyone for coming out in such beastly weather, the second day of a weeklong monsoon. (Outside, the rain pours down in bucketfuls, turning the parking lot around the studios into a flood plain.)

"As they would say in Britain," grins Tenaglia, "'it's a three-dog night.'" Pause. "Except that's the wrong format." Kaboom. Rim shot. The radio-savvy group chuckles lightly, savoring the in-joke.

Wrong format, perhaps. Wrong country, definitely. Australia's Aborigines, the story goes, sleep with their dogs to keep them warm during the Southern Hemisphere's winter. The colder it gets, the more dogs you gather close to you. A three-dog night means it's wicked cold outside. Most Britons, like most Americans, including Tenaglia, enjoy the advantages of central heating when they need it.

The station owner moves straight from the three-dog-night gaffe into a longer joke about Heaven, Hell, and "clients," the punch line eliciting polite laughter from its target audience, WSHE clients such as Cellar Door Productions and Borders Music, who've nestled at small white tables set up in Greenwich's Studio D. Then he turns over the mike to WSHE program director Bill Pugh. Less jocular and more poised, Pugh also thanks everyone for being here, particularly the station's "support staff," before introducing the Rembrandts (Danny Wilde and Phil Solem), in town for a live broadcast on WSHE earlier that day and on hand tonight to play a few of their songs acoustically -- notably "I'll Be There for You," the hit theme song from the hit TV show Friends, as well as a current WSHE favorite -- and to glad hand with station brass and "clients."

The Rembrandts give the SHEsters what they want, playing "I'll Be There for You" first, the suits swaying gently in place to the song's calculatingly hooky choruses ("I'll be there for you/'Cause you're there for me, too"). They follow up with their biggest previous hit, 1990's "That's Just the Way It Is Baby," then two more songs, before mugging engagingly and exiting stage right to spend a half-hour good-naturedly signing autographs for a queue of station staffers and advertisers.

A remarkable tableau of kismet, really, because had it tried, the radio station couldn't have tapped a more appropriate act to perform at its "alternative" coming-out bash. Likably bland pop-music careerists mindful of the importance of taking care of business, the Rembrandts are the musical analogue of WSHE's new format: smooth, safe as milk, adult, and, no matter what the station's promo spots say, decidedly unalternative.

Sixteen days before the Rembrandts briefly serenaded the radio station's troops and clients -- at exactly 1:03 p.m. on Monday, June 5 A WSHE-FM (103.5) created a mild disturbance on the local airwaves when it changed from "SHE's only rock and roll" to "South Florida's rock alternative." The station moved from its old mix of Seventies classic rock (Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Pink Floyd), Eighties new wave (Police, U2, Talking Heads, Pretenders), and Nineties modern rock (Counting Crows, Live, cranberries, Hootie and the Blowfish) to its new mix of, uh, Eighties new wave (Police, U2, et al.) and Nineties modern rock (Counting Crows, et al.).

Sort of meet the new format, same as the old format.
On the surface, SHE has done one thing and one thing only: sent the dinosaur bands packing. But on a more subtle level, the station, along with like-minded radio outlets all over the nation, buoyed by the overwhelming ratings success of Denver's KXPK (the Peak), has cobbled together two existing formats, Adult Album Alternative (AAA) and Album Oriented Rock (AOR), and in the process orchestrated a complete generational overhaul of "classic rock" by replacing doddering Seventies monoliths with doddering Eighties monoliths. The new SHE supplements its pantheon of non-noisy Eighties artists, as exemplified by, say, Simple Minds, with a roster of non-noisy current artists, as exemplified by, say, the Gin Blossoms. At no time, however, does it remotely approach what might be considered a legitimate "alternative" station, such as WVUM-FM (90.5). If SHE constitutes an alternative, it is only to stations that pump out music by country-and-western hat guys, stations that feature talk-show blowhards, and stations that regurgitate canned Christian programming with hosts who want to lighten your wallet.

Take a traipse through a roll call of the highest-profile alternative bands of the past several years, the ones signed to major labels, the ones who played the main stage at Lollapalooza, the ones featured in Rolling Stone and Spin, or the ones who showcased at the New Music Seminar, South by Southwest, and CMJ conferences: Sonic Youth, Sugar, Flaming Lips, Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, PJ Harvey, Bettie Serveert, Guided by Voices, Helium, Sebadoh, Magnapop, Throwing Muses, Lush, Rollins Band, Primus, Bottle Rockets, Moby, nine inch nails, Hole. Well, you get the idea. Heard any of them on "South Florida's Rock Alternative"? Thought not.