"We Quit Doing Rock" - WQDR and the Death of Rock Radio

40 years ago this week, one of the premiere album rock stations in America flipped to country…and I’m still not over it.

Like many others, I was drawn to the radio as a kid. First, as a listener, soaking up all the sounds I heard; from the voices of the jocks to the commercials to the songs. I listened to not only what the DJs said, but how they said it, and how they presented the music. Soon enough, I’d hold my little cassette recorder up to the speaker and capture every song I could.

The radio was almost always tuned to WQDR in Raleigh, NC.

The only country station in the area we could pick up was WAKG-FM (Country Sunshine) in Danville, VA, my maternal grandmother’s favorite station. Even though I seemingly absorbed every form of music from various family members growing up, I gravitated toward rock’n’roll more than any other. WQDR was a rock station. No, it was the rock station. The brainchild of Durham Life Broadcasting’s Carl Venters, it was originally WPTF-FM (the sister station of its legendary AM equivalent) and had been broadcasting classical music for much of the previous decade and into the early ‘70s.

By 1972, the FM radio band had become the hot new thing. Although it had always been around, FM had mostly been relegated to classical music and talk. Up until the late 1960s, AM was where rock and pop lived. Incredible to consider now, as FM’s fidelity is far superior (even though AM’s coverage is greater). Indeed, when more and more stations started programming rock on FM, the format became more adventurous, the music more progressive, and the production more detailed. Venters reached out to rock radio format doc Lee Abrams (who was then just 19 years old but already a success for what he’d done for a station up in Detroit) to help create an album rock format for WPTF-FM, which Venters changed to WQDR. The new call letters stood for Quadrophonic Rock, inspired by the then-new sound technology, an early form of surround sound that uses four separate channels instead of two (the traditional stereo setup).

The B-Side to “Brown Sugar”

WQDR officially signed on the air at midnight on December 26th, 1972, with the unmistakable swagger of “Bitch” by the Rolling Stones. Rock radio had come to Raleigh, and with Abrams’ new format, it became one of the first of its kind in the nation, especially on the East Coast. (Undoubtedly inspired by the legendary Tom Donahue’s successful free-form or “underground” radio experiment in San Francisco.) Abrams’ format was artist-focused instead of the more common song-focused way of crafting a playlist. Under Abrams’ vision, instead of looking at hit singles, Program and Music Directors considered album sales as well as the artists that made those albums. As a result, album cuts - or deep cuts - were preferred over singles. Throughout the late ‘60s and the ‘70s, artists crafted albums as listening events with concepts and continuity, instead of just a collection of singles padded out by filler.

WQDR would play full album sides overnight and entire concerts on weekends. Their jocks didn’t shout and use inane horns and laugh tracks. They were calm, cool, collected, and some were probably high as hell. But it was that conversational tone, that laid-back delivery that made me want to be a DJ. Yes, I loved Wolfman Jack and I had a soft spot for the Boss Jocks, but they never made me want to sit between two turntables and cue past the burn while sharing a back story about the next record over the fade of the previous one the way QDR’s jocks did. Oddly enough, the first time my voice was ever heard on the air was on WQDR.

East Coast Live

Allan Handleman hosted a show called East Coast Live that originated on QDR on Sunday nights and he’d have an array of rock experts, conspiracy theorists, paranormal enthusiasts, and whatnot each week. My favorite guest was a record expert who’d give unofficial appraisals to listeners who’d call up to describe what kind of records they had. I’ve long forgotten his name.

One night, when I was about 12 years old, the record collector guy was guesting. Handleman took calls for listeners to guess some “obscure” records; I remember Humble Pie’s version of “C’mon Everybody” was one of them. Then came “Mr. Bassman.”

I heard the first line and dialed the phone. I got through! I can’t remember if there was a screener or not, but I was soon on the air with Allan Handleman and the record guy. Handleman asked if I knew who the singer was. With a little too much exuberance, I shouted, “Johnny Cymbal!”, my high-pitched voice exposing my youth. Handleman seemed shocked, probably thinking he’d stumped his Molly Hatchet/Jethro Tull-loving rock audience. He laughed, “How did you know that?” “I’ve got the single!” “You do?” I did, and hell, I still do. It helps to have parents who not only loved rock’n’roll but passed that love on to you, a love that expanded tenfold once you got a hold of it.

For my efforts, I was awarded a 1981 Rolling Stones tour poster (presented by Jovan - the first time a band had a corporate sponsorship) that I could pick up at the QDR studios on the next business day.

Of course, I still have this...somewhere.

My dad took me to the station the following week. I’d like to say that I got a tour of the station and met the jocks and all that, but I just sat in the lobby and waited until a guy brought me the rolled-up poster, said, “Here ya go,” and I left. I didn’t even know who it was. I was so hopped up on adrenaline, not to mention I was so cripplingly shy, that I was scared to ask.

The Real Rock Stars

WQDR may have sounded like free-form radio at times, but it was far from an anything-goes format. They didn’t jump on the hard rock/heavy metal bandwagon in the early ‘80s like most. While groups like Quiet Riot and Def Leppard were making dents in playlists around the country and on MTV, QDR stood its ground, although it did bend a little by giving the great Jo Leigh a half-hour (9:30 pm if I remember correctly) to host The Metal Shop during her shift.

The jocks were the real rock stars to these young, impressionable ears: Rockin’ Ron, Blade, Gongaware, Tom Guild, Bob Walton, Jo Leigh, Brian McFadden, Daniel Brunty, and on and on and on. One of the most impressive radio moments I remember taping off QDR was New Year’s Eve as 1983 turned to ‘84. The top 500 songs were edited down to a half-hour, timed for the number one song, “Stairway to Heaven” (of course) to start right at midnight. The stunt not only subconsciously planted a love of radio production and editing that I’d soon spend thirty years honing, but I listened to that mix so much that even to this day, I remember where many of the songs’ splices happened when I hear them in full. Little did I - or anyone - know, that recording kicked off their final year on the air.

The tape I made is long gone, but thanks to the internet, that very moment is digitized and up on SoundCloud. What a time to be alive.

WQDR had been the station that also helped me develop my taste. It was where I first heard everything from Yes to Arrogance, from the Fabulous Knobs to Boston, from Red Rider to PKM. Local, regional, or national, it didn’t matter. If it rocked, it aired. QDR was where I first heard the young Texas guitar slinger, Stevie Ray Vaughan. The jock was so smitten with Texas Flood, SRV’s debut, he played the first three tracks in a row, just because it was that good.

It wasn’t just music, though. Gayle Rancer, QDR’s News Director, and Joan Siefert won a Peabody Award in 1981 for the news department for “Our Forgotten Warriors,” a series focused on veterans of Vietnam. Consider how ahead of the curve they were. Within a few years, everyone from Stanley Kubrick to Bruce Springsteen would be joining the chorus of making sure our soldiers finally received the respect they deserved.

The Song Is Over

In the summer of 1984, word came down that Don Curtis, who’d recently acquired WQDR, was going to flip the format to country. Looking back, it made sense. The Urban Cowboy craze had caused country music to go mainstream, and the fledgling MTV network had laid waste to a lot of the, well, less photogenic rock stars of the previous decade. The writing was on the wall, but the QDR jocks were not going quietly.

That summer, I heard the most exciting free-form radio I would ever experience on a commercial FM station. The live version of the Outlaws’ “Green Grass and High Tides” (from Bring ‘em Back Alive) - all 22 minutes of it - one night, followed by Dire Straits then new double-live album Alchemy - in its entirety another night. In mid-August on the weekend of the 25th anniversary of Woodstock, they played all the audio they had from the festival. It was the wild west of radio and it was glorious.

Still, like all good things, it had to come to an end.

As that end drew nigh, the jocks said goodbye in their own way. Bob “The Blade” Robinson signed off his shift by spinning The Who’s “The Song Is Over”, for instance. Then, on Labor Day weekend 1984, WQDR signed off the same way it had signed on, as Rockin’ Ron Phillips bid farewell with “Bitch.” WQDR now stood for “We Quit Doing Rock.”

Today, it’s inconceivable that a radio station would announce a format change to the media months in advance while giving their jocks full reign to run amok on the air all summer. Now, they’re lucky if they get any advance at all. Some won’t know until they turn on the radio on the way to work, only to find out they have no work to go to.

As if to underline the reality of radio, after Rockin’ Ron gave one of the most touching goodbyes in all of radio history on September 5th, 1984, and hits the start button on the cart deck for what was to be the final rock song on WQDR before the format switch, he realized that someone didn’t cue the damn cart back up after playing it earlier in the day.

Radio. It’s a bitch.

Long Live Rock

After the flip, some of the QDR jocks found a new home a little to the left on 94Z (WZZU) while several others settled further to the right of the dial on a station that played “only the finest rock’n’roll.” That station became my go-to, growing with me for the rest of the ‘80s and well into the ‘90s…

By 1982, Carl Venters had left Durham Life and started up Voyager Communications. A little over a year later, Voyager purchased country station WXYY and moved its tower to Middlesex, NC while it remained licensed to nearby Wilson. A few days before QDR flipped, WXYY became WRDU 106. It signed on the air, again with a Rolling Stones song, but this time, former QDR jock Tom Guild fired up “Start Me Up” (thankfully, he made sure the cart was cued up beforehand).

WRDU continued the presentation QDR had perfected in the ‘70s but added a modern edge. The format was rock, but it was touted as the “finest” rock, giving it an air of sophistication. (It was fitting that Steve Winwood’s “Finer Things” was in heavy rotation by ‘86.) Sunday mornings kicked off with Kitty Kinnin’s Jazz Brunch. The jocks were not shouters, they were conversational and friendly. The morning show, Reynolds and Company (later Reynolds and Silva) were hilarious, but not low-brow. Monday nights were reserved for Rockline with Bob Coburn, a syndicated nationwide broadcast offering stimulating conversation with both new and legendary artists. Yes, RDU rocked. It was the full spectrum of the rock format at the time. They rocked so well, in fact, they were named Rolling Stone’s Station of the Year in 1990.

What was fascinating about WRDU was the diversity of its playlist in the early years. They seemed to be competing for listeners not only with WZZU, who’d acquired some of QDR’s cume at first but also Raleigh’s AC station, WRAL-FM. The first time I heard Sade’s “Smooth Operator” was on RDU while I was traveling down I-85 South with the windows down and my (then quite luxurious) hair blowing in the breeze. It’s one of those perfect musical moments that just sticks with you.

Like WQDR, RDU’s team understood that “rock” was all-encompassing. There was plenty of variety, but it remained mostly artist-based. Still, times were changing. In the 1970s and especially the ‘80s, rock music in general had become much more corporate, as did rock radio. Music decisions shifted from the jocks to Music/Program Directors or, in smaller markets, General Managers and/or even station owners. Then the more adventurous album rock format devolved into classic rock.

There are two main differences between album rock and classic rock. First, the tighter playlists. The core artists (Led Zeppelin, Queen, etc.) are still there, but their catalogs are whittled down to only their most highly “tested” material. Second, and this is the most glaring difference, the classic rock format does not play any new music by their core artists. I remember WRDU airing new music by the Stones (the advance Voodoo Lounge track, “Love Is Strong” debuted via satellite in 1994 - fancy!), Neil Young, Tom Petty, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and so on, up through most of the ‘90s while interspersed with the new acts of the day such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

However, sometime around the new millennium, the older artists’ new material stopped being added. Classic rock had replaced album rock across the country and regional playlists gave way to basically the same format nationwide. The rock format had become split into different categories. There were now alternative rock stations, mainstream rock stations, classic rock stations, and even “extreme” rock stations. Young bands were now cordoned off away from the legends. And the classic rock stations only played the tired (but well-tested) songs by those legends. There was nowhere to hear new music by, say, Bob Seger or Bonnie Raitt, unless you happened to be in a market that aired one of the few Triple-A (Adult Alternative) stations (yet another rock format). These older artists were still releasing great music, but they were going unheard. And for at least two generations of listeners, if they didn’t hear it on the radio, it didn’t exist.

Much of this, of course, was a byproduct of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that allowed a corporation to purchase several media outlets in the same market, something the FCC kept in check for decades. It was a disastrous move for local stations - and listeners. But that’s an argument for another day.

“Here Come the Rooster”

After the Telecommunications Act, SFX acquired RDU, and by 1999 it had come under the control of Clear Channel Communications. The old 94Z, WZZU, became Sunny 93.9. RDU’s “classic rock” format became “mainstream rock” in 2001. They’d brought Allan Handelman back into the fold for a while, but mornings had been taken over by the syndicated John Boy and Billy “Big Show” and then later Bob and Tom - the times they had a-changed.

Triangle radio kept shifting around, becoming quite a mess by the early-to-mid aughts. Longtime Oldies station, WTRG 100.7, acquired, like RDU by this time, by Clear Channel, axed its format and stunted for a few days in November 2004 as “The Bull”, playing country. It then settled into the Adult Alternative format and called itself “The River” (helped by its new calls, WRVA-FM). The format sounded quite unfocused and confusing. It was trying to be one of those “Bob” or “Fred” or whatever-the-hell silly formats that acted like it was “all-encompassing” but really just mixed AC with Top Forty and a little mainstream rock. The River’s Triple-A format lasted only a couple of years before it settled into a more conventional classic rock approach.

Of course, all these shenanigans didn’t help ratings at all, and by 2006, the same year The River went rock, the country beast came calling for WRDU just as it had done 22 years earlier for WQDR. This time, however, it came in the form of a rooster.

On October 6, 2006, 106.1 flipped back to country and branded itself Rooster Country. Bob “The Blade” Robinson, the local rock jock legend who’d had shifts on both QDR and RDU, bravely took a shift on the new format. It remains simultaneously one of Raleigh radio's most hilarious and saddest eras. I listened in real time as Blade came apart one afternoon live on the air, broke format by playing “The Song Is Over” - the same tune he signed off with on QDR - and just quit. In 2006, deep in the era of voice-tracking, it was a rare moment of good old-fashioned radio chutzpah. God bless him for it. That rock’n’roll attitude was apparently still alive and well.

A New Hope

By 2009 Clear Channel finally snuffed the Rooster and they flipped 106.1 to right-wing talk. The River 100.7 ultimately took the WRDU calls and switched to classic rock in 2013 in a typically corporate and soulless Clear Channel move to capitalize on a brand without injecting any of the substance its namesake once had. It was nothing like the original RDU 106. It was just another classic rock station playing the same tired old songs over and over and over and over and - of course - no new music from heritage artists.

The closest we’ve come to the glory days of rock radio in the Triangle has been the 2018 launch of Capitol Broadcasting’s That Station. Essentially an LPFM (Low-power FM) located in the Cary/Apex/Raleigh area at 95.7, That Station can also be heard online through its app and on HD channels adjacent to its sister station, WRAL-FM. With a deep playlist mixing album rock from QDR and RDU’s heyday with the Triple-A format and a strong focus on newer Americana-based artists (artists that would’ve probably been considered album rock-ish in the ‘70s), That Station is actually a thrilling listen, which is saying something for terrestrial radio in 2024. (On the other hand, they call their DJs curators for Pete’s sake, so they’re far from perfect.)

There’s a lot more to this Triangle radio story than I can, or am willing to, get into here. And I haven’t even touched on the over-compartmentalization of Satellite radio. Again, that’s all for another day. Maybe. But I must admit, 40 years later, 94.7 WQDR is still Country and has done damn well over the years, being right in the thick of it as the country format has lasted through the Country AC-era of the mid-’80s, the New Traditionalists, the Class of ‘89, Garth, Shania, line dances, Taylor Swift, and the format’s current mega stadium-filling success. The Raleigh-Durham market has grown into large-market territory and QDR has even won a couple of CMA awards for Station of the Year. Meanwhile, rock music’s popularity has dwindled from its ‘70s peak to mostly a niche format nowadays (thanks in no small part to its splintering into dozens of subgenres - again, another argument for another day). Don Curtis made the right business decision after all. But guess what? Unlike rock, you can’t use country as a verb. So you can rock the country, but you can’t country the rock.

Some of the jocks from QDR and RDU can still be heard around the Triangle in various capacities; some on internet radio, some have taken the podcast route, while others can still be heard on the FM band. They’re keeping the spirit alive as best they can. Yet for almost 12 years with WQDR and 22 years with WRDU, rock radio itself was alive and well in the Triangle area of North Carolina. They were the top rock stations of their kind for a while, and that’s what we’re celebrating this week. Here’s to the music that inspired us for generations, and the jocks that brought it to us.

Rock is dead, they say. Long live rock.

Here’s a Mixtape highlighting some of the Old WQDR’s playlist.

Unedited Mixtape on Apple Music