The Last DJ
Before Spotify, before algorithms, before podcasters like me, there was a person in a booth making bets. Sometimes those bets changed everything. This episode is about what we lost when that person disappeared.
In 1974, a music director at WMMS-FM in Cleveland named Donna Halper pulled a seven-minute track from a package that arrived unsolicited from a Toronto band nobody in the States had heard of. She played it. The phones flooded. Mercury Records signed the band. That band was Rush. The song was “Working Man.” And the reason any of this happened is because Donna Halper knew her audience. Cleveland, a gritty and blue-collar, three-shifts-a-day Cleveland and she trusted that they’d recognize a great song when they heard one.
That’s what local radio DJs actually were: curatorial intelligence. Not just voices. Not just personalities. People who understood their specific community and made programming decisions accordingly. A programmer in Los Angeles might have passed on “Working Man.” A DJ who knew Cleveland would not.
It was never a pure system. Payola corrupted it early and often. Alan Freed built rock and roll’s mythology, then got destroyed by it. The independent promoter scheme laundered the practice for decades until Eliot Spitzer came for the major labels in the 2000s. But underneath all of that, there were still humans making calls based on taste. That part was real.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 ended it. Clear Channel went from 40 stations to 1,240. When you own that many stations, you don’t hire 1,200 local voices, you hire a dozen programmers, centralize everything, and pipe the same playlist from Portland to Tulsa.
What’s left: automation, research data, advertiser demographics, and the same forty songs on a loop. Radio listenership has barely collapsed — 82% of Americans still tune in weekly as of 2022. But the surprise is dead. That thing where a song you’ve never heard comes on and you sit in your driveway because you don’t want it to stop. That was a human decision. Now it’s nobody’s job.
I actually got to hear Donna Halper tell that story herself when Scott and Rico at Rock and Roll Autopsy had her on (Episode 129, go find it) and what struck me wasn’t the drama of the story. It was how undramatic she made it sound. “I’m a music director. It’s what I do.” Rush dedicated their first two albums to her. Not to the label. To the woman who played the damn song.
That job falls to us now.
The Songs
“Over Before You Know It” — Michigander. Second appearance on the podcast, and this one earns it. There’s an Oasis influence lurking in the chorus delivery, but it never loses a distinctly Midwestern grounding. The strings give it a late-Beatles warmth, and the bridge builds back into the chorus in a way that feels earned rather than obligatory.
“Now She’s Gone” — The Forty Fours. Early Beatles DNA, heavy on the vocal harmonies, and genuinely hooky. The drumming is clean throughout, and there’s a moment near the end of the first minute where you think they’re about to drop an Amen break — they don’t, but the fills around it are worth the suspense.
“Lost in the Numbers” — Galactic Cowboy Orchestra. Instrumental, progressive, a little jazz-fusion, entirely addictive. The violin reads Kansas at first, then takes its own path somewhere you didn’t expect. This one flew under the radar for most of 2025 and it deserves better.
“Sandcastles 2008” — Tough Cookie. Late-grunge energy, Velvet Revolver-adjacent, with a slinky rhythm that keeps it from getting too heavy. The singer’s voice fits the band perfectly, which sounds like a low bar until you notice how often it isn’t.
“Lift Me Up” — Luna Rosa. Brit-pop rock, big reverb on both the guitar and vocals, and an opening that’s deliberately weird in a way that mostly works. Feels loose and spacious. Good loud-in-the-car song.
