Budget cuts . Now that means more Lin Brehmer !!!!

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

Entercom is really hurting, huh.

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You buried the lede, which is that Lin Brehmer is retiring from mornings. Wow.

As good as they all are at liking music, you've really failed at developing new talent if you're rolling with three guys in their 60s from 5:30 to 7. Like, what's your long-term plan here?

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Richard Milne to mornings. Wow. First he kicks Hemmert to the curb and now it's Brenner. I like him, but I like Lin better with Mary or without.

Brehmer has been burning the candle at both ends for the past few years. He makes it to a shit ton of appearances and shows, takes pics with everyone, drinks, then makes it in to the morning show. At 65, he's gotta be burnt.

Working a few more years middays, he'll get to sleep a little.

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I still think of Milne as the new guy.

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Who picks the songs?

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

The Boomertron 5000. The enduring legacy of Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone.

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Richard Milne is good, but just having him play music without newscasts or a co-host or featurettes or anything isn't a true morning show. That's Me-TV FM with a person who talks in and out of commercial breaks.

Also, as you alluded to, his career arc of getting demoted to weekend mornings and losing Local Anesthetic before being promoted to afternoon drive, then to middays, and now to morning drive within a span of a year and a half is downright odd. Greg Solk clearly seems to like him a lot, but doesn't seem to trust him to play anything outside the same rotation of new releases, R.E.M., and Mumford and Sons that everyone except Lin is a slave to.

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He seems like an old guy to me.

I worked with him 25 years ago.

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There's an old Chicago Reader article that explained the pre-computer method as this byzantine hand-scrawled system where you could play a song off an album, but not again for a while, and not if someone else played it recently, and then the next time you played it, it had to be the opposite of whether you last played a hit or a deep cut. That sort of enforced depth now, where you couldn't play "Free Fallin'" for two weeks and not before you played "A Face in the Crowd" first, is absolutely unthinkable today; they probably play "Free Fallin'" twice in 12 hours. There was also some kind of rule about not playing slow songs in a row, or old songs in a row, or XRT-darling songs in a row. That last rule would be good with the darlings they have now, though I certainly wouldn't mind if "In a Daydream" by the Freddy Jones Band segued into "Drive Somewhere" by the Vulgar Boatmen.

Lin explained on that podcast with Laurence that what they have now is kind of a modernization of that, where there's all sorts of metadata attached to all the songs in the library where they're continuously presented with pools of songs that the computer deems eligible for airplay at a given moment. He also said he overrides it when he can but at his own peril.

I understand any ensemble needs a conductor, but it bewilders me that with the wealth of experience and knowledge that their core airstaff has, that they just don't lay off and trust them to program their own shows without algorithmically mandated Foo Fighters. I'd say maybe keep a tighter leash on the weekend/fill-in guys, but the weekend/fill-in guys are Johnny Mars and Frank E. Lee and just as capable as anyone else.

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My brother was an intern 30-something years ago. Milne was the new guy. I got to be a ringer on their 16" softball team for a couple seasons. Then they decided to keep all players in house.

I know Richard has been there for over 30 years, it's just that when he came in, there was no way he was breaking into that lineup.

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That would have been Terri Hemmert, Wendy Rice, Frank E. Lee, Johnny Mars, Marty Lennartz? Lot of talent there.

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Brehmer has really grown on me over the years. I used to hate his slow manner of speaking and his complete and total apathy for the White Sox, but he jacks the occasional Lin's Bin out of the park, and it's nice to have a familiar voice during the morning drive other than Mike Mulligan. Mornings on the radio will get a little more vanilla with this move.

Tom Marker did mornings. Bob Verdi doing Athletes Feats(I don't remember Bruce Wolf doing it before, but he did '76-82) from '82-2001 was really one of the pre-cursers to the Score.

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Lin's Bin is probably the best thing they have going and I hope he hangs on to it after he moves.

This feels like the end of something -- rearranging the DJ chairs, if you will. They did a shit job developing new air talent for years, and then everyone got old at once and now there's no one to replace them without it ceasing to be what we know it as. Almost all the specialty shows and featurettes that made them different are gone. The imaging of the station used to be extremely minimalist and is now as overdone and corny as KQX. I might have an aircheck from 2013, I'll look, but even without the evidence, I know just from 6.5 years ago, it's a very different station.

Entercom probably wants very badly to pull the plug and go with a much lower-overhead alternative jukebox format that they use in lesser markets, problem is, the audience has been so loyal and the rest of the radio landscape has fallen so hard that they're a top-10 station on sheer attrition. Terri Hemmert was 7th in middays when she retired, the sort of retirement where whenever anyone else on staff has a cold, the whole lineup gets rejiggered to put her back at 10 a.m. where she was.

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Dixon got whacked off.

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I wonder if they'll try to bring in James Van Osdol (again) at some point. I'm sure he'd jump at the opportunity, he grew up listening to XRT, and he's only in his early 50s. Complete tool, but people seem to like him. I think his main source of income currently involves interviewing d-level celebrities inside a cramped Mazda, so his salary requirements should fit within the station's salary parameters.

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I only have the ability to have the kind of depth you guys are displaying with one radio genre at a time.

A couple of decades back, Howard Stern, on some day when he was recalling his career, said that he interviewed at XRT in his youth. He really liked the station and wanted to take the job but he got an offer closer to home.

I really wish the government would hold back a handful of stations in each market to keep them from being corporatized. Radio in the 80s and 90s was so much fun in its quirkiness. Then it became like Mc Donalds, where you could enter another market and the radio sounds exactly the same.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Yeah, your guy Clinton and his DLC cronies really screwed the country over by deregulating the radio industry, eh?

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What WXRT needs to do, is have more "Regular Guy", have him do mornings, and afternoon
drive....that guy "get's it", and is the best representation of all Chicagoans since the Da Superfans.

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Blackhawk goal, scored by number 20, Al Secord.

Richard was just doing week ends back then.

He's a great guy.

Brehmer is too.

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I would pay to watch a public beheading of the "Regular Guy"

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They were both on the team. I see Lin and chat at Ike Reilly shows. Great guy.

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Regular Guy was funny 25 years ago. The bit is a little stale today.

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Same.

And put The Hawk on the Guillotine right next to him.

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Since Greg Solk took over: Wendy Rice left, Terri Hemmert retired without retiring, Lara Mondae got cut down to one night a week, Emma Mac lost her freeform show and got cut down to voice-tracking, and Mary Dixon got fired. I don't think this was intentional, but that's how it happened.

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never heard of her.

And I thought Lin was on evenings or weekends or some shit. Didnt know he was the morning guy.

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It's unfortunate Greg and JDC never crossed job paths.

Already got the morning anchor job at WBEZ. If you look at her Twitter, you can tell she was always going to be okay.

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