Music: New Rock on a Red-Hot Roll

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In 1979, the debt-ridden and desperate KROQ in Pasadena, Calif., broke the bland playlist. Its new format: then unknown bands like Britain's Duran Duran and the rockabilly Stray Cats (both now megagroups). The reversal was quick. When Berlin's Pleasure Victim played on the station, a surprising 25,000 copies were sold locally. Now KROQ is the No. 1 rock station in the large Los Angeles radio market. Says then Program Director Rick Carroll, who now advises ten other stations on strategy: "I sensed that there was a big audience out there looking for something of their own. Music just didn't have the excitement of the early '60s." This year Atlanta-based Consultant Lee Abrams, a czar of AOR programming, began feeding his 75 client stations a completely revised "Superstars" format, opening it up to unknown artists. Says Steve Leeds, an MCA talent director: "People have gone from artist orientation to song orientation. They hear a song and buy it without caring who the artist is, and the business thrives on breaking in new acts."

Television and radio have created a demand for rockers in the flesh. After three miserable seasons, the concert business is thriving again. The Police, who four years ago played to seven people in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., will perform before 1 million fans this summer in 30 U.S. cities. They sold out New York's Shea Stadium in just five hours for an August concert. Frontier Booking, New Music's hottest agency, will put 20 bands on the road this summer, twice as many as last year. The Liverpool group A Flock of Seagulls, for instance, arrived last year planning to give just a dozen concerts, and wound up touring for six months.

Dance clubs are jumping skyhigh. From New York's Ritz to Madame Wong's West in Los Angeles, the dead discos have been displaced. Gone are the glitterballs, replaced by giant video screens. Their new music? Ringing cash registers and everything from rap music to technopop. The First Avenue club in Minneapolis, for instance, attracts up to 1,200 patrons each night to its multilevel cavern of stages and dance floors, plus four giant screens and 15 video monitors integrated with computer graphics. A good club disc jockey keeps well ahead of radio, dropping a record when it starts getting air play. Says Deejay Roy Freedom: "The club is an escape. People want to hear something that's not on the car radio."