Mojo's been uploading lots of old clips to
his youtube page if you'd like to hear more old mixes.
Midnight Music on mixcloud also has a ton of pretty rare stuff, including an excerpt from a broadcast in 1977! The rest of this will get a little off track (and may be redundant for some), so bear with me, just nice to have an excuse to talk Mojo.
How Mojo made his myth is really fascinating to me and you don't really see many people go into detail about it aside from Juan Atkins. The man had an incredibly shrewd business sense and was totally uncomprimising when it came to maintaining control over his format. From '72-'76 he was at WAAM, a Top-40 station in Ann Arbor, and switched over to black-owned Detroit R'n'B station WGPR in '77. He made this transition right as FM was beginning to over take AM radio in listenership. In '76 FM radio, as an industry, operated at a net loss. As a result there was little advertiser interest, so programming was much less conservative, which is what allowed Mojo to establish his 5-hour Mothership sessions. 'Black' music and broadcasters were given much more space on FM. By '79, FM would be worth almost half of what AM was worth (~880 mil to 2 bil). This happened in large part because around the mid-70s cars most auto manufacturers began including FM in their cars. Advertisers hadn't anticipated FM overtaking AM until ~81/82, so there's a period of 3-5 years where FM stations are getting a large number of listeners, and are still having their broadcasts be dictated more by the radio jocks than the ad agencies.
All of which to say that Mojo sees this coming and makes an incredibly prescient move to FM in Detroit, a city with a predominantly black and auto-driven market. He does it far enough in advance that he's able to establish himself as a major force in the city (peaking around ~18-19% arbitron ratings from '83-85) before advertisers eventually move in and effectively force him off of WJLB. Of course, the other reason for his success was his song selection like you're talking about. Radio in Detroit was segregated at the time, in every sense and at every level. Mojo's refusal to play strictly AoR, R'n'B, soul, funk, reggae, classical, etc. gave him a larger audiance, he had appeal across demographics in a way that few other jocks were allowed to.
Getting back on topic, what Mojo
didn't play is as interesting what he did.
Juan Atkins:
He played all the Parliament and Funkadelic that anybody ever wanted to hear. Those two groups were really big in Detroit at the time. In fact, they were one of the main reasons why disco didn't really grab hold in Detroit in '79. Mojo used to play a lot of funk just to be different from all the other stations that had gone over to disco. When 'Knee Deep' came out, that just put the last nail in the coffin of disco music.
Maurice Herd:
Mojo didn’t play Chip[-E] or Marshall [Jefferson] or anything – he actually played everything except the ‘original House.’ He played the B52s, Nitzer Ebb…
Alan Oldham:
Ken was the first person to champion Detroit Techno (forget what you heard about Mojo). He and his brother Greg spun the first Techno records (Strings of Life, No UFOs, etc.) at the club Todd's, a dance music mecca (punk, new wave, Industrial and House on alternate nights) that exposed the masses to new music.
Around the same time that Mojo is peaking just shy of a 20% Arbitron rating in Detroit, the Hot Mix 5 in Chicago (a
much larger market) are peaking around 30%. Disco was massive on FM all over the country, but didn't get as strong a foothold in Detroit. I think the biggest factor was just that there weren't many black FM stations on the dial at the time, and most of them didn't have room for much disco in their format. (WJZZ being a jazz station, its sister station WCHB was soul iirc) WDRQ was a disco station from ~'78-'80, and Ken Collier had a show on there but they changed their format and their personnel so frequently in the early-mid 80s it didn't really stick. (Seriously, if you go through old issues of Billboard it's like every 2 months WDRQ is changing their program director or station manager)
I'm not a Detroiter or old enough to have heard Mojo in the 80s, so it always used to bug me hearing interviews with techno artists talking about how Mojo exposed them to Sun Ra, and Kraftwerk and how that was what allowed techno to happen etc. Because at the same time you've got Jonzun Crew in Boston "Space is the Place" and ofc Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" in NYC. Clearly more than just Detroiters were hearing this stuff over radio at the same time. It seems to me that what was remarkable about Mojo was his messaging, his refusal to play on only one side of the color line, and the extent to which he opened up Detroit radio for black broadcasters and musicians. It's hard to overstate how rampant and oppressive racism was in the music industry at the time.
Anonymous DJ in '75:
...white disc jockeys are told, and I wish they had put it in writing, that you can't play two black songs together...
Mike Clark:
He’s definitely one of the ones that helped catapult it because the radio was very fixed back then. I was doing radio early on, doing stuff with him you know, thank goodness, but at that time we couldn’t speak, we really couldn’t enter the radio sometimes. We would give them the cassettes, they’d grab them and go in. We couldn’t talk on the radio, they couldn’t use our names on there, so you were just kinda caught up in that. But he was able to just make a lot of stuff happen, he opened up doors and minds. So a lot of us were, by the time that particular law was lifted, we were able to express ourselves more on the radio station and he was one who did help because he had a team.
Anyways getting back on track, practically every band in Detroit in the early-mid 80s would give demos to Mojo, and it seems like for the most part he'd play them out, he had pretty much an open-door policy at the station. So for some under-discussed cuts, he gave The Bus Boys a break
same with
Ken Kicker Lowery (sadly can't find a link to the song). Vendetta already had a deal but he played them too
We can get into the role that jazz fusion and prog rock played in techno later (I'm sure
@thirdform will have plenty to add there). But I'll end with this. (If any of this was interesting to someone who's publishing, DM I could use an excuse to get my notes in order and wrap up some drafts)
Alan Oldham:
This song, “River People,” was from Mr. Gone and Mojo used to play it every night. He really made a hit out of a track. ... Mojo, for the black community, was it. And this was in the pre hip-hop days where black people listened to everything in Detroit when I was growing up. It was that open atmosphere that allowed Detroit techno to form I think. And Mojo was definitely ground zero for the black community. I mean this guy would play The Isley Brothers, Prince, Alice Cooper, Weather Report. He was the first DJ to play B-52s in Detroit. He broke a lot of music to the black community that we would have never heard.
Also taking bets on what Nitzer Ebb Mojo played. My money's on either "Join in the Chant" or the George Clinton mix of "Fun to be Had"
