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Last week, Jeff Norman, president and general manager of The Truth, a new right-wing FM-talk station, explained that a variation of The Pole, a.k.a. “Stripper Radio,” which ran for a week or so after the plug was pulled on Indie 101.5, a cult favorite that continues to survive, kind of, in an online version, would air on weekends. According to him, on-air promos would feature “an upscale female voice saying, ‘You’re listening to Pole Radio on 101.5 The Truth, Denver’s FM-talk station,’ so that The Pole will seem more like a feature of The Truth instead of us confusing people by making them think it’s a separate station.”
Apparently something changed between then and this past weekend, however. I tuned in during a Sunday afternoon drive, and instead of catching the sort of cuts that make bare bimbos rotate, my ears were filled with soft rock verging on easy listening: Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” the Four Tops’ “Ain’t No Woman Like the One I Got,” Abba’s “Take a Chance on Me.” (Come to think of it, that last song might actually work in a strip club — although it would come across like a reference to STDs.) As for the imaging, the snippets I heard were delivered by a barking male voice, not an upscale female one, that made no mention of The Pole whatsoever. Instead, the only name referenced was The Truth, which supposedly delivers a “rock-and-roll attitude” — a claim substantially undermined at one point when it was immediately followed by Harry Chapin’s “Taxi,” a number that displays all the rock-and-roll attitude of a knitting circle.
What’ll next weekend on The Truth sound like? Hell if I know — and the folks there probably aren’t certain, either.
