Lawrence.com

Raleigh, N.C. — The compact discs come to Steve Bass on a kind of musical underground railroad, slipped under the door of his radio station or passed from a friend to a friend to a friend.

Bass is more than happy to air the tracks. It's the mission of WBZB-AM :quot; perhaps alone in the country :quot; to play nothing but local music. Radio consultants say they know of no other station foolhardy enough to try such a move.

As station owner, Bass just wishes that groups like Bandway, the Belmont Playboys, Bigun Mother Nature, Bluesville and Celtic Jam would include a phone number or address where they can be reached.

"We can't find these guys," reads WBZB's Web site beside each band's name and a picture of their CD. "Can someone help us? They gave us a great CD and disappeared."

"We have a lot of stuff that's really good music, but it was slipped under the door," said Bass, who's also general manager of the 1,000-watt station with offices in the small town of Garner, near Raleigh. "The idea is to promote the music and have something to say about these folks when we play their music.

"But we get a lot of 'a friend of a friend asked me to give this to you, and his name is Gary something,"' Bass said with a sigh. "However, we're not allowing those issues to restrict whether we play the music."

There are two restrictions on the music WBZB plays: It's got to be local (and that's kind of loosely defined, with South Carolina and Virginia bands making their way onto the airwaves); and it's got to pass the taste test of WBZB employees, which basically means that someone at the station, anyone at the station, likes the music.

"It's hard to judge what's going to get on the air and what's not," said Ben Alexander, WBZB's station manager. "The employees sit around and listen to CDs. If we like it, if it sounds like quality music, then it goes on the air. There's nothing else influencing it."

That means heavy metal, country, jazz and R&B all can get airtime, in a lineup the station calls "genre hopping." The station gets about 20 CD submissions a week, of which about 95 percent get at least one track aired; most get two or three tracks.

For a musician, little is more fulfilling than hearing your song on the radio, said Rod Abernethy, a guitarist for Arrogance, which ruled the North Carolina rock scene in the 1970s and early '80s.

"It's one of the best things a band or musician can have, to have his music played on the radio :quot; other than playing in clubs," said Abernethy, who dropped off some Arrogance CDs at the station this summer.

WBZB went on the air July 15, a year and a half after the Federal Communications Commission approved its license. Per that license, it broadcasts only from sunup to sundown.

Its signal is so weak that the station can be picked up in the car only in a small area because power lines interfere with it. It can only be heard in parts of Raleigh, but it broadcasts on the Web, and Alexander said he has e-mails from listeners in Holland and New Zealand as well as sites closer to home.

"I think what you guys are doing for the local NC music scene is awesome!" said an e-mail from a man in Atlanta. A woman in Ottawa, Canada, requested that WBZB play a song from the group Gavinheart.

Closer to home, musician Mojo Collins of Wilmington wrote: "Rock on, brothers. It's so cool to have someone like you doing this for indie acts."

Bass has filed a petition with the FCC to move the station to the band between 1610 and 1710 AM, which would shift it to 10,000 watts in the daytime and allow it to broadcast 24 hours a day.

WBZB is the antithesis of a national trend toward radio homogenization, including syndicated disc jockeys and sound-alike formats that let marketers promise businesses that their ad will air every day, say, at 4 p.m. just after Phil Collins' "Sussudio."

The reason for the sound-alike formats is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated station ownership. Before that, ownership was capped at 40 stations nationally and four in any market, two AM and two FM. Now, San Antonio-based Clear Channel, the industry leader, owns 1,200 stations across the country.

Even though Arbitron ratings show listeners tune in less since the change :quot; an average of 23 hours per week with the radio in 1993 compared to 20.5 hours in 2001 :quot; one radio consultant ranks WBZB's chances of survival at "one in a billion."