Clear Channel radio chain suggests sensitivity toward certain songs
No Burning Down the House , from the Talking Heads. Forget about Only the Good Die Young , by Billy Joel.

Those tunes and many, many more are on a list of tunes supposedly off the air on the nation's largest radio chain, Clear Channel, following last week's terrorist attacks.

But local Clear Channel stations said no songs have been banned from their airwaves.

Bill Hess, regional program director for Clear Channel, said the list of songs -- which ranges from Metallica's Harvester of Sorrow to John Lennon's Imagine -- was sent to program directors with the suggestion that some of them might be insensitive.

The list also includes Free Fallin', The Pretenders My City Was Gone, Dave Matthews Band's Crash Into Me and Jerry Lee Lewis's Great Ball of Fire.

Clear Channel, which has more than 1,100 radio stations, owns WHJY-FM, WSNE-FM, WWBB-FM (B101), and WHJJ-AM in Rhode Island.

Hess said no songs have been dropped -- and local Clear Channel stations actually added Imagine.

Joe Bevilacqua, program director for WHJY, said the list was only circulated to sensitize the company's program directors.

"I wouldn't play Burning Down the House right now, but that's just a matter of common sense," he said.

The only song currently on the WHJY playlist that he's "curtailed," Bevilacqua said, is a number by Drowning Pool called Bodies , which includes the line "bodies hit the floor."

-- ANDY SMITH

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