I’ve long suspected Clear Channel of being the enemy — the enemy of all that could be good and decent about music, the enemy who drives corporate rock and corporate country and drives the soul out of every bit of music it touches.

Now I learn from my friend Buddy Blue that Clear Channel has canned Jim McInnes, the long-time DJ for KGB-FM (28 years on the air), and the best damn DJ to ever work in San Diego (his show was syndicated the last few years by Clear Channel, so some of you in other parts of the country may have heard him).

McInnes has a great radio voice and his laid back style is perfectly suited to a classic rock station in San Diego. But McInnes was spinning what we now call “classic” rock when it was current rock, and he did so much more than play the latest hits — he played the new stuff, the risky stuff, the stuff no other DJ would play. Many of us heard the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Blondie, the Ramones and Elvis Costello on McInnes’s show for the first time. On Sunday nights he had a show called “Private Stock” where he spun records from his own personal collection. That’s where I heard the New York Dolls and Iggy and the Stooges for the first time. McInnes was also a tireless promoter of the local music scene.

In other words, McInnes is a San Diego icon, and only a soulless corporation could fire a man of McInnes’s stature. Shame on Clear Channel.