Remember how we listened to the radio, and I said "That's the place to be"?
Harry Chapin, "WOLD"
I once wanted nothing more than to be a disc jockey at a rock and roll station, playing magical music, spinning discs into the night as the sun set and the night came on. I had terrible crushes on the local voices, superstars of the town in which I grew up. They were men, with beautiful intonation, naturally sexy no matter what they looked like. They could tell marvelous stories, laugh at the absurdities of life, and still make you feel marvelous at the pain and intensity of the music. This was the time of Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Steely Dan, and Warren Zevon. I remember playing double solitaire and scrabble with my mother in the newly-completed extension to the house, listening to the Doors and watching, from the west window, the lights and hearing the roar of cars out on "dragstrip road."
I had my full time disc jockey experience, at a small town in southeast Kansas the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at university. I was finally put on the FM side on a regular basis just when the baseball strike started. I was supposed to "run the board" and drop in local commercials during the space between innings, which was a job no one wanted. But when the strike happened and I was the voice of the night at the only real choice for entertainment in town I was suddenly a superstar. In a small town, cute sort of way. I loved it. But I was working 70 hour weeks for minimum wage, for no overtime pay, and I was happy to go back to school in the fall. Besides, by then the strike was over and I was back to running the board most nights instead of playing any interesting music.
I kept an interest in radio, though, and listened through college to both popular and talk radio, NPR, and, when I got to graduate school in Toronto, to the CBC and Canadian popular and traditional music (the international radio station was across the street from where I lived on College Street in Little Portugal and I remember sitting in bed one day and watching Jean Chretien come out the door just some 40 feet from my window.
When I got back to a small town in the US I think I lost the radio thing. The local djs were pretty terrible (awfully provincial and mispronouncing names and places like crazy -- a thing that makes me bonkers!) and the music was dull and repetitive (I did like the videos on the country music station, however). Eventually all the radios in my house were tuned to NPR and left there. I watched more and more tv instead of listening to the radio, and it was not as magical or relaxing. So I paid less attention to it. There was no more joy of "Dr. Demento" on Sunday nights and a few years ago even Casey Kasem retired.
The exception was the AM radio I listened to late at night when I drove back and forth from home to see my parents. I remember in my first year here I listened to Clarence Thomas's hearings as it got dark, but mostly I would listen to the really late night things. Larry King, and Laura Ingraham, but also some guy who talked about UFOs in the middle of the night. The clear channel (not Clear Channel) stations -- KDKA in Pittsburgh, WLS from Chicago, KAAY from Little Rock, and WHO in Des Moines -- and the small local AM ones that after dark had very limited broadcast range. These were the land of the weird, the exotic, the rebroadcasts of radio dramas from the 1940s, and the advice shows whose advice you couldn't imagine anyone would take.
My car is dead, dead, dead, and after getting it towed 65 miles on Sunday I borrowed my mother's old car to drive home and back to work. One of the last things I pulled from my car as I left it at the shop were the CDs I had been listening to -- a couple of audio book mysteries and some Leonard Cohen discs, and a few compilations of WWII music. When I settled into my mother's car, I discovered there was no CD player, and I had no cassettes to entertain me. So I was stuck listening to the radio as it got dark. Not NPR (the only station I could get was running "Hearts of Space" which would have put me completely to sleep) but FM music and AM talk radio. I hardly ever listen to top 40 radio, and I realized that the area I live in doesn't really have that kind of thing. There are some "classic rock" stations, but most are country. And that was okay for me. The majority of the songs I heard set out to tell stories, and the rhymes were often clever and sometimes quite unexpected. There were morals to the stories, often ones that were ones I could quite appreciate -- not just the kind of pablum that the republican presidential candidates are spouting these days.
But after a while, the country music faded one song into another, and I tuned to the AM dial as it grew dark. There were baseball games and football previews, a broadcast of "Meet the Press" on the radio which was all about Irene. But then there they were -- the clear channel broadcasts that had been there for the past 15 years, waiting for me to return to them. The rebroadcast of a 1943 episode of "The Great Gildersleeve" (did you know that Joss Whedon, of Buffy and Firefly fame, was the grandson of the original co-writer of that series?), a political discussion with a sane Democrat and an only-slightly-crazy right winger, advice for investments and money handling (which of course was not supposed to be taken as advice). It was like a smorgasbord of delights, all slightly seedy, all slightly shopworn, but all intriguing, as if you might find a science fiction diamond in the midst of a dollar bin of bad cookbooks and romance novels at the used book store. I didn't find that diamond, but I had fun looking.
I can't get AM radio in my house, which is why my radios will stay tuned to the local NPR station, and the scanning slowly up and down the dial, going one move at a time just in case you catch something special, is not possible on the internets. The sudden discovery is not possible. And the best AM radio is that found after dark when you get broadcasts from far away bouncing off the layers of the atmosphere. I don't drive after dark if I can avoid it. Too many deer on the highways, and it is harder for me to see around the crazy lights that people put on the front of their cars. They are too bright, too much of a contrast to the dark country roads. I am getting older and don't have those eyes I used to have.
But maybe some night I will go for a drive, just to listen to the radio in the dark, just to hear the magic of the radio. The music is gone, but the night is there. The voices are there. There is still magic in the air.