Well, it’s time for the weekly writing challenge again, as suggested by John at The Sound of One Hand Typing. I skipped the last couple of weeks but one of his suggestions this week was too close to home for me to pass up. Write something about “radio.”
Some of you might not know it but I write a daily blog about music, primarily the music of my life – the mid-’60s on, although not so much about the last decade or so. A time when great new music has become scarcer for me to embrace and perhaps not coincidentally, a time when radio has become marginal and marginalized.
A little about me. I was a sickly child – asthma, bad immune system (my mom’s chain smoking in the house doubtless did nothing to improve that, but it was the ’70s. What do you expect?Her doctor at one point apparently suggested a nice smoke or two would calm her nerves) I was in hospital a lot, and off school at home even more. Now, my mom was a teacher by trade so she made sure I got some schoolwork in there even when my lungs were being practically wretched up through my mouth every few minutes. But there were weekends, and evenings and so on. I wasn’t allowed to go out and hang out with the neighborhood kids if I was sick, nor if she deemed it too cold, too rainy, etc. My parents fought a lot, my older brother didn’t have a lot in common with me because of the age gap and perhaps because of his extroverted nature that led him to be “out” most of the time. (Ironically, in later life he’d become one of the most utterly antisocial people I’ve ever met. Lots we don’t understand about the autism spectrum still ) It could have been a totally garbage, horrible piece of soul-crushing life for young me. But by and large, it wasn’t. I had my books to read and Lego and Hot Wheels to play with and.. the big one… I had a radio.
When I was maybe five, I was given a little transistor radio for either Christmas or my birthday. Tiny one, about the size of two boxes of raisins, with a little dial on the side to tune in the AM station of your choice. I soon found CHUM in Toronto, then Canada’s top-rated pop or top 40 station. Actually they had a top 30, not 40, but you get the idea. I was in love with it. Some of my earliest memories, when I was maybe two or three, involve hearing music in our house I liked. Glen Campbell, Bobby Goldsboro, the Beatles. Oh yes, the Beatles. My mom was British and she seemed to really like the Fab Four and I remember hearing ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and staring in awe at the colorful album cover when I was maybe all of three years old. Hospital could be scary and lonely for a five, six year old… but at least I had my radio, and my friends. Elton John, Harry Chapin, America, Jim Gold, Bread. Nights weren’t so dark or all alone.
Needless to say, a few years on I had been upgraded to a little all-in-one stereo with a turntable and my allowance was going not to candy or comics like many kids my age, but to saving up for Elton John or Wings LPS or the latest hot 45 from the Eatons department store. And my spare hours avoiding the family turmoil were spent listening, learning the names of every singer and band on my radio. Soon, I was collecting the CHUM top 30 charts, by then in a newspaper and compiling my own charts , week by week, based on how many times I heard songs on radio coupled a bit with my own choices. 1974- #1 song, “Bennie and the Jets”. 1975 – “Philadelphia Freedom”. 1976 – “Silly Love Songs” and so on through about 1985,
The ’80s rolled along and I found FM stations and by the middle of the decade, I found groundbreaking alt rock station CFNY in Toronto. That was before they even called it “alt rock”. Few people here had heard of Depeche Mode, the Stranglers, Madness, the Cure or even REM in 1984 or ’85, but I had and was visiting the local cramped indie record store to buy their records, thanks to that CFNY influence. The late-’80s rolled around and I got through who knows what weird circumstances a job looking after a run-down downtown hotel on the night shift. Wide-eyed me dealing with bikers, cokeheads, teenaged hookers, shifty street folk, night after night… but being kept company by endless coffee and a soundtrack of CFNY night sounds, from the Sex Pistols to the Silencers, .
CFNY was at the time run by David Marsden. He wasn’t on air much by then, but he ran the show. And what a show. As luck would have it, he would take a job on air two decades later in my suburban hometown on the rock station and he and I would become good friends, even though he is old enough to be… well, let’s say for generosity, my father. This guy was at John and Yoko’s “Bed In” and hung out with they guys who’d be The Band before they even heard of Bob Dylan. A wonderful man, with an encyclopedic knowledge of music. A passion for it, A passion for radio. Not only have I had the happy chance to go to many of his parties, he’s let me sit in on his radio show once or twice. (Usually I helped him carry in boxes of CDS…he wasn’t going to limit himself to what the station had on their computer!)
The same station had a number of DJs who were nearly as in love with music and as good at dealing with fellow fans as David. I ended up meeting several of their DJs and becoming friends. Many a time I had a beer at a bar with Matt, who was an aspiring musician in his downtime, and a hell or a nice guy. Pretty decent songwriter too, he’s now given up commercial radio to concentrate on his music and his little children. He loved music and cared about his listeners. Sarah, the 20ish girl who was third fiddle on the morning show but occasionally got her own shift if someone phoned in sick. Shoulda been a prime-time DJ. I reprimanded her one time for making her home so obvious when she was a single gal. She’d often drive the wrapped company truck and park it in front of her house, on the city’s main north-street thoroughfare. Not too safe, talking about how she was single and lived alone and then parking a virtual billboard in front of her place on a street with about 50 000 cars a day driving by it. She actually seemed to take that advice to heart. And invited me to a party there one night. Good people. Great voices on the air, who were as good in real life.
I miss all that. And I feel sorry for the younger generation. They don’t know the feeling. They don’t have the connection. They have their phones with Spotify that play precisely what they want to hear every minute, but they don’t have radio. They don’t know the excitement of waiting all afternoon to hear that one new song that you love and have it blast out just before you had to go to dinner. They don’t find cool new songs that a DJ, much like themselves, found and threw on the turntable or in the CD player. They don’t know what it’s like to be lonely, or scared at 4AM and pick up the phone and talk to the local DJ who’s putting on a whole side of a Tears for Fears album and is happy to talk about it, the weather and the meaning of life to you for as long as the first four songs take to play. They ain’t being invited to a bar or a party by Spotify.
Radio itself has a lot of the blame. Somewhere along the line, the stations began getting gobbled up by conglomerates who decided it was easier to have one top 30 for all of North America than worry about what individual stations’ listeners wanted to hear. And that having 300 songs total on a computer was more efficient than having a 40-foot wall of albums and CDs to confuse the disc jockeys…if they had one. Because computers could duplicate them at a lower price. Fox could give them weather reports, once a day, so who cares if once in awhile a surprise thunderstorm spun out a tornado on the city and their were no people in the office to warn listeners? Their I-phones would do so anyway.
Many of my real friends in adult life have worked in radio. And radio, itself, was a good friend of mine for decades. It still is, but I’m getting old and it’s not aging well near as well as me. It makes me sad. If only the local station had a DJ playing his own collection of records and was watching that radar for that black cloud on the horizon, I’d switch him on and feel better. I’d buy him a beer at the local watering hole this weekend and find out what he’s heard that’s new and cool this week.
Radio, radio.
Everydave Life 