RADIO RADIO

chime time is 12 minutes to midnight

I grew up listening to the radio. Few of my age didn’t, especially in the New York City region where I was born. Among my earliest memories is hearing Arthur Godfrey Time and Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club on my mom’s kitchen radio perched on top of the refrigerator, where everyone could hear. I mention New York because the airwaves were full of radio stations there, from Long Island, where I lived, from New York City, and from Connecticut across Long Island Sound. At night, you could get stations from Buffalo and Baltimore if you knew where to look on the dial.

I got my first transistor radio at 8 or 9 and immediately plugged into the City’s Top 40 stations, WABC, WINS, and WMCA. ABC was the favorite, although I don’t know why. It might have been the DJs because they were all basically playing the same music. And yes, the stories about hiding the radio under your pillow so you could listen past bedtime were true. Sometimes I think I made this up, but I remember the first time WABC played the Beatles. I was 10 going on 11, and it was late on a January afternoon. Dan Ingram (a hero!) made an unusual introduction to a song he was about to play, saying something like ‘here’s a band that’s big in England and we’re just trying it out here’. And then “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and Beatlemania! It was January of 1964. Yes, Murray The K of WINS was the “Fifth Beatle,” but we loved W A Beatle C!

AM radio was fine for most of the 60s, but then FM appeared, and it was a different world. I split my time between the two, but then the patchouli-scented WNEW-FM won me over. It was a whole new way of both making and listening to radio, and I couldn’t get enough of it. Especially since the AM side was leaning towards bubblegum, and I could get Cream and album tracks from the Rolling Stones instead. I enjoyed listening and expanding my record collection so much that when I went away to college, I auditioned for the campus radio station and was given an on-air slot. The best part of the audition (which was really just meeting a couple of students who ran the place): I smoked a joint beforehand. It lowered my voice a little, and the guys loved my ‘deep, gravelly voice’!

WCVF-AM, Fredonia, was a carrier current station, which meant you could only pick it up on campus, and its signal was generated through the electricity in the dorms. The sound quality was less than ideal, too. But I had a show, and my friends in the dorms listened to me. It was totally free form. I picked the tunes and the order in which I played them. That format was the only one I used for the entirety of my on-air experience, with one minor exception that I’ll get to later.

I was only on the air at CVF for a couple or three semesters. My college career was a mess, but I really enjoyed working in the record library, checking in new records, and thoroughly enjoying what these days is called discovery. I attended a semester or two at Suffolk County Community College and worked at the station there, doing news mostly. The call letters of that one are lost to the ages (after a pretty good Google). It was carrier current, too. Around the same time, I went to a broadcasting school in Manhattan and got a certificate, but it seemed all the jobs they were hooked into were in small towns around the country, and I was unwilling to move out of the tri-state area. Looking back, it’s a shoulda, woulda, coulda thing. Maybe I didn’t want it enough.

In June of 1977, WUSB at SUNY Stony Brook on Long Island went FM. I joined in 1979. Unlike a lot of college stations, they accepted members of the community for on-air positions. I’m pretty sure I was slotted into an afternoon shift. The signal was great, I lived pretty close to campus, and my time there grew into a music director position in 83-84 when I took a few courses. I was on the air there, on and off, until 1995. My last few years, I would commute from New York City. First from Queens, then from Manhattan, where I’d get up at 6 AM every other Saturday and take the Long Island Railroad to Stony Brook in time to be on the air at 9 AM. Looking back, that’s nuts! One good thing I remember, besides having fun doing radio, was that Dan Ingram was on the air Saturday afternoons, and I could listen to him on WCBS-FM on the train back to the city. One detour, I actually had a job at a commercial station for a couple of weeks. WRIV-AM in Riverhead, way out on the Island, hired me to do Saturday afternoons. It was a “Music of Your Life” format, which meant my mother’s life, not mine. My first five minutes on the air were a disaster. I tried to segue from one record to another, and the turntable jammed. Dead air is not your friend. Everyone who worked at the station was listening, and the phones lit up. The station manager was screaming at me. But it really wasn’t my fault that their equipment sucked. All in all, it wasn’t my scene.

Once I got to Austin, I joined up with a new non-commercial FM, KOOP. I had Friday mornings at 9 with The New American Roots Show. Americana was new and hitting its high points. I played lots of it with a few in-studio guests. I don’t really remember why I was kicked off the air there, but I was rescued by Jay Trachtenberg, who was the manager of on-air personnel at KUT-FM at the University of Texas. A fan of my KOOP show, he had me start doing overnights, which blossomed into a full-time gig running their website and doing all kinds of fill-ins. Overnights were brutal at first, doing 12-5 AM. After a while, it was shortened to ending at 3 AM, going automated until Morning Edition, but just being involved with one of the biggest stations in Texas was a thrill. I was fired in October of 2003 for reasons too ugly to mention. Haven’t done radio since, though I tried a couple of times and ran into “radio ego syndrome.” That’s where the person running a station has a head that is so big it has its own parking space. Get the picture?

The reason I went through all of this is that I miss doing radio. Walking into a studio somewhere with a couple of bins and boxes of discs and playing what I want in the order I want for a couple of hours. It’s an art form. Those opportunities are gone as far as I know. CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG. I hardly even listen to terrestrial radio anymore. When I do, I’m shocked at how bad it is. And as I’ve discussed before, my brain is broken and won’t accept new music except on a very rare occasion. I pay for satellite radio, and even there it’s had to find anything close to free-form/progressive radio the way it was done by Vin Scelsa on WNEW, another hero. Radio is dying anyway. Kids today have so many choices. It’s pretty far down the list of what media they pay attention to.

As Vin used to say: Adios Companeros.

Nothing lasts forever, I said that.