CRITICAL MASS

Songs from satellites, music in my dreams

Little Steven Van Zandt’s Underground Garage
Little Steven Van Zandt’s Underground Garage

Bouncin’ off a satellite

Crushing the last long American night - Bruce Springsteen, “Radio Nowhere”

Sometimes at night I hear a radio playing when there is no radio around.

This is not an unusual phenomenon; others experience it. They hear faint music, the buzzing of ballgames, commercial jingles. They ascribe it to a neighbor’s radio or television. Some convince themselves their heads are receivers.

Radio is a part of me; I grew up in what might have been its last great age. I listened to baseball and basketball games in bed at night; I remember the miracle of tuning in a far-off station, the way micro-manipulation could sometimes raise voices out of the squelch. The pop songs of the ’60s and ’70s are imprinted in my mind. Play me a snatch of any pop song released between 1965 and 1980 and I probably can tell you its title, the artist and the year it was released. I used to play that game on the air with Tommy Smith, the venerable morning host at 103.7 The Buzz. Maybe he beat me a couple of times, but not often.

My generation was the last one that could embrace radio as idiosyncratic and genuinely weird, maybe the last time there was anything like romance attached to spinning records. I had friends who did it professionally, I had an FCC license and a show on the Centenary College station even though I wasn’t a Centenary student. I am fairly confident I was the first person in Shreveport ever to play a Van Halen record, since I slit open the promo copy of their first album and put it on the air. I played “Ice Cream Man” because it is an old John Brim blues song.

Later, I supplemented my income as the sports editor of The Jennings Daily News in Louisiana hosting a blues show on KJEF. I was the lead-in to a show hosted by Phil Phillips, who wrote and had the original hit with “Sea of Love” in 1959. (It became a hit, the legend goes, because a Baton Rouge DJ locked himself in the studio and played it constantly for 48 hours.) The experience was a bit disillusioning. No one listened to Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters in those days, especially in rural southwest Louisiana. They only listened to bands they could watch on MTV. Radio as a delivery device for music died some time around the launch of the video star.

For more than 30 years, radio has steadily become more corporate, with stations programmed by people in suits who live in big cities and do more looking at demographic breakdowns than listening to new songs. The stereotypical local disc jockey, lionized in our popular culture, has ceased to exist as a taste maker. There are exceptions - locally, 94.9 Tom-FM feels like it is programmed by a human being with eclectic tastes and human ears. But for the most part local music radio has been a wasteland for a long time.

Then in August 2002 - about a month after they started broadcasting nationwide - Sirius Satellite Radio gave me an extended cab Dodge Ram with a Sirius Country logo on the side, outfitted with a premium Kenwood stereo system wired up to receive 100 channels of commercial-free digital entertainment. They let me drive it for a week.

It didn’t go all that well - the truck’s air conditioning didn’t work, which led us to cancel a road trip we’d planned to check out the different offerings. So I drove it to work and back a few times and heard enough to know I liked the product well enough. In my relatively small sample, I managed to hear Steve Earle, the Spanic Boys, the Mike Plume Band, Woody Guthrie’s “Do Re Mi,” Dwight Yoakam’s cover of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” Malcolm Holcombe’s “Teaching Michael Anthony” recorded live in the Sirius studios, Uncle Tupelo’s cover of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and Rodney Crowell doing “Blues de Bosco” off the Evangeline Made compilation album. Stuff you would never hear on your typical terrestrial radio, a kind of narrow casting that was analogous to cable television.

Back then they had 60 devoted to music and 40 to news, talk and sports. I didn’t spend enough time in my car to justify what was then a $12.99-a-month subscription.

A friend discovered satellite radio about the same time - he liked it, got it and has had it ever since. He used to make a lot of out-of-state trips, so it wasn’t unusual for him to be in his car for several hours at a time. It was nice for him to set it on a channel and not worry about losing the signal as he burned through a state or two.

Then, late last year I bought a new car. While I couldn’t get it with all the options I wanted, it did come with a satellite radio-enabled unit and a trial subscription. I figured I’d use it for a few months, then let the subscription lapse.

But I don’t think I can.

It’s like I’ve discovered radio in all its goofy, bizarre glory, all over again. I listen to a relatively few channels - Little Steven Van Zandt’s Underground Garage is my go-to because it plays the coolest songs in the world and has opened my curatorial ears to the possibilities of Scandinavian garage pop (The Dahlmanns, The Nomads, Cocktail Slippers) as well as re-introducing nearly forgotten gems from decades past. Little Steven’s Underground Garage is a channel where you might hear hear the song you’d thought you’d heard once - but maybe you’d only dreamed - on the radio back in 1982, when you were driving from Dallas to Shreveport at 3 a.m. with heat lightning flashing in the northern sky. Or you might hear Frank Sinatra’s version of “Mrs. Robinson” off his 1969 My Way album (the one that includes the lyric “The PTA, Mrs. Robinson/Won’t OK the way you do your thing/Ding, ding, ding/And you’ll get yours, Mrs. Robinson/ Foolin’ with that young stuff like you do/Boo, hoo, hoo; woo, woo, woo”).

Van Zandt has provided a home for some characterful figures who serve as DJs. There’s Rolling Stones original manager Andrew Loog Oldham; Handsome Dick Manitoba, former lead singer of the Manhattan punk band The Dictators; and Kid Leo from the legendary WMMS in Cleveland; and The Woggles’ Mighty Manfred hosts a show - and if you don’t know who many or any of these people are, well, that’s kind of the point.

They’ve got deep and diverse record collections and highly refined and extremely personal tastes. Like those we used to have in every city and town in the country.

America is a big and mostly empty country. We cohere around our culture and shared history rather than around ethnic or religious poles. For the past hundred years or so, since the rise of mass media, we’ve become an increasingly homogeneous nation. We all have the same fast-food restaurants and box stores, and Hollywood rolls out visions of how we should live in 3,000 theaters every week. That’s not all bad, because we need things in common, a reservoir of common experience and, in some ways we’ve become dangerously Balkanized. We hunker down in our echo chambers and watch our own particular brand of news, we order up our own set of custom facts. We’re free to dive down any rabbit hole that catches our eye. That might not be good citizenship, but it is the way we live now.

In the ’60s and ’70s, we had something called the Top 40. At any given moment, we had four or five hit songs that almost everybody knew pretty well, that were unavoidable to anyone who chose to live in the world. But we had real DJs too, people who discovered music. We had regional hits. We had local bands too - amateurs and strivers who didn’t make it, who might have had a glorious moment before retiring into mundane adulthood. It wasn’t always as fake as these reality shows make it out to be.

These days we cover our ears with headphones and carry our record collections in the palm of our hand. Thanks to streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, we see music as a utility, a constantly flowing thing that can be interrupted, but not exhausted. That’s probably so. Talent has never been scarce.

The radio I hear in my head at night is just a kind of aural hallucination and the bass line may be just the pumping of my blood. It comes in that limbo between wakefulness and sleep, my mind rummaging through its files. It is not a sign of madness, but possibly the opposite. It is a natural function of an active mind blinking down into restfulness, going to sleep. That is what I tell myself; it is just an artifact of life - something like a memory.

E-mail: [email protected]

Style, Pages 45 on 03/24/2013

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