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Sign-on: The Magic of Radio
The summer I was 12, I spent hours walking along the beach on Long Island,
transistor radio in my hand, listening to the most popular station in the nation. I
didnt much care for the songs on WABC; I particularly despised Gilbert
OSullivans Alone Again (Naturally), a whining ballad that somehow swelled
my adolescent frustrations and made me want to hurl the radio into the sea. But I
didnt. Nor did I turn the dial on the cream-colored plastic boxnotched black
dials for volume and tuning, smooth ribs of plastic over the speaker, a single 9-volt
battery inside, the whole package a bit larger than a pack of Marlboros. That radio
stayed with me all day; each night, I slipped it under my pillow.
I kept that radio tuned to the Top 40 station because the next song might be Billy
Pauls Me and Mrs. Jones, which I couldnt get enough of, even if I hadnt the
slightest idea what the song was about. I kept the radio tuned to Musicradio 77
because I was 12, this was America, and that was what I was supposed to do. I
listened because the deejays were fast and fevered, because there was nothing else
moving at the frenetic pace of my mind and emotions. In the voice of my favorite
deejay, Dan Ingram, in his six-second antics sandwiched between ads and pop
songs, I heard freedom and passion, everything a kid wants to think is out there
somewhere, just beyond his reach.
Where I grew up, in New York City, WABC was the sound that poured out of car
windows, storefronts, beach blanket transistors, and even some of those hip hi-fi
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stereos the older kids were buying so they could play their albumsalbums WABC
assuredly did not play. Every big city had a similar stationWLS in Chicago, KHJ
in Los Angeles, WRKO in Boston and on and on across the land, the deejays
shouting, the hits repeating, the jingles and contests and promotions and ads flying
out of the speakers, a locomotive of a generation.
Nobody talked much about radio then; it was just there, everywhere, a
subliminal echo chamber tucked under a cloak of invisibility.1 The songs and
jingles embedded themselves in our memories, linking to moments magical and
painful, connecting to events, places, people. Americans who grew up in the 1950s,
60s, 70s and into the 80s received the blessing (and the curse) of a common
soundtrack, not only in popular music, but across all of the programming that came
out of what William Styron called the plastic larynx of the cheap little radiothe
rock and the pop, the deejays and the news, the all-night talkers and the FM fringe.
For a few brief decades, pop culture brought the nation together into a sense of
belonging, a deep belief in the greatest of American myths, the one that had
powered the nation to victory in World War II and propelled the economic dynamo
of the 50s and 60sthe deeply felt conviction that we were one community, one
generation. There was quiet strength to the myth that because we all grew up
dancing and dreaming to the same soundtrack, we were therefore somehow united.
That sense of belonging molded our expectations in politics, work, home and
school. Until the Great Unraveling of the late 60s and early 70s, this shared pop
culture was a meeting ground for our nation, a commons that we only years later
realized we had lost.
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Radioat least in its broadcast AM-FM incarnationhas seemed like a fading
technology of late, but its a huge piece of how we got to be who we are. And if the
history of changing technologies teaches us anything, we should know better than
to write radios obituary. Speaking to Americans about radio over the past few
years, Ive heard one story after another about the voice, program or music that
changed a life. Almost everyone has a radio storyof a road trip on which they
first heard the blues or zydeco, of an all-night talk show that lured them into the
mysteries of the JFK assassination or the deep unknowns of cosmology, of a deejay
who talked them through a teen romance gone bad. Michael Freedman, who rose to
the top of CBS Radio News, pulled open his desk and cradled in his hand the
transistor radio that he kept under his pillow decades ago to listen to the ballgames
and newscasts that shaped his future. George Michael, the great Philadelphia and
New York Top 40 deejay who later became a nationally syndicated sportscaster,
reached into his top drawer and showed me the stopwatch he used four decades ago
to time the introductions of each pop hit so he could talk right up to the first
syllable of the song. Ive been taken into basements to see treasured jukeboxes, into
back offices to hear an old tape of a cherished but long gone Top 40 station, into
kitchens to pore over scrapbooks of concert tickets, programs and song surveys
featuring the swinging All-American deejays of one boss rocker or another. Each
visit brings back my own memories in rushes of sound muffled by the passage of
time: The velvet tones of Clarence Rock, the all-night newsman on all-news WINS;
the wild conspiracy theories and classic carny pitches of all-night talker Long John
Nebel; the tinny tunes of distant AM pop stations as I faded to dreamland.
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Radio lends itself to nostalgia, to a pining for the innocence of a summers night
listening to baseball from a far-off city, the signal fading in and out, the crack of the
bat sometimes lost in the sizzle of static from a distant lightning bolt. Or the
longing could be for radios lost edge, for that moment when you first heard a
certain Dylan song, or the whole A side of Sgt. Peppers, or National Public
Radios coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, or Art Bells midnight conjuring
of too many coincidences surrounding the official explanation of Area 51.
But far more than nostalgia, the story of radio is the story of imagination in
American popular culture. It is Richard Dreyfuss in American Graffiti conjuring
Wolfman Jack as a pirate of the airwaves holed up in some Mexican hideaway,
illicitly pumping out the cruising tunes that kept the Strip hopping each night. It is
Rush Limbaugh thumping his desk and grandiosely describing his vast Excellence
in Broadcasting Network headquarters even as he delivers his talk show from the
comfort of his South Florida home. It is thousands of college kids playing radio,
summoning a fantasy world of their own, as I did in the late 70s, when I took
listeners to my all-night show on an aural tour of a towering Holder Broadcasting
Complex, 12 great stories of radio, with live reports from our beleaguered
weatherman calling in from his outdoor perch, our stentorian but oft inebriated
sports reporter, and our officious and incompetent newsmanall me, of course.
Finest moment: A listener called and asked if tours were available of the
complex, which actually was a decrepit studio in the sodden basement of an
ancient, deteriorating dormitory.
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Radio, not even a century old as a mass medium, has already evolved from
plaything of hobbyists and tinkerers to source of the first truly national pop culture
(the Golden Age of radio network broadcasting in the 1930s and 40s) to its first
brush with death (when TV hit a majority of U.S. homes in the early 1950s) to
bonding agent for a generation of American youth (the Top 40 era and the rise of
rock and roll) to messenger of the counterculture (the rise of the FM band and
freeform radio) to vanguard of niche-specialization (the triumph of market research
and the perfection of satellite technology) and finally to this moment, in which
radio is widely groused about and dismissed, yet remains a constant companion for
nearly all Americansin the car, at home in the morning, in the background at the
office. Like most old media, radio defies predictions of its death at the hands of
new technologies. American radio--like the pop culture it has helped to create, like
the country it speaks tois ever adapting. It hardens with time, absorbs the new,
co-opts the rebellious, reinvents itself every step of the way.
The first national broadcast reached a relative handful of homemade radio sets on
July 2, 1921, when RCA arranged for a live description of the heavyweight boxing
championship bout between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. The match
took place in Hoboken, New Jersey, where a commentator's remarks were
transcribed and telegraphed to KDKA in Pittsburgh. Around the country, boxing
fans and the plain old curious paid a few pennies admission to gather in firehouses
and social halls where volunteer radio hobbyists had set up their receivers.
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Never before has anyone undertaken the colossal task of simultaneously making
available a voice description of each incident in a fight to hundreds of thousands of
people, wrote the RCA house magazine, "Wireless Age." The event was deemed
so important that each person who set up a receiver and pulled in the broadcast
could receive a certificate--signed by Jack Dempsey and Franklin Roosevelt, then a
former assistant secretary of the Navy and president of the Navy Club, which
helped organize the fightthanking the listener for his role in "the successful
promotion of amity between the nations."2
Within a few months, radio had so captured the American imagination that a
song swept the nationon sheet music, of course. People called it simply "The
Radio Song:"
I wish there was a "Wireless" to Heaven,
And I could speak to Mama ev'ry day,
I would let her know, by the Radio,
I'm so lonesome since she went away.
Radio became a truly mass medium after the first reasonably affordable sets came
on the market in 1927. The Sears catalogue that year featured a $34.95 table radio
and advised that no family should be without its untold advantages. A catalogue
from the Radio Specialty Corp. made the Sears pitch seem shy: When the forces of
the Almighty Creator of the Universe and the skill and genius of Man so combine
to bring you untold blessings which may be yours to enjoy without even the asking,
we ask you in all seriousness why you should not at once show your gratitude and
appreciation and accept that which is so freely offered?3
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Radio quickly became essential to daily life. The dance bands and other musical
acts of the 30s gave way during the war years to a more ambitious menu of news,
dramas, comedy and variety shows. The great networkshuge concerns created in
the late 1920s to link the nations local stations by phone lines--had symphony
orchestras and creative staffs teeming with serious playwrights and fine actors.
Radios were the new hearth, their baroque design reflecting the importance of the
object and the hours that families spent with it. Radio inspired new kinds of
communities, liberated from geography--clusters of Americans who shared the
same musical taste, political philosophy or sense of humor. In a country with
distinct regional sensibilities, radio was something universal.
Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to understand how to marry the
listeners imagination to a distant voice. When citizens visited their presidents
home each week for his fireside chats, they had little concrete sense that
Roosevelts hands shook as he stood before crowds, that braces held him up on legs
crippled by polio. On the air, there were no tremors: Roosevelts voice was clear
and strong, and he used radio as an instrument of power.
During and after the war, radios expanded beyond the living room to every corner
of the house. With more and more urgent news coming over the air, Americans
wanted to be near the radio. Clock radios came on the market and soon the radio
was waking commuters for the workday. Kitchen table radios meant that news and
music became companions while dinner was cooking. By 1940, there were even
rudimentary portable radios, bread-box sized units that looked like small
suitcases and weighed more than five pounds.
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There were more stations to listen to than ever beforethe Federal
Communications Commission opened up space on the AM dial, especially in rural
America and the new suburbs. Though hardly any Americans owned FM radios, the
government declared that band open for stations as well. Between 1945 and 1952,
the number of AM stations shot up from 940 to 2,400, while FM took its first steps,
growing from a few dozen stations to 650. In 1946, playwright Norman Corwin
wrote a script for CBS called Seems Radio Is Here to Stay.4
Radios awkward, panicked, inchoate adjustment to the introduction of television
in American homes reminds us: We have been here before. Whenever a new
communications medium comes along, the first wave of hype informs us that the
old ways are history: Radio will kill off newspapers, television will eliminate radio,
the Internet will obviate the need for TV, bloggers will supplant professional
journalists. But the real story of how media evolve is much more interesting than
any on-off switch model of replacement: It is a story of how we cope with being
alone in a crowded world, and how we find community in a society seemingly
designed to send each of us our own way. The clearest way to understand a culture,
Marshall McLuhan said, is to examine its tools of conversation. Radio, from its
start, was something magical, something that came out of the ether, a stunning turn
in the popular culture from centuries of writing and reading back to the roots of
human communication: Voice and listening. All of a sudden, one could speak to
many--unseen, unknown. The broadcaster could be whomever he chose to be, and
the audience assumed new identities too. The president might call you My fellow
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Americans, or a charismatic commentator such as Walter Winchell might address
Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.5 And at home, you might say to
yourself, Thats me hes talking to.
At first alone, and then in ever-larger communities, listeners bonded through their
appreciation of characters, shows, phrases, songs, all the bits and pieces of sound
that add up to a common culture. The tools were ancient, Biblicalrepetition,
formulaic expressions, parablesbut they were adapted to the new medium
jingles, hit songs, time and temperature, slogans, radio storytellers, midnight
talkers. The result was a people with a common set of references, sharing ideas and
beliefs.6
SPACER
Today, radio seems clueless. One-third of the recorded music sold in this country
falls into categories that barely exist on the radiojazz, classical, Broadway,
bluegrass, zydeco, trance, New Age, the vast spectrum of American sound. An
Andrea Bocelli CD outsells Elton John 5 to 1 but is not heard on the radio. The
Welsh classical singer Charlotte Church outsells Sheryl Crow 3 to 1; again, radio
silence. The soundtrack from the movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou wows the
buying public and sweeps the Grammys, but wins precious little airplay. Some of
the top-grossing concert acts each summer are Jimmy Buffett and Steely Dan; it
takes patient dial-scanning to find the specialized station that might perhaps play
one or two of their biggest hits.7
Radios audience has been in decline for more than a decade, even as the
advertising load each hour soars up toward the 30-minute mark. No one seems to
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care, said James Duncan, a leading radio consultant. The radio executives seem
not to worry about it, except for a few programming types. The advertisers seem
not to complain. Perhaps they have become immune to the clutter because clutter is
so ubiquitous in all media.8
How did something that meant so much to so many become such a neglected
corner of the popular culture? How could such an intimate medium come to be
governed by such impersonal and corporate forces? Why have we allowed radio,
which brought together the most influential generation of the past century, to
splinter into so many niches that it now divides us from each other more than it
binds us in song or any sense of common cause?
For all our technological prowess, we seem to be moving back toward the kind of
lives our great-grandparents led in the days before radio--apart, atomized, in our
own worlds, Googling in countless different directions. Technology and culture
went micro, and now each of us has access to our own portal, our own America.
That was supposed to be a grand gift, but something is missing. The American
sense of unity through mass media started with radio. Radio popularized the idea of
being part of a generation. When radio lost its way, those grand, enveloping ideas
seeped out of our cultural vocabulary. The bonds that radio seemed to cement were
always artificial, something that took on different meanings in each individual. But
it gave us a starting point for conversations about community. For all its artifice, its
deejays with fake names, its sameness and phony familiarity, radio gave Americans
what his job and the road gave Willy Loman in Arthur Millers Death of a
Salesman: Radio gave us a persona, a foundation. This book is about what that
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time of community felt and sounded like, how it came to be, why it all collapsed,
and what we will listen to next.
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1 Marshall McLuhan, quoted in Fornatale, Radio in the Television Age, xxv.2 White, Battle of the Century.3 Eberly, 34.
4 Keith, Talking Radio, 3.
5 Douglas,Listening In, 24.6 Postman,Amusing Ourselves, 18.7 Lee Abrams, memo to staff, Sept. 7, 2000.8 Quoted in Radio Told To Be Wary Of Its Own Prosperity, Tim Jones, Chicago Tribune, Dec. 7, 1999.