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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.