Jim’s Blog: Rock and Roll on the Radio
It was the summer that Mount St. Helens blew its top, CNN went on the air, Richard Pryor set fire to himself, draft registration was reinstated, Ronald Reagan flirted with naming Gerald Ford as his running mate, the United States skipped the Moscow Olympics, and the shipyard workers struck in Poland. We counted the days Americans had been kept in captivity in Iran. We went to the movies and saw The Empire Strikes Back and The Blues Brothers and Caddyshack and Airplane. It was the summer of 1980, and it was also the summer I got my first taste of full-time radio at a little rock ‘n’ roll station in Freeport, Illinois.
Earlier that spring, I had gotten a breathless phone call from a friend who was already working there part-time, telling me to stay right where I was, because any minute now I was going to get a call from his boss, who was looking for a nighttime DJ for the summer. A couple of hours (not minutes) later, the guy did indeed call, and we set up an interview. Just as it took him two hours to call me the first time, he was also two hours late for my interview (which happened to occur on the same weekend Ann met my parents for the first time, but that’s a different story). That I would get the job, however, was pretty much a foregone conclusion.
It was a pretty sweet gig for a college kid. I was on the air Sunday through Friday nights from six to midnight, so I had Saturday nights to party with my friends. I was paid the princely sum of $135 a week, but I was living at home in Monroe, so my only expenses were gasoline and beer.
I have a few photographs of myself from that summer. I would like to be able to show you one of them, but I’m not sure what box they’re hiding in. They show a big, hairy, extremely young-looking kid, always wearing a T-shirt and some stupid hat, behind the mike or holding a set of headphones in his hands, always grinning at the camera. And why not grin? He was on the radio every night and getting paid for it.
Jim’s Blog: The Beer Tourist Reports
I have written before that my wife and I are beer tourists. We’ll take off on a weekend day and visit breweries, new ones and familiar ones, in Madison and elsewhere. Recently we’ve visited two that made a big impression on us.
The first one is in Madison: Working Draft Beer Company, which opened in March at 1129 E. Wilson Street, across from McPike Park (formerly Central Park). It’s not just a brewery; it’s intended as a venue for artists, whether it’s providing gallery space or a venue for musical performances and poetry readings. It’s also a neighborhood gathering place. On a recent Sunday, the place was full of people of all ages, including several families. Working Draft has several long tables, so you can’t help but socialize with your fellow patrons. The sort of social vibe we found on that day is one of the things Ann and I love the most about craft-beer culture.
The second one is in Darlington, in Lafayette County. City Service Brewing is located in an old gas station right downtown on Main Street, and the building still looks very much as it did when it was built in 1931. City Service is celebrating its first birthday this month. The picture accompanying this post gives you a look at one end of the bar, which is built on top of a 1962 Lincoln Continental. The taproom is full of automotive memorabilia and a motorcycle that spent 56 years at the bottom of a lake hangs from the ceiling. (Really. If you want to know the rest of the story, you’ll have to visit and find out for yourself.) Ann tells me the ladies’ room is quite unusual, although I have to take her word for it.
Working Draft, City Service, and places like them are fun if you like to people-watch. They’re local businesses, so their success is good for the community. In the case of City Service, they preserve old or historic buildings. If you don’t consider yourself a beer drinker, or your beer of choice is fizzy, yellow, and nationally advertised, tell the bartender that. Chances are they can recommend something you’ll like that’s made only a few feet from where you’re sitting.
Jim’s Blog: Don and Casey
You may not have heard about the recent death of Don Bustany. You may not recognize his name at all—even though he’s mentioned on Magic 98 every weekend. Don Bustany was the co-creator of American Top 40 with Casey Kasem. Back in 1970, he and Casey dreamed up the idea of a weekly countdown show based on the authoritative Hot 100 chart from Billboard magazine. And you know all about what happened next.
You have probably seen Don Bustany‘s name on your TV, too. His “day job” while American Top 40 was getting off the ground involved working behind the scenes on some famous network TV shows, including The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show, where he’s credited as a camera coordinator.
Although Casey is most famous for his radio show, he was frequently seen—not just heard—on TV, and not just as himself, but as an actor. Just last weekend I watched an old Hawaii Five-O that featured Casey as a combative TV talk-show host. It was one of two appearances he made on Hawaii Five-O, both in 1974. In the other one, he played a sleazy department store owner. (Click the links to see him.) Over the years, Casey also acted in episodes of Fantasy Island, Charlie’s Angels, Quincy, and Ironside. That’s besides the dozens (or maybe hundreds) of cartoon voices he did during his long career.
Don Bustany and Casey Kasem. They aren’t making guys like them anymore.
Jim’s Blog: Hello Again, Chicago
Thirty-five years ago this month, Ann and I honeymooned in Chicago, back when we were young and broke. For our anniversary, no longer young and no longer broke, we decided we’d go back for a weekend.
We started on Saturday afternoon with lunch at Giordano’s with a big ol’ Chicago-style pizza. From there, we walked to the Museum of Broadcast Communications for SNL: The Experience, an exhibit on the history of Saturday Night Live. It’s pretty fabulous, taking you through a week in the life of the show, from the writers’ meetings on Monday through the building of sets and designing of costumes, to rehearsals and finally, showtime. All along the way, it’s loaded with costumes, memorabilia, and video. No matter which era of SNL is your favorite—Aykroyd and Belushi, Carvey and Hartman, Ferrell and Oteri, or the current cast—you’ll enjoy it. It’s open through December 31 and is worth a road trip. Your ticket to the SNL exhibit also includes the regular exhibits at the Museum of Broadcast Communications, which are Chicago-centric but cover the history of radio and especially television in fascinating ways,
That’ll be hard to top, I thought. Until we checked into our hotel, where we were upgraded to a suite on the 38th floor of the 39-story building. We got up there to find that it was bigger than our condo in Middleton, with enough space to seat 25 people in the living area (no joke) and spectacular views of downtown Chicago. The slightly fuzzy picture you see with this post is one of the views we had from up there. The towers on the right are Marina City, which was one of the first mixed-use (retail and residential) developments in the country, built back in the 60s. It was also the location of Chicago Top 40 radio station WCFL, a favorite station of mine when I was young, one that no longer exists. The House of Blues is located in Marina City, and that was where we went for dinner on Saturday night.
Sunday morning we went back to Marina City to Yolk, a breakfast chain located only in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Dallas/Fort Worth. I thought maybe that was going to be my favorite part of the weekend (seriously—it was that good), until we went on an architecture boat tour on the Chicago River. If that doesn’t sound interesting to you, hold up—it really was. As we went up and down the river, our tour guide pointed out the buildings along the way and their history. It was an unusual frame for the history of the city itself, and a fascinating way to see it.
We wandered around at Navy Pier after that before hitting the road for home. Did we visit a couple of breweries along the way? Do you even have to ask?
Brewery stops are always a good part of any weekend. But as we were driving home, Ann asked me which was my single favorite part of our anniversary weekend. I couldn’t decide then, and I still can’t.
Jim’s Blog: Hey Honey, I’m Home
I have written a few times over the years about another job I have, which is to teach classes for high school kids getting ready to take their ACTs and SATs. I spent most of March doing that, mostly in Illinois and Minnesota, including 14 straight nights away from home at the end of the month.
A great thing about the job is it gives me plenty of downtime. Sometimes I don’t teach until the evening, which leaves me the whole day to A) do other work or B) vegetate in the hotel. I did a fair amount of vegetation this time, watching more TV than I usually do on these trips. Classic TV channels like MeTV, Antenna TV, and the Heroes & Icons channel are good for people of my somewhat-advanced age—their shows are familiar and I don’t need to pay attention 100 percent of the time. A side-effect of watching these channels comes from watching the commercials, often the same ones over and over. After a couple of days, I had a powerful desire to buy term life insurance, a walk-in tub, My Pillow, and (oddly enough) an elliptical exercise machine.
I also get whole days off occasionally. And I want everyone to know—my colleagues here at the radio station especially—that I do not spend every moment of every off day touring breweries. On this trip, I saw some other stuff. I saw the World’s Largest Hockey Stick, in Eveleth, Minnesota (pictured), and I drove past Bob Dylan‘s childhood home just down the road in Hibbing. (I wrote about that experience in more detail, and posted a picture, here.)
But I went to lots of breweries, too.
I also saw some places I’d never seen before, visited some friends, and worked with some great kids (and a few who probably should have been spanked more when they were younger, but that’s another story).
Teaching season is over now until the fall. I’ll miss it a little. But I’ll get to be on the radio more often, which is a plus. (I hope you think it’s a plus.)
Jim’s Blog: The Night Van Halen Trashed the Sheraton
Forty years ago this week, Journey, then an up-and-coming rock band, was set to play the Orpheum Theater. Also on the bill was the band Montrose, and a new band from Los Angeles called Van Halen. One month after releasing their first album, Van Halen was already generating a buzz, and a dedicated knot of Madison fans was looking forward to the show.
Then, disaster. The Orpheum dropped Van Halen from the bill. Something about not being able to accommodate three bands, or something. Over at the Emerald City Chronicle, a local music paper, the staff was devastated, until the editor got an idea. Why not try to get Van Halen booked to play somewhere else in town on the same night? Reporter Susan Masino got on the phone to Van Halen‘s record label, and before long, the show was set for the Shuffle Inn, a popular Madison venue on the West Beltline near Todd Drive, on March 7, 1978.
It was a rager, a Madison legend fondly remembered by those who were there. The band spent three nights in Madison at the Sheraton on John Nolen Drive, although that’s probably not so fondly remembered by the Sheraton itself. It was a blizzard of rock-star craziness that included, among other things, band members trashing rooms, chasing each other around the halls with fire extinguishers, and taping frozen fish to the hallway ceilings (really). It was such a wild time that the band actually thanked the Sheraton in the liner notes to their second album, released about a year later.
Susan Masino went on to a successful career as a rock writer (and was a Madison radio personality for a number of years). She recently told the story of the concert and the wild night that followed to a Van Halen fan site, and it’s quite a tale, perfect for you to read during Saturday at the 70s. It is rated PG, however, so don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Jim’s Blog: Lean Times
Last weekend, the American Top 40 show on Sunday at the 80s was from February 1984. It gave me flashbacks to a time when I was a far younger man, a time that was pretty awful for a while but eventually turned out OK.
In the fall of 1983, married six months, I had dragged my wife to a small town in Illinois. “Not the ends of the earth, but you can see them from there,” as I described it. I did not like the radio job I had taken there, however, but it turned out that they didn’t like me either. One Monday morning in February, I was called into the boss’ office and fired. Ann hadn’t been able to find a job yet—she was, as she likes to say, “watching General Hospital professionally”—and with no steady paycheck coming into the house (one-bedroom basement apartment, actually) lean times were coming.
I cannot remember precisely how we got by. I got unemployment, I remember that—and we qualified for some of that free government-surplus cheese they were handing out back then. (We still have the box that it came in.) At some point during that time—and I can’t remember the exact date anymore—my best friend, who had heart trouble for as long as I’d known him, died at age 23.
We two kids were getting a series of lessons in what real life is like, and it wasn’t any fun.
I applied for radio jobs all over the country, and we’d have moved—if it had been necessary. As it turned out, the other radio station in town had an opening, and I took it early in April. The day they wanted me to start turned out to be our first wedding anniversary. When I told them that, and how we were planning to celebrate with our first dinner and a movie in a long time, they were nice enough to let me start a day later.
(The movie was Splash, the mermaid comedy with Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah.)
I ended up working for that station for a couple of years, so that chapter of the story has a happy ending. But for a while last Sunday afternoon, listening to “Karma Chameleon,” “That’s All” by Genesis, and Kool and the Gang‘s “Joanna,” the happy ending hadn’t happened yet, and all I could feel was how it was to be young and jobless, mourning the loss of a friend, and wondering what disasters were yet to come.
Jim’s Blog: Sticky Tape
So the other day I walked into the Magic bullpen, the office we share, looking for some tape to seal up an envelope. I said to Ginger and Jillene, “Do either of you have any sticky tape?”
They both looked at me like I had two heads, so I decided I’d better explain. “Sticky tape, as distinct from recording tape.”
Ginger paused for a moment and said, “So you mean tape, like over there?,” and pointed toward the tape dispenser.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “I guess I don’t have to make that distinction anymore.”
I started in radio nearly 40 years ago (!), when we used recording tape, so if you asked somebody at the radio station for tape, you needed to specify whether you meant recording tape or the sticky kind. As a result, the phrase “sticky tape” has remained in my vocabulary, even though recording tape started going out of style 20 years ago and is gone now. You might be able to find a tape machine in some forgotten closet in the basement of our building, but all of our recording is done digitally today. There are people in our building who have never used an actual tape machine, and probably a few who have never even seen one in action.
But my old-radio-guy brain still makes me differentiate between recording tape and sticky tape.
This got me thinking about all the stuff that’s still part of my mental furniture (and maybe yours too) that won’t be present in the minds of younger people. The sound of a dial tone. Hitting the carriage return when you finish typing a line. Taking film to the drugstore to be developed. TV stations and radio stations signing off at night and on in the morning. And so on.
I am not a person who is opposed to progress and change. I like my smartphone, and having dozens of channels on my TV. I like having my music library on a portable drive that fits in a shirt pocket. I like GPS navigation in the car. But I’m probably still going to ask you for sticky tape now and then. Sorry about that.
Jim’s Blog: New Year’s Vacation
Ann and I don’t usually take long vacations. We started 2018, however, with a nine-day trip, the longest one we’ve been on together in something like eight years. Our first stop was to visit Ann‘s sister and her family, who live in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. We decided to drive it this time, as we’ve done before. This is risky in the winter for obvious reasons, but since we’ve also been snowed in there when flying, we figured it was worth the gamble. It takes about 16 hours, which is one long day and one short morning in the car.
The Washington metro area has the most complicated system of highways I’ve ever seen. It’s a mix of tollways and free highways; it helps that we have an electronic toll transponder from Illinois, which means we don’t have to stop and throw coins in a bucket—tolls are deducted from our account, which automatically replenishes from a credit card when needed. Near my sister-in-law’s suburb, there’s a highway that costs $2.50 to get on, and there’s no other good way to get where we need to go. We’re on it for only one exit, but we had to cough up the $2.50 every time. I bet we dropped close to $20 on that exit alone during the four days we were there. It’s quite a scam, really. Not only that, the traffic is hellacious. It’s like everybody in Virginia has their own car, and nobody rides with anybody else. But we made it to my sister-in-law’s, and we spent a lot of time with our three nephews and one niece.
When everybody went back to work and school on January 2, we became tourists. There’s an affiliate of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in a nearby suburb, and it’s fabulous. On another day, we visited the Manassas National Battlefield Park, the site of two key battles of the Civil War. I am a history geek and battlefield tramper from way back, but there wasn’t much tramping on this day, given that it was about 10 degrees above zero. On the way home, we stopped off in Cleveland for a day at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was a bucket-list destination for me, and if you like music, it should be one for you, too. The collection of artifacts is remarkable, from the piano John Lennon and Paul McCartney used to write many of their famous early songs to the dress Stevie Nicks wore on the cover of Fleetwood Mac‘s Rumours. There’s a lot to see.
By the time we got home last Sunday, we were ready to be back. The cats were ready to have us back. And I’m ready to be back to work, too.
Jim’s Blog: Top Songs of 2017
When I was a kid, I was quite a nerd.
(Cue people who know me personally: “What do you mean, ‘was’?”)
I used to watch baseball games on TV and keep statistics in my own little scorebook. And for a lot of years before I was old enough to do anything else on New Year’s Eve, I listened to the radio countdown of the year’s top songs, writing them down one by one. Even after I got old enough to go out with friends on New Year’s Eve, I’d listen to as much of the countdown as I could. When I was a little baby disc jockey just starting out, it was a thrill to actually host the New Year’s Eve countdown show for the first time. Later in my career, when I did an afternoon radio show in Iowa, I’d do the countdown between noon and 6PM on December 31 instead of the traditional six-to-midnight. I called it “the countdown show for people who can’t make it til midnight,” of which I was usually one.
Even though I am not the nerd I used to be (cue people who know me personally: “what do you mean ‘used to be’?”), I’m still fascinated by the year-end ranking of top songs. Billboard magazine is considered the bible of the music industry, and its year-end top 50 for 2017 is pretty interesting. I would not have guessed that Maroon 5‘s “Don’t Wanna Know” would be #1—I would have bet on Ed Sheeran‘s “Shape of You,” which ended up #2. Nobody should be surprised that Adele has two of the top 11. Justin Timberlake‘s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” made the top 10 in both 2016 and 2017.
My favorite songs of 2017 didn’t make the list, however. “Wish I Knew You” by the Revivalists was released in 2015 but didn’t become a hit until this year. It took me awhile to come around to liking “Feel It Still” by Portugal. The Man, but I do.
(The band’s name, as written in the previous sentence, does not contain a typo. They put a period between “Portugal” and “The Man” in their name. I like their song, but as a writer and longtime professional editor, I don’t like that period. No I do not.)
Wherever you go and whatever you do over this new year’s holiday, I hope there’s good music to listen to. Because if there isn’t, what’s the point?