Jim Bartlett’s Blog

Whenever I come into the office lately, the first thing I do is check to see if Lanette is still here, or if her baby has decided it’s time to have his birthday. It occurred to me the other day that apart from when I was six and my mother was expecting with my youngest […]

I hope you saw the article in Isthmus recently about the great Lost Madison Facebook community–and that you’ve checked out Lost Madison yourself. It’s full of pictures and memories of Madison the way it used to be, and an excellent source of information about the city’s past. In the summer, I find myself thinking about […]

The other night at Concert on the Square, one of the listeners at Table 75 asked me, “What’s the best prize you’ve ever given away?”   I had to think about it for a minute. Making someone’s $992 mortgage payment during Magic Pays Your Bills last year was fun. At another station, I once gave […]

Every time I hear Kelly Clarkson’s song “People Like Us,” I don’t hear it the way she sings it.  I don’t hear the line “We’re all misfits living in a world on fire.”  I hear “We’re all dipsticks living in a world on fire.”  There’s a word for this phenomenon: it’s called a “mondegreen,” the […]

This weekend is a significant anniversary in Madison-area history: On June 8, 1984, shortly before 1:00 on that Friday morning, an F5 tornado, the strongest there is, struck Barneveld. Ninety percent of the village was destroyed and nine people died. Other communities in southern Wisconsin were also hit within a span of about two hours […]

  On Memorial Day weekend, Bratfest kicks off the festival season.  If you keep your eyes open, you’ll see lots of radio stations broadcasting from these summertime events (even Magic 98).  Over the years, I have been to a few. In small-town Iowa more than 20 years ago, the annual summer festival was supposed to […]

This past weekend’s Saturday morning edition of American Top 40 is a show I can remember hearing when it was on the first time, back in the spring of 1974. I was a 14-year-old music and radio geek, and I used to sit by the radio with a pencil and paper and write down the […]

If you are a 70s music fanatic (and odds are good that you are), these are good times in Madison. Chicago plays Overture Hall on April 28th, and two more high-profile shows have been booked for the summer. On July 16th, Jackson Browne is scheduled to play Overture Hall. It’s an acoustic show–an article in […]

If you are reading this blog post, that means I am still on the Magic payroll, although I haven’t been on the air much lately. I have another job that requires me to travel from time to time, and that’s where I’ve been. Killing time in a hotel one night, I came up with a […]

In 1961, the Belgian composer Jacques Brel wrote “Le Moribond,” a dark song about a man about to be executed, and sang it in an unsentimental, almost jazzy style. Sample lyric, translated to English: Goodbye, Tony, I didn’t like you too much you know It’s killing me to be dying today While you are so […]