As far as I'm concerned, Mark Germino has already penned one of the greatest songs ever written - the savage indictment of the radio industry that is Rex Bob Lowenstein, a go-to track for me in my own radio days as the autonomy of the DJ was slowly chipped away...
Now, I've not checked in on Mark for a while, but the other day I figured I'd see what he'd been up to, and was rather pleased to discover his latest record, his first in 15 years, was well worth my attention.
Midnight Carnival contains some classic, grizzled storytelling Americana... and it also contains The Greatest Song Ever Written. Now if you're going to write a song with that title, you better have your tongue firmly in your cheek... and Mark pulls that one off with aplomb.
It just hit me, like a punch in the gut... I am now as old as Rex Bob Lowenstein.
And his name is Rex Bob Lowenstein
He's forty-seven, goin' on sixteen
His request line's open but he makes no bones
About why he plays Madonna after George Jones
Rex Bob David Saul Lowenstein only exists in a song, but he's been a hero of mine since I first heard his name back in the early 90s. He was the DJ I always wanted to be. A DJ not confined by playlists or genres, a DJ who defies his bosses and plays whatever the hell he wants... or whatever the hell his listeners want.
Of course, that doesn't end well for him. That's radio for you!
Now Rex Bob David Saul Lowenstein
Quit his job a week later, but before he'd leave
He locked and bolted the control room door
And played smash or trash till they cuffed him on the floor
Well they drug him into court and the judge said, “Rex
“I've got to lock you up, for what I'm not sure yet.
“But your boss here says he thinks you're wrapped too tight.
“But, by the way thanks for playing ‘Moon River' last night”
Back when I first heard Rex Bob - played by Bob Harris on his much-missed late night show in the early 90s - I imagined some grizzly old DJ of a similar vintage to the hero of Harry Chapin's WOLD. I mean, 47... imagine being as old as that! It was unthinkable.
And now here I am... and it doesn't seem that old at all. Those of you who are older are no doubt wishing you could be 47 again. Time plays tricks on us all.
The closest I ever got to being Rex Bob Lowenstein is this blog. I can live with that.
Have you ever grown as old (or older) than a character in a song you always thought of as much older than you? There's a question to get you scratching your heads...
In 1988, when I started worked in radio, there was a box of 45 singles in the studio that represented the current playlist. It was a selection of the latest hits and new releases which had been decided upon by committee (the programme controller, head of music and the jocks) and was updated weekly. Three or four times an hour, the on-air presenter would choose a disc from the front of the box (not necessarily the first one, they could flip through a handful and find the right one for right then), play it, then put it to the back of the box when they were done (to prevent the same tune being played in consecutive shows). Beyond that, presenters had free choice in the music they played. They were given a basic pattern to try to stick to - big hit at the start of the hour, 70s oldie, current, 80s, oldie, recurrent etc. - but they could mine the record library for whatever they wanted to fill those gaps. If they ran a music feature in their show, they could (with agreement from the boss) go off-piste completely, given the right justification.
The best DJs used this to make endlessly engaging radio - "Ooh, I haven't heard that in ages" moments followed by big, comfortable hits, followed by "What's this? Never heard that before, but I like the sound of it..."
(The laziest DJs grabbed a pile of old Now compilations and picked from those. But those guys were the exceptions rather than the rule.)
In the early 90s, with our first takeover (or the first one I'd experienced), all this changed. The new management decreed that listeners didn't want unpredictability from their radio shows - they wanted familiarity. DJ choice was almost completely gone, overnight, replaced by computer-generated playlists that rotated oldies, often with a frequency only marginally less than the rotation of current chart hits.
How were these songs selected for addition to the playlist? By audience testing. Someone would call up a random selection of people who were roughly the right age and socio-economic profile as the station's target audience and play them a bunch of 30 second song clips down the phone. Those that got the thumbs up went in the computer. Those that didn't get an immediately positive reaction were confined to the dustbin of history.
Now, apparently I'm in the minority, but even at a young age, I never listened to radio to hear the same old songs over and over again. Yes, I wanted to hear my favourites - new and old - but many of those favourites had only been discovered because some DJ with free choice and an extensive musical knowledge had ventured beyond the predictable. In short, I wanted a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar - where else would I discover my new favourites?
With the exception of new releases (and those were only selected based on their "heat" in industry mags like Music Week... and a little bit of playlist discussion, of which, more later), local radio listeners were deprived the joy of discovering something "new" (i.e. something they'd never heard before) sometime in the early 90s.
And radio would never be the same again.
There were two songs that cried out to be featured this week, although both of them have appeared in this series before...
Or, to be more honest, I love the ideal. The idea of what radio can be...though it rarely is.
I worked in radio for 23 years of my life, but only for the first 4 or 5 was that radio station allowed to be even a fraction of what it could be. I want to write something about that. About my years in radio: the good times and the bad. And about the ideal: what I believe radio could and should be.
I also love songs about radio. A few years back, on the old blog, I had the idea of doing a Top Ten... but I couldn't whittle them down. In the end, I settled on a Top 40, but there were still many great ones I missed out... and many more I've discovered since.
And so, I decided to start a new ongoing feature. This won't be a Top Ten. That funny squiggle, in the title line, just in case you don't know, it's an infinity symbol. Because I reckon I can write about radio songs on and off here forever... and never write about them all. I'll die before I run out... or get bored of blogging, at least. There's always that possibility.
To start, here's three of my favourites. All of them tackle the idea of what radio could and should be... and feature an old DJ who's forced to face the fact, as I was many years ago, that it rarely is. They're also three songs which inspired a short story I wrote some time ago, so I thought I'd include that as well, to mark the beginning of my new infinite feature. I will number these songs as I go along, then we'll all see how long it takes to count to infinity. Oh, and there's a bonus track at the end of the post which seemed fitting.
1. Harry Chapin - W.O.L.D.
2. Mark Germino & The Sluggers - Rex Bob Lowenstein
3. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - The Last DJ
Dead Air
The printout from the weather
centre comes through at 3.43am, and finally someone has given it a
name. Cumulus Letalis. Jesse reads the report like he’s supposed to, like he
has every night for twenty-eight years, then he taps the screen that fires off
Celine Dion on the playout system and stares out at the stars. Celine Dion! Has
it really come to this?
At least they weren’t responding
like every other station in town. In fact, the WXYW reaction was as far from
that as you could get. Station Manager Steve Carlton had made that quite clear
at the Crisis Management Meeting yesterday afternoon.
“If these clouds really spread
to Boston, like the weather centre predicts, you can guarantee our competitors
will be in full-on panic mode. They’ll have reporters up on the rooftops,
man-in-the-street vox-pops, eye-in-the-sky choppers tracking the evacuation
effort, everybody from the feds to NASA throwing in their two cents worth…
there won’t be a station in town sticking to playlist with a live presenter.
There will of course be the ones who go to automation and get the hell out of
Dodge…”
“Like we all should be doing,”
said Gerry Gerrity, WX’s shit-hot breakfast jock (and A-1 pain in everybody’s
ass). He still had his blue-tooth clipped to the side of his temple (he
regularly took calls from his agent in the middle of station meetings, and never
lowered his voice); Jesse thought he looked like a stapled schlong.
“Well, obviously I can’t force
anybody to stay and work,” said Carlton, “but—“
“I’ll do it,” said Jesse. It was
the first he’d spoken in a station meeting all year. Maybe that explained the
looks he got from around the table. But he’d long since given up caring what
any of them thought. You can’t expect to maintain any semblance of self-respect
when you’re playing James Blunt for a living.
“If you hate the job so much,”
Audrey used to say, “quit!”
“I don’t hate the job,” he told
her. “I hate what they’ve turned the job into. A business – this was never
supposed to be a business!”
“No? What’s it supposed to be
then? A calling?”
Audrey never understood.
“What else am I going to do?”
he’d ask her. “What else am I good for after all these years but playing
records and talking?” They didn’t even call them records anymore. It was all
“tracks” nowadays.
“Tracks is what train runs on,”
Jesse used to tell them, but he stopped when they started looking at him like he
was their grandpa. These kids they were getting in the station nowadays, they
wouldn’t even know a record if they saw it.
At a little after 4.30, Jesse
watches the clouds rolling in from the South. From the 57th floor of
the WXYW Tower of Power, he can see the whole of the city and beyond. Across
the bay as far as World’s End and Quincy. And while they still had clear skies
overhead, he knew it’d only be a matter of time. From Florida to Virginia, past
Delaware and Philly - up to New York and Jersey. Over the last few days, those
lousy clouds had squirmed up the whole of the Eastern seaboard. And once they
settled, that was it. Everything went dark. No communications, nobody in or out
of any of the cities, no idea what was going on inside. They sent in the army,
the Hazmat teams, FEMA… they lost contact with all of them within a few
hours. The President declared a state of emergency, but it quickly became
apparent the only solution was a complete evacuation, at least until they
figured out exactly what they were dealing with. If they ever did. But even
with warning, they couldn’t hope to get everybody out of Boston in time, and
the highways had been jammed as far as Vermont for 72 hours now.
Of course, there were plenty of
theories. Alien invasion. Terrorist attack. The wrath of God. (Though surely
God would have taken the West Coast first?) But all the satellites showed was
that strange, low-lying cloud. Cumulus Letalis. You didn’t have to be a classical scholar to decipher the Latin.
“At the end of the day, there
are going to be thousands – if not tens of thousands - of listeners who either
can’t get out of the city in time, or just plain don’t want to leave their
homes,” Steve Carlton had told him, in private once the others had gone. “And
while everybody else will be fighting it out to provide up-to-the-second
disaster reportage… there will be a large proportion of the audience share who
simply don’t want to know – who just want to bury their heads in the sand and
hope that this all… blows over. Which, after all, it just might just do. That,
Jesse, is where WXYW comes in – offering the perfect mix of adult contemporary
classics to soothe the fearful spirit... and a steady, reassuring voice to
becalm the troubled mind.”
Jesse wouldn’t miss Steve
Carlton and all his inconceivable bullshit. His audience research that
suggested listeners wanted a friendly, calm, natural, quietly humorous
presentation style on the one hand, while the sponsors wanted an upbeat,
non-ironic, in-your-face sales patter from their jock-read promo scripts on the
other. His song sampling results that involved playing 30 second hooks down the
phone to stay-at-home shut-ins, then building an entire playlist around their
ability to Name That Tune in 29… rather than letting the experts – people like
Jesse – put their heart and soul into selecting the kind of imaginative,
entertaining and provocative music choices that had been delivering
consistently strong ratings for a good ten, fifteen years before some idiot
with a computer and an attitude decided they knew best. Some idiot who didn’t
even know the difference between ELO and ELP. Didn’t even care. And people wondered
why Jesse had volunteered to stay behind. There was nothing in this job for him
anymore… but since Audrey moved out, the job was all he had.
At half past five, Jesse reads
out the day’s Mad Mad Mondegreen email. Listener-suggested songs with amusingly
misheard lyrics. “We’ve got to insult microwave ovens,” says Brody in
Cambridge, from the song, ‘Money For Nothing’, by the immortal Dire Straits. As
Jesse fires off the track, the first fingers of dawn unclench over Logan
and Fort Dawes, and though the smother of cloud already hugs the streets
beneath him, from atop the second tallest building in Boston, Jesse can still
see the sunrise, and the stars winking out in the west. It occurs to him now
that while below, the unknown is at last being discovered, as long as he
remains up here in the studio… the lousy clouds might never even reach him.
He tries the switchboard for an
outside line. He has some crazy idea about calling Audrey, doing his best to
make some kind of peace. But the phones are down, and his cell has lost its
signal. He eats a Twinkie from the vending machine and burns the roof of his
mouth with vile black coffee.
At 6.13, the lights go out in
the studio and the desk goes dead. A few seconds later, the emergency generator
kicks in and Jesse makes a quick apology for the momentary loss of service,
before restarting Dido. He turns his face into the sun that’s rising again -
over the advancing cloud line this time - and closes his eyes ‘til the lids go
transparent. He sneezes when he opens them again, and wipes snotty fingers on
the side of his chair. What a pity Gerry Gerrity won’t be following him this
morning.
By 7am, Cumulus Letalis has
taken all the land Jesse could see, but still the Tower of Power remains above,
so far unaffected. He wonders what would happen if he got in the elevator and
punched ‘G’. He wonders how many people got out of the city in time, and how
many remain below, down in the mystery. He wonders about Steve Carlton and Dana
Oxbury, and that cross-eyed guy Mandy from Sponsorship & Promotions. He
wonders about Audrey. He wonders about Audrey a lot more than he might have
expected to. But as he watches a jet scar the immaculate blue above, he knows
it’s far too late for regret. Particularly when the cloud is rising. He could
open the studio window and step out across it now… though soon, those same
studio windows will be sinking underneath, and only the transmitters will be
visible from above.
“One final matter,” Steve
Carlton had told him, suddenly unable to meet Jesse’s eyes, like even he knew
the bullshit only went so far. “When… I mean, if something should happen, and
you’re no longer able to keep broadcasting… I would of course expect you to
switch to automation before… well, at the first sign of… aherm…”
But Jesse has his own plan for
when that happens, and as the sunlight blinks through the advancing brume, he
knows the time has come to put said plans into action.
“And now,” he says, killing
David Gray mid-song and really smiling into that mic for the first time in years,
“in a change to our regularly scheduled programming… here’s some tunes you won’t
hear every day.” He switches off the playout computer and slips in a CD (if the
studio still had turntables, he’d have brought vinyl), introducing a few
records from his own… personal collection.
“This first one goes out to
Audrey, wherever she might be – you always did love The Ramones, honey…”
A lost classic indie-dance crossover from the 90s. I think Norman Cook might have had something to do with it, but I can't find anything online to confirm that.
Probably the darkest record Prince ever recorded, his bleakly funny piss-take of violent and misogynist gangster rap, from the legendary Black Album. The live version on youtube doesn't really do the track justice, but this being Prince, you won't find the album version there.
1. Bruce Springsteen - Bobby Jean
Back in the 80s, at the height of his success, Bruce had a big falling out with his best friend, Steve Van Zandt (star of The Sopranos and the excellent Lilyhammer). Many believe this song was about their break-up. (They're friends again now, and Stevie's back with the E Street Band.)
Now you hung with me when all the others turned away, turned up their nose We liked the same music, we liked the same bands, we liked the same clothes We told each other that we were the wildest, the wildest things we'd ever seen Now I wished you would have told me, I wished I could have talked to you Just to say goodbye, Bobby Jean
