Radio and Me: Part II

Throughout the 70's I listened to WBAI, WNCN and WQXR and also to Jean Shepherd on WOR-AM, who did a 45-minute monologue every night until he left WOR in 1977.  I had discovered Shepherd by reading his short stories in Playboy magazine, one of the very few outlets I had for good writing in the early 60's (it also had Nabokov and P.G. Wodehouse).  Shepherd's modern-day rants do not hold up well today but his stories about his childhood and his days in the army are still incisive and funny stories about growing up in a small town and serving in the armed forces in the days of the draft.  New York has never had a good country radio station but in the 80's and 90's I listened to Honky-Tonkin' and Tennessee Border on WKCR and Laura Cantrell's Radio Thrift Shop on WFMU (another quirky independent station), where most of the country music was classical and played by knowledgeable djs.  The WKCR shows are still on the air, while Laura Cantrell has left to pursue her own country music career (all her radio shows, however, are archived at the WFMU website). 

In the 80's I also discovered Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion on WNYC.  I have never owned a motorcar but I loved the way Click and Clack talked about them, with intelligent good humor. Tom Magliozzi died but his brother Ray survives him and the show is continuing with re-runs.  A Prairie Home Companion is Garrison Keillor's show, which he has been doing in various forms since 1974; he is now 73 years old and has talked about retiring several times.  It is something of a variety show, with music (usually of the folk variety), skits and stories about Lake Wobegone, a fictional town in Minnesota, full of Norwegians.  In the 90's, while listening to WBAI, I discovered Max Schmid's The Golden Age of Radio, where I first heard the great radio dramas that Orson Welles did before he made films, doing brilliant adaptations of books such as The Heart of Darkness using a handful of actors, a sound effects person, and Bernard Hermann's music.  Over the years Schmid has played something of the role with radio shows that Henri Langlois played with films:  presenting everything he can find and being quite careful about giving his own opinions about its quality.  If I hear something I like by a particular writer or director on Schmid's show I will sometimes order additional shows on MP3 discs, which are relatively inexpensive.  People are surprised to hear that many radio shows, most of which they have barely heard of, if at all, still exist and are available for listening.

I do listen to some other shows occasionally.  I like some of what Jonathan Schwartz plays, perhaps about a third, which was the same ratio as with the late Danny Stiles.  And WQXR is still often my default station, as I write this a serenade by Dvorak is playing.   I will be writing more about individual stations and shows.

Radio and Me: a Brief Introduction Part I

We did not have a family radio in my home when I was a child:  neither of my parents cared about music and were content for news from the local newspaper, The Hudson Register-Star.  My parents, particularly my father, did not believe in anything that gave one pleasure, especially if it cost money and didn't make money, though he did buy a TV so my mother could watch soap operas.  Radio drama was coming to an end in the 50's but I still wanted to listen to it --especially the remaining Westerns -- and my brother and I were both baseball fans and wanted to listen to the games on the radio. So we both were able to use birthday money from grandparents to buy inexpensive crystal radio sets (the power comes from the radio waves themselves), put them together (one can still do this) and start listening to the radio, each in the privacy of our own room; we particularly liked the AM baseball broadcasts at night, as the signals bounced to us often from far away and which we listened to with cheap earphones under the covers. Red Barber and Mel Allen were the announcers for the Yankees and Vin Scully, who started in 1950 and is still going strong, was the announcer for the Dodgers.

When I was twelve I had a paper route and was able to use some of the money to buy a portable radio that could also be plugged in and that's when I started to listen to popular music, especially New York station WABC, which had quite a strong signal.  I was fairly indiscriminate in my taste but was particularly fond of The Beach Boys.  In 1962 I went away to school in New Hampshire and listened mostly to Boston Top 40 stations, savoring the British bands of that period; I was especially fond of The Rolling Stones because adults seemed to dislike them almost as much as they disliked Elvis Presley when I was younger.

When I came to New York to attend college in 1965 I still listened mostly to pop music, until I took Music Humanities, a required course at Columbia.  That opened my eyes and ears to classical music and opera, of which there was a great deal in N.Y.  While growing up in Hudson, N.Y. I never heard of classical music and never had attended a concert.  I started going to Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center fairly regularly, as well as the lower-priced and exciting NYC Opera. I also started going to ballet and dance performances, which also helped me appreciate a wider range of music:  seeing the wonderfully musical ballets of Balanchine helped me to appreciate the intricacies of composers as different as Tchaikovsky and Bach.  And I also started listening frequently to classical radio stations WQXR and WNCN (especially the late night show of Bill Watson, who would play Mozart's Requiem twice in a row).

I bought a lot of records and listened to a lot of radio in the 60's and during that period many things happened --the good, the bad, and the ugly -- but among the best were discovering WBAI and discovering country music.  In 1966 I first heard of Bob Fass when he did a "fly-in", something of a "be-in" except that it took place at Kennedy airport.  The press mentioned his show, Radio Unnameable, on WBAI at midnight, Monday to Friday, and I started to listen to its marvelous combination of free-form music and comedy, a very individual style that also influenced WBAI personalities Steve Post (Saturday and Sunday) and Larry Josephson (weekday mornings). Unexpected and interesting things were always happening on Radio Unnameable; for instance, it was where Arlo Guthrie performed "Alice's Restaurant"  for the first time.  And it was around this time that The Byrds, a favorite rock group of mine, did their album "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" and got me interested for the first time in country music.  As popular music had become solipsistic and formulaic I started to discover the populist authenticity of country music. ...to be continued

TV and Me: an Introduction

My family got their first TV in the early fifties, when we lived in a farmhouse in Kinderhook, N.Y.  The only show I remember watching early on was Howdy Doody, which was on throughout the 50's.  Generally I did not watch much TV when I was a kid because of the lack of good reception, the primitive quality of many of the shows (particularly as opposed to the radio shows I liked, just as they were about to die out), and the lack of privacy (the TV being in the living room).  When I was in third grade we moved to Hudson, N.Y. where we received stations from Albany, about forty miles away.  Reception was poor, even if one had a good aerial on the roof, which we did not, and there was always a problem with a rolling picture, sometimes not easily corrected with "horizontal hold."  I was content with reading what books I could find (in a town without a library or a bookstore) and listening to the radio.  I was a passionate listener to baseball games (as I still am) but did sometimes watch baseball's The Game of the Week on TV Saturday afternoons, with its excellent use of two cameras to show the entire field.

When I went away to school in 1962, when I was 15, I almost never watched TV, since it seemed that our dormitory TV was tuned usually to professional wrestling or My Favorite Martian (to this day I cannot stand the canned laughter of situation comedies) and the same thing was true in the TV room at my dorm when I started at Columbia in 1965.  So I did not watch TV again until the mid-seventies, when I finally bought a TV so I could watch Simon Raven's excellent adaptation of Anthony Trollope's The Pallisers; I had loved the novels and I thought the TV version was beautifully written and cast.  The only other show I watched during this period was Norman Lear's brilliant Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.  I would also watch an occasional movie on TV, though I hated the commercials and timed the movie content with a stopwatch (Leonard Maltin had published his first book that had the running times of classical movies) to make sure the movies were not cut; if a movie of 120 minutes was shown in a two-hour time slot I simply would not watch it.  But mostly I saw movies at MoMA and at repertory houses such as The New Yorker (one can read about this on my other blog http://balletbaseballmoviesbooks.blogspot.com )

In 1994 I married and moved to Brooklyn with my wonderful wife Susan and there we got cable TV, mainly to watch AMC, at that time (and, alas, no longer) similar to the current Turner Classic Movies, with uninterrupted and uncut classical films.  But it was also at that point that I began to explore some of the more creative talents in TV that I had been hearing about, particularly Steven Bochco (L.A. Law, NYPD Blue) and David E. Kelley (The Practice, Ally McBeal). But until our first child was born, in 1998, we mostly went to the movies.

After our son was born we watched a bit more TV because we were, by necessity, at home more often.  The one show Susan and I both liked most recently was Jason Katim's Parenthood, which just completed an excellent six-year run and had its moving series finale this year.  Most of the best shows these days are on cable TV; they are not tied down to a rigid 22-episode schedule and are at slightly less risk of becoming formulaic.  The two network shows I watch currently are Secrets and Lies and The Good Wife.  Secrets and Lies is less interesting for its murder mystery than for its insights into the behavior of the lower-middle class; it was created by Barbie Kligman and is helped immensely by the acting, directing and producing of Thirtysomething veteran Timothy Busfield.  The Good Wife is a complex legal and personal drama created by Michele and Robert King.

Vincent Gilligan is one of the most creative people in television these days.  He created Breaking Bad and the current Better Call Saul (something of a spinoff but rather different in mood) for AMC.  I will be discussing these shows and others that I like, such as Mad Men, The Americans, Homeland, et al., as well as some I don't like.

Radio and TV

Last year, according to FX's data, three-hundred and fifty-two scripted first-run prime-time and late-night programs aired on broadcast, cable and streaming networks in the U.S., not including PBS.
Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker, April 13, 2015.

I'm creating this blog because little attention is given to most of these shows, whether or not they deserve it, and the people who create and produce them are seldom given sufficient credit.  Jason Katims, who is largely responsible for Friday Night Lights and Parenthood, two recent beautiful and complex shows, is still mostly unknown to most of the shows' viewers.  I intend to write about shows I like, mostly, and bring attention to their writers, producers and directors.

Radio gets even less attention than TV, not surprising since there is less creativity currently on radio.  But I plan to bring attention to what creativity there is, as well as what there has been.  One of my favorite radio shows, which has been on WBAI (99.5, 7-9 P.M. Sundays) for some time is Max Schmid's The Golden Age of Radio, which broadcasts everything from the Mercury Theatre of Orson Welles to a recent impressive tribute to the recently-deceased and mostly-forgotten Stan Freberg, who did one of the last network radio shows, in 1957.  But I will also write about current radio, the best of which is on non-profit stations WKCR, WNYC, WFMU, WQXR, as well as WBAI. And I will also write about the current state of talk and musical radio (not good, what little I know about it at this point).

So stayed tuned and please let me know if you have any radio or TV shows that deserve more attention.