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.