The end was near. At three o’ clock it would came to a close. All those years, all those dreams, snuffed.
I wanted the moment to myself. It was personal, after all. My hand left the steering wheel and nudged the volume upward as I meandered the neighborhood streets.
But in my mind, I was miles away and years ago and down my own version of Alice’s rabbit hole.
…
Saturday was a delight, the height of my week. My routine was always the same: leave the house by 4 p.m. and stop at Saucy-Q to grab mac-n-cheese, collard greens, the obligatory cornbread for the pot liquor and a huge cup of “sweet tea,” then on to Popeye’s drive-thru for red beans and rice.
I’d wheel into the parking lot around 4:30, balance the bags of food as I slipped the straps of the CD cases onto my shoulders. Then around the building, through a heavy metal door and down the stairs to paradise.
The first time I walked into the radio studios, I knew it suited me. Well hidden, safe and stalwart in a basement at Spring Hill College, so secure it was a designated civil defense shelter. Built in mid-century, the hope of the Post-War boom still whispered through the offices and studios off its wide central hallway.
It’s been a decade now since WHIL ventured from its classical music to test the waters with jazz. My forays into the local cultural scene – founding a jazz society around the same time that programming decision was made – landed me behind the microphone to transmit my mania across the region.
Naturally, money was tight. Equipment was outdated, most of it 15 years old. We still employed CDs and recorded syndicated programming on mini-disc.
The upside? It fit the stereotypes, the images many of us have of what a radio studio looks like: the wide board, the knobs and lights, meters, buttons and sliding pots, racks of receivers and readouts, something straight out the cultural subconscious.
Once into the studios on Saturdays, I’d settle down in the music library and savor my meal, a dinner deliberately chosen for the music that brought me there. Hey, if you’re going to play jazz, why not do so on the food that built it? Even now, the flavors are integral to the memories.
After five minutes of NPR news at the top of the hour what came next was non-stop delight, without fail, every week and the arc it flowed over was essential to the beauty.
…
5:06 p.m.: I slipped in the mini-disc for Weekend Radio, a quirky and eclectic variety show out of Cleveland. Host Robert Conrad – not the actor of “Wild Wild West” fame – assembled a grab bag of things that might find P. D. Q. Bach up against a Bob & Ray routine followed by something from Penguin Café Orchestra.
One night the show gave me something uncanny. I was in the library, listening to the broadcast while surfing the Web. A comedy bit finished and the next sound from the speakers was percussion, then the chanting of an African choir.
Anonymous recognition rose, electric, immediate.
“Why do I know this?” It was primal, pulled from my marrow, visceral, eerie.
I sat mesmerized, invigorated and shocked by the swelling voices. Wide-eyed, comprehension teetered.
“WHY do I know this?”
A little digging uncovered the connection. An earlier version of the work – a Christian choral mass inspired by African music – appeared on the soundtrack for the 1960s film “The Singing Nun.” I remember seeing the album cover in my uncle’s bedroom during visits to my grandparents.
It had easily been 35 years since I had last heard it, long before I ever started grade school but its haunting quality had embedded itself in my subconscious.
In that unearthly sensation, its primeval feel laid bare the power of art.
…
The succession of Saturday programs were natural complements. At 6 p.m., was Broadway Revisited, a show from Michigan with music teacher and jazz historian Art Hilgart taking listeners through the development of the American canon on the stages of musical theater. This was normally when I broke out a small tabletop lamp and lowered the studio lights, the control panel twinkling in the amber hue from the lampshade.
At 7 p.m. came Swingin’ Down the Lane, with focus on the Big Band and jazz that preceded Be-Bop.
Then it was my turn, my show: Jazz Connection. Since my tastes run to the Bop era and beyond, it was a natural follow-up to the Swing era. The freedom allowed by public radio – the lack of commercials and tolerance for the avant-garde – was incredible.
Twenty-minute Dexter Gordon number? No problem.
Free jazz from Ornette Coleman? Sure thing.
Anything I wanted from my personal collection, all decided only by my given mood in the moment. No timed commercial breaks, few interruptions. Just all-consuming, ever-flowing art.
I preferred journeys, pensive and invigorating, three straight hours of experimentation in emotional dynamics. All these years later, I still run into local fans with compliments and I’m still proud to say the highest praise comes from musicians.
The last hour of the evening, 11 p.m – midnight, was the “cool down” with the ethereal tones of Hearts of Space, a trippy, almost New Age-ish thing that sounded like it was best enjoyed with a bong and good wine.
If I could have stayed there all night doing it, I wouldn’t have hesitated. Often when I left, I would climb the steps to the outside and stand in the night, charged by my good fortune and drinking in the indigo sky as the wind rustled through the trees on the hilltop.
…
Time passed and I began to pull shifts during the day, working more and more with others. The other staff members were active components of the local arts milieu, actors, dancers, opera singers, musicians, writers and photographers. Their life experiences were tantalizing with many having spent substantial time in foreign countries. Using the occasional foreign language phrase as a change of pace – “danke,” “grazie” or “arigato” – was likely to elicit a stream of language in that tongue, an earnest query as to your fluency.
Most enjoyable was their obvious humanity and graciousness. I still maintain it was easily the finest collection of people I’ve ever worked with, with none of the name-dropping, pettiness and gossip I encountered elsewhere. The personal politics and backbiting that seems to accompany some jobs was thankfully absent. They cared for their slice of community and each other.
The pay was paltry but that wasn’t why we were there. The sense of public service, of promoting the arts, drove and unified us.
I doubt I’ll ever find it again.
…
Music was an afterthought in the house where I grew up. Dad had his Glen Campbell, Eddy Arnold, some Ray Charles and Johnny Cash’s “Live at Folsom Prison.” My mother’s tastes ran towards treacly pop and “easy listening.”
Music was never integral to them. No one played an instrument and we were never taught.
I gravitated toward the usual pop stuff, rock, R&B, some funk. In middle school, I wanted a guitar, but we couldn’t afford it.
When I finally landed a six-string in college, I was into folk music and blues, mainly for the stories and the ability to subvert social norms.
Quickly, music took hold in me unlike anyone else in my family. I learned the basics of theory, the math behind it all and progressed rapidly but could never make up the ground I lost by not learning at a younger age. After a few years, I gravitated toward jazz. I’d never be able to play what I loved most which I think only stoked my fascination.
My exposure to classical music had been fair but nothing like what I experienced once I began working day shifts at WHIL. After poking around, I fell into minimalism and a whole new avenue of thought and feeling opened up to me.
I vividly recall the first time I heard this, the complexity of emotion that cascaded through me and the eagerness with which I circulated it among friends. At an age where a lot of people were narrowing their choices and chances, mine were opening.
It’s never to late for discovery, never too late for growth.
…
For now, the end of WHIL approached. After three decades of service to Mobile, its license was sold. The school could no longer afford what the local community couldn’t support. The belt was tightened on the auction block.
The new owners are in Tuscaloosa, the home of a state-wide network slowly growing.
The crucial moment approached. The voice was stifled mid-word, minutes before the assigned switch to the new network. There was no goodbye, just abrupt silence.
The day is coming when Alabama’s public radio system will more closely resemble the Mississippi centralized system, an efficient set-up where what you hear in Jackson is what you hear in Tupelo and Biloxi. In some ways, it ensures the spread of quality programming. In other ways, it’s less responsive to local tweaking, to giving exposure to artists.
While technology has hit broadcast radio hard, it has hacked into public radio most of all. Their market share, target demographics and core audience are the most likely to have the widest number of choices available from satellites, web streaming and MP3 players. What’s transpired should surprise no one.
I was proud to have been a part of public radio. The culture it preserved, the stories it told and the art it spread would never be served on for-profit stations. Its role was vital.
I encountered condescension from those in commercial radio, as if public radio weren’t “real” radio. They’re right. There is indeed a distinction.
In public radio, the music isn’t merely a lure to get people to listen to the advertising. The art is the raison d’etre. It’s why the broadcast exists.
And even though fundraising drives were no more relished by the staff than the listeners, there was something innately egalitarian in it. As I would say to the audience, it was “Marconian democracy in action.”
In a nation returning day-by-day closer to the Gilded Age, public radio was something that still theoretically gave us a chance to call the shots.
…
We’ve all heard the credo- find something you would do for free and you’ll always be successful…which explains my relative failures. I’ve held a variety of jobs in my days: sales, journalism, worked in college athletics and as construction labor, dabbled in graphic design, been a set dresser for a motion picture and an aide in a congressional campaign. I’ve done everything there is to do in a bar or restaurant.
None of them I would repeat for free. Some I wouldn’t care to ever do again.
What I’ve found through the years is that the service of joy and beauty is one of the greatest things we can experience. Misery abounds in this world. Holding onto the search for refinement is the best bulwark against life’s relentless pounding.
Which means I’ll be hard pressed to ever find the heights I enjoyed in that basement.
