Spirit of Radio

I’m not a big fan of radio, either for music or for talk radio.  I never listen to the radio in my apartment – I can’t be bothered to hook up any sort of antenna – and in the car I listen to the CD player 90% of the time.  The radio tends to come on if, due to some oversight, I have no CDs to listen to in the car.  But here are my opinions on the topic anyway.

 Talk Radio

Unlike music, I don’t have various personalities in my apartment, in my car, or on CD, talking about various different issues.  These are people mostly speaking live and commenting on events as they occur.  Relative to music, I consider talk radio to be a more appropriate use of the medium.  Even so, I listen to mere minutes of talk radio a month, only in the car, and only if I don’t have a CD to listen to. 

 G. Gordon Liddy.  Back in the 90s he was on WJFK 106.7, which is our primary talk radio station in the DC area (see Don & Mike).  I enjoyed him for along time, as he always had interesting guests on the show and a fairly intelligent way of discussing things.  When I worked for Jerry, we’d listen to him all the time – I even answered the office phone “G. Gordon Liddy’s office” by mistake.  My buddy John met him at the Denny’s in Fairfax and got him to sign his books. He did come off as somewhat of a know-it-all, though, and it annoyed me when he’d go off on subjects like cars which he didn’t really know about – but thought he did.  Moreover, callers would call in to ask his advice on topics well beyond his realm of knowledge – the FBI, prison, Watergate, guns, being a federal prosecutor, etc.  He would promote his “Stacked & Packed Calendars”, claiming the women were astonishing knockouts – then we’d buy the damn thing and scratch our heads.  Either he needs his eyes checked, or his standards of feminine beauty were remarkably low – only one or two of the women would be anywhere close to as attractive as he described.  I’ve read Will, his autobiography, and his two novels The Monkey Handlers and Out of Control.  So far as I know, Liddy is still on the air, but on some satellite radio station, Radio America.

 Rush Limbaugh.  I was never a Rush Limbaugh fan.  Although I tend to agree with his politics, his bombastic and pompous attitude was tiresome after awhile.  He also had a nasty habit of focusing 80% of the show’s content on Hillary Clinton.  The way he described it, Hillary woke up every morning cursing Limbaugh and his show for exposing her lies and agenda.  Somehow I doubt it.

 Howard Stern.  I listened to him briefly when he was on WJFK.  I notice that he and Robin are fairly intelligent and well-informed, but the other idiots on the show and the callers are atrociously stupid.  The impression I get is that the FCC fines the show suffered were due not to anything Stern himself said on the air, but what his callers said.  If there was ever any sort of “Idiocracy” eugenics program to eliminate grossly stupid people from the gene pool by sterilizing them, the first group targeted should be anyone who called into Howard Stern’s show.  Group #2 would be audience members and guests on the Jerry Springer show.

Although Stern would often have strippers and porn stars on the show, this has two drawbacks.  First, it’s RADIO, so we can’t see these women even if they stripped nude in the studio (can we hear her breasts??).  Second, even on the cable show, invariably broadcast long after any child’s bedtime, 100% of the nudity is pixilated out.  As a practical matter, the only way to experience any of the nudity would be to show up in person.  You’d be better off taking a note of who the porn star was and simply buying or renting her movies.  So Stern’s show is really more of a tease than anything truly satisfying.  Currently he’s on Sirius, formerly on WJFK.

 Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht.  Currently on Rock 105 in Jacksonville, Florida.  Like Stern, he tends to get in trouble and fired, but unlike Stern it tends to be stuff that he says himself, and it’s invariably grossly racist.  Having said that, the majority of his material was simply over-the-top stories involving cops, Sgt Fury, sex, masturbation, or other bizarre topics.  I tended to find it mildly entertaining and not at all offensive.  Tracht himself is fairly bulky (works out all the time) and used to be a deputy sheriff in Falls Church.

 Don Imus.  I really don’t like Imus.  Not that it has anything to do with “nappy headed hos” or his radio jihad with Howard Stern, I just think of him as not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.  His humor reminds me of Mark Russell and the other pretentious political humorists you might see at the Kennedy Center.  Right now he’s on WJZW 105.9 in this area (formerly WCXR, see below).

 Dr. Laura.  My parents loved her show.  I noticed a fair amount of callers would be women asking her permission to cheat on their husbands, violate court orders they didn’t agree with, or do some other unethical or unsavory behavior which anyone, with half a brain and an iota of understanding of who Dr Laura was, could predict she would completely disagree with.  Or maybe those were just the callers when I was listening.

 Don & Mike.  Don Geronimo retired in April 2008 so now it’s the the “Mike O’Meara” show.  Of the two, I preferred Don anyway.  They were actually in Northern Virginia, based at WJFK even though they are syndicated nationwide.  At best I found their show occasionally entertaining, but several things really turned me off:

1.  Inside jokes about Buzz, Rob Spewak (sic), Dennis Murphy (whoever that mushmouth guy was who would always call in), Joe Ardinger, etc.  Even when I knew who they were talking about, it was still annoying.  Moreover, they would always interrupt Buzz when he was trying to read the news, with inane and stupid remarks leftover from whatever they were discussing before the news segment started.

2.  Busting on other DJs.  With regard to the Greaseman, who they would crucify mercilessly, it was kicking him when he was down and shamelessly pandering to their minority listeners.  With regard to other DJs, it tended to be talking about how lame the other shows were, how other DJs ripped them off, and other petty issues.  Whatever accusations of lameness were leveled at competing DJs, I’d heard enough of their own show to know they applied equally well to them.  Enough.

3.  “Arbitron ratings”.  A certain portion of the show was devoted to them bragging about their ratings, to talking about inside stuff on the industry, and going on and on about how they were renewing contracts in certain markets, doing well in some, poorly in others, and other dull minutiae about the business side of their show.

4.  When you subtracted all that other stuff, the actual original content of the show was very low.  Probably the one thing that ever enjoyed was listening to Don go on about his own personal life.  Mike always seemed to be bragging about himself, while Don would be more evenhanded on his own account.  Overall, though the show was the “someone gave us a radio show so we can say whatever we want and mistreat the callers” show.

 Opie & Anthony.  Gregg “Opie” Hughes and Anthony Cumia.  For awhile they were on WJFK, now they’re on satellite radio (XM and Sirius) and two regular stations, WRXK 92.3 in New York and WROX FM 96.1 in Norfolk, Virginia.  Originally I didn’t like these guys, they came off as a coarser, raunchier version of Don & Mike.  Some of the stunts were pathetically stupid: this “sex across Manhattan” thing that got them fired (again, sex/nudity on the radio….unclear on the concept!) and one where they tried to get an intern so drunk that he’d puke.  If there was anything I liked about them was that they were big fans of AC/DC, Black Sabbath, etc. the same music I listened to, and were pretty much of the same scene and age.  They also made a “Smokey and the Bandit” reference l liked, so that was cool.  But as with Don & Mike, this was another “some idiot gave us a radio show, so we’ll pretty much say what we want” deal.

 Ron & Fez.   These were two geeks from NYC.  Why anyone gave these two a show is one of the mysteries of the universe.  More of this “put a microphone in front of two guys and let them simply talk about nothing” idiocy.  They weren’t really stupid, per se, so much as dull and not particularly interesting. 

 The Sports Junkies/Big O & the Dukes.  These are a bunch of frat rats from the DC area.  Every time I listen to WJFK, no matter what time, it seems they’ve grabbed the slot.  For the life of me I can’t tell the difference between the two shows, and can’t even tell if they’re the same guys or what.  Both shows are/were exactly the same: a bunch of frat rats, from the DC area, talking about sports and their social lives, busting on each other incessantly.  The Sports Junkies used to do this really annoying thing of reducing everyone’s name – except some guy “Lurch” – to initials.  They are also the types to get obsessed with sports statistics and have the sports nut’s obnoxious, arrogant tendency to talk like they’re experts on every single sport – EXCEPT soccer, which they make it a point to be militantly indifferent to, except knowing that Beckham plays for the L.A. Galaxy (so they can bitch that L.A. doesn’t have an NFL team). 

 Music

You would think I’d prefer music on the radio than talk.  But I guess I’m stupid: why listen to music on the radio when you can listen to music on the tape deck, record player, CD player, iTunes, etc.?  I have the CDs, etc. and know how to use the equipment.  Why should I let some DJ determine what I’m going to hear?  If I want to hear it, I probably have it on CD already.  If I want to be surprised, I’ll select the party mix feature on iTunes to shuffle things around.  One thing DJs do not do, is play obscure songs you can’t find on CD (with the very rare exception of radio-broadcast concerts or studio sessions – which eventually end up on CD anyway).  The songs by any band that get played on the radio are the most popular ones, thus if you like the band you probably have the song already.  And in this day of $.99 songs on iTunes, if you like the song but don’t want to buy the whole album, you can buy the song on iTunes and listen to it whenever you want. 

 Having said that, I’ll review the music radio scene, all of which is local to my area, Washington DC & Baltimore, with one major exception:

 WSOU 89.5.  This is the Seton Hall University radio station, in Orange, New Jersey (89.5).  When I visited Ken, I’d tune in to this after getting up to around exit 10 on the New Jersey Turnpike.  This station would play heavy metal, including lots of thrash AND obscure tracks (“Sabbra Cadabra” and “Megalomania” by Black Sabbath).

 WIYY 98 Rock.  This is the heaviest station in the DC area.  At 10 p.m. they play “Mandatory Metallica” (3 tracks from various albums).  You won’t anything heavier than Metallica, but you’ll hear plenty of the harder edge of classic rock.

 WWDC DC101.  This used to be classic rock, almost identical to 105.9.  The latter switched to soft jazz, and then much later DC101 switched to a more progressive rock format.  By progressive I don’t mean King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, etc., I mean stuff like R.E.M. – the typical R.E.M. fan being some skinny guy in glasses who drives a VW and is not only very liberal but also an intellectual snob.  His idea of winning an argument is to state his position and then say “…duh!”  Either that or slap it on the back of their used Volvo in the form of a clever bumper sticker. 

 WCXR 105.9.  No longer in business, they used to be simply classic rock and abruptly changed formats.  I heard “Blowing Free” by Wishbone Ash on this station.

 WARW 94.7.  Formerly “Arrow” and now “Globe”, though still pretty much classic rock.  If you want to hear Beatles, Pink Floyd, etc. this is the station to listen to.

 WHFS 99.1.  This is THE progressive rock station here, basically the R.E.M. station.  I’d check out the band listing for their HFstival and realize: I have no use for any of them.  Awhile back they had an ad campaign which said “evolve” – implying that 98 Rock listeners were inarticulate Neanderthals, whereas WHFS listeners had “evolved” into homo sapiens.   

 XM & Sirius.  Hmm, I rarely listen to the radio that’s free, why should I pay for it?  Aside from “no commercials” – which is true when I listen to my CDs etc. on my own stereo – what is the advantage? I still can’t see the strippers on the Howard Stern show – it’s still radio.  No thanks.