Some things, you'd just rather know in advance
- Michelle Wood: SWCD
- October 4, 2009
- 1040
Are you the kind of person who likes skipping chapters, wanting to find out how a novel ends without putting in the effort it takes to find the answer on your own?
Do you fast-forward through a movie, seeking the same kind of shortcuts in the privacy of your own home theater?
Have you ever ended a date before you even got to know the other person simply because you thought you knew it wasn't going anywhere?
Ever thought a roller coaster was boring before you ever experienced the real thrill of zero gravity?
If so, well, have I got something for you. In this age of instant everything, in an era when patience isn't considered a virtue but a fatal flaw, in this blink-and-you'll-miss-it world, I stumbled across something the other night, something so noxious and insulting that I could almost see the corporate bean counters swinging for the fences and missing a pitch so far out of the strike zone they couldn't have hit it with a boat oar.
Morons.
First, a bit of background.
I've been a radio guy since the early '60s. I can remember not only the first time I heard the Beatles and the Stones, but artists like Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, the Temptations, Donovan, the Electric Prunes and the Strawberry Alarm Clock.
It was a transistor radio -- the size of a pack of baseball cards -- and the stations it caught beamed in from Cleveland, from Columbus, from Akron, from Chicago and, best of all, from Detroit/Windsor ... the amazing CKLW, which was my umbilical cord, my lifeline, my initial connection to the music that mattered.
So, to set a typical scene, I'd be tanning on the roof of our house, a beach towel stretched out beneath me and a fine late-summer sun blazing down on my ectomorphic frame, a thermos of water on one side, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut in my hands and the transistor radio providing yet another installment of the soundtrack of my youth.
It was almost perfect. I loved hanging out on the rooftop and, had it not been for intrusive inconveniences like homework and meals, I might never have come down.
Mom could never understand my attraction to that dangerous place.
"You're going to break your neck," she'd say. "Don't come crawling to me when that happens."
Mostly, though, she'd see me scaling the fence outside the kitchen window and say a prayer for my safe return to her orbit.
But that's not what I wanted to tell you about; no, it's what I heard on the radio the other night, a time when I was simply sitting on the roof of the house my wife and I have lived in since the turn of the century. It was nearly midnight and my transistor radio -- this one the size of a hardback copy of The Godfather -- was pumping in a typical Saturday night oldies playlist.
After having grooved to the Dave Clark 5, the Guess Who, the Intruders, Al Green and Creedence Clearwater Revival -- a very cool run of tunes -- I was blasted from my reverie of happy memories by words I thought I'd never hear issuing from a radio, portable or otherwise.
"Stayed tuned," the voice said, ruining my mood, "for Galveston, by Glen Campbell, I Can't Explain, by the Who, Bobbie Gentry's Son of a Preacher Man and Bernadette, by the Four Tops."
Buzz kill.
What has the world come to when the simple pleasure of waiting through commercials to hear what's coming on next is taken away?
The last thing I want to know is what's about to be played.
Talk about draining the fun from the pool.
I can understand news ... and weather ... and sports teasing what's coming next.
But music?
That to me is a crime.
Half the fun of spending your time with an ear to the radio is NOT knowing what's coming on next. It defeats the whole purpose of waiting and, more than that, takes the listeners for idiots, as programmed as the set list. Am I naive enough to believe there are still some Alan Freeds or Kid Leos out there, grabbing discs at random, supplying unseen parties with a reason to laugh and dance?
Yes. Maybe I'm all wrong about this. Maybe the modern listener wants to know what's coming on next.
Why? I can't imagine. Instant gratification, I suppose. It reminds me of what Dean Wormer said to Bluto in Animal House.
"Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life," he said.
It's not easy being patient. It requires a sense of pace and a belief in the possible. If a radio station thinks I have to be baited with what song comes next, I'll do what I can to rebel against that kind of garbage.
I'll find another place, one that takes its listeners for more than cretins. And I'll bide my time, waiting for a sequence of songs that surprises and challenges me.
On the spot.
Even if that spot finds me four stories high, singing as the moon comes into focus.
Mike Dewey can be e-mailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560.