All Those Years Ago

It was 1970 when I heard my first New Year’s Eve radio countdown, and it was transfixing—hearing all the best songs of the year ranked in order of popularity appealed to the same part of my kid brain that poured over the agate type on the sports pages. I can remember listening to radio countdowns on the last night of several years during the first half of the 1970s. By the end of the decade, I was partying with my friends on New Year’s Eve, but the countdown likely would have been on the radio wherever we were.

Only once did I ever host the New Year’s Eve countdown on the radio, 30 years ago, at KDTH in Dubuque. I have forgotten most of the details—how many records were on the list, how long the countdown took, how the list was compiled, or what our top song of 1981 was—it’s all gone down the memory hole. The only thing I do remember is that at midnight, the board operator on the other station in the building came over to my studio with a split of champagne, which we shared.

It’s understandable why a person might forget the top songs of 1981. Take a look at the Cash Box magazine singles chart for the year and tell me there’s anything you’d really care to hear again this instant. (I count only two among the top 40—”Who’s Crying Now” by Journey, which might be the best thing they ever did, and “All Those Years Ago” by George Harrison.) The chart is overflowing with limp R&B ballads and vapid country crossovers, and much of what still gets played on the radio today has been played to death. (If you hear “Private Eyes,” “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” or “Take It on the Run” today, that’s three or four minutes you’ll want back when you’re on your deathbed.) Air Supply, Christopher Cross, Sheena Easton, Neil Diamond—somebody smarter than me will have to figure out why our thirst for tasteful adult ballads and other forms of colorless pop music (limp R&B ballads and vapid country crossovers, for example) reached a peak in 1981, higher than it had been since the early 60s. Reaction against the anything-goes 1970s? The squeaky-clean values of the nascent Reagan era? The existential cry of anguish that caused the universe to birth MTV?

The album chart for the year rocks harder, although it’s easy to see why the early 80s are sometimes disparaged as the years of “corporate rock.” Among the top albums of the year are radio-friendly records by superstar brand names REO Speedwagon, Styx, Foreigner, and Journey. Several other highly polished and carefully calculated albums are in the upper reaches of the chart as well, by Pat Benatar, Stevie Nicks, the Police, and Phil Collins. But a couple of survivors of the pre-corporate age, the Moody Blues and the Rolling Stones, make the Top 10, and Steve Winwood sneaks into the Top 20. (And John Lennon, no longer a survivor in 1981, ranks in the Top 10 as well.) The point is that although there was still room among the year’s top albums for Diamond and Barbra Streisand, album buyers were not quite so infected by whatever wuss virus had struck Top 40 buyers and listeners in 1981. Rush and AC/DC appear in the Top 20, and AC/DC’s Back in Black nearly made it, at #22.

If I go through the top 100 singles and disqualify everything overplayed, dull, or trivial, I’m left with only a bare handful of songs. Here’s the best of the lot.

Posting will continue to be light here into next week. Happy New Year to all, and thanks for your continuing—albeit occasionally baffling because it sucks a lot of the time—support for this Internet feature.

Off-Topic Tuesday: Reagan

In the interest of getting some new content up this week, here’s another travel piece. In 2008, The Mrs. and I visited the Reagan Library and Museum in California. Before we got home, I started composing a piece about what I experienced there, thinking I’d try to get it published somewhere. I never did, of course, until now. It’s extremely long, and you can skip it if you want.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Thousand Oaks, California, is pretty fabulous. Little expense has been spared to honor the 40th president. The museum complex sits on a magnificent mountaintop, and its sprawling building houses, among other things, the actual Air Force One airplane used during Reagan’s term, and the actual pub in Ireland he famously visited while president, disassembled and rebuilt. Gallery after gallery is devoted to various phases of Reagan’s life and presidency, and there’s much emphasis on Nancy Reagan’s role in both. Reagan’s gravesite outside overlooks a spectacular mountain vista.

The museum is crowded with docents in jackets and ties. The men have the look and manner of prosperous retired executives, the women the look and manner of the wives of prosperous retired executives. They are extremely welcoming and helpful. They ask where visitors are from, they talk about the weather, they answer questions about the collections and the building itself. The gift shop is impressive. So is the cafeteria. There’s a lot to see. There are interesting artifacts of Reagan’s life, a massive collection of Nancy’s dresses, many video screens to watch.

But as a visitor walks along, he begins to feel as though something is missing.

Someday at Christmas

On December 24, 1969, the Capital Times, the afternoon newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, hit the streets with the words “Merry Christmas” emblazoned above the masthead. Its front page, however, was not so merry. Headlines included “Children’s Doctor Shortage Becomes Acute in Madison,” “Arab Summit Breaks Apart in Disarray,” and “Plane, Missile Firms Get ‘Christmas Gifts.’” Its page-one feature story began with the following lede: “Bringing up a retarded child is a challenge to love, to care, and to sacrifice. At Central Colony, there are six children waiting for someone willing to meet that challenge.” The story was headlined, “‘Have You Found a Family For Me?,’” and included pictures of Brenda, Pauncho, Jeffrey, Tom, Jerry, and Wally, all under the age of 12, all of whom would be spending another Christmas at the state home for the developmentally disabled.

I was reading that paper in my office the other day, in the deepening dark of winter twilight, thinking about what a remarkably depressing picture it paints of the world at Christmas Eve 1969, a day of loneliness and want, failure and war. And at that precise moment, the laptop music stash shuffled up Stevie Wonder’s “Someday at Christmas”: “Someday at Christmas men won’t be boys/Playing with bombs like kids play with toys” and “Someday at Christmas there’ll be no wars/When we have learned what Christmas is for” and “Someday at Christmas we’ll see a land/With no hungry children and no empty hands.”

Stevie, you son of a bitch.

I had to stop reading, turn off the computer, and go do something else. I couldn’t take any more.

The next morning, I looked up the same day’s edition of the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison’s other daily paper. Its front page bannered an article about the success of the paper’s annual Empty Stocking campaign to benefit the needy, and it included items about gifts being airlifted to POWs in North Vietnam and poor families in Mississippi, plus a photo of an Amish man driving a horse-drawn sleigh in Kalona, Iowa, which received six inches of snow the day before. Also on the front page was the King James version of the Christmas story.

Why was this front page so different from the one on the Capital Times the same day? The answer was under the headline “On This Day, All the News Is Good.” “In keeping with a long Christmas tradition, The Wisconsin State Journal today carries no stories of disaster, crime, or violence on this front page.”

On December 24, 1969, which front page was more truthful? Was it the Capital Times, with its stories of the challenges faced by individuals, the Madison community, and the world, challenges that pay no attention to the calendar? Or was it the State Journal, telling of children who get what they need, of kindness in the midst of hardship and war, and of the birth of Jesus?

I don’t know. Surely the State Journal describes the world as we would like it to be, fitting on Christmas, when we are closer to being the people we imagine ourselves to be than on any other day of the year: filled with love for our fellow creatures, warm and secure in our traditions, caring and generous toward the whole world. And it feels so good and so right that we start thinking that maybe we can learn to live in that light the other 364 days of the year.

Stevie feels it, too: “Someday all our dreams will come to be/Someday in a world where men are free.” But just as the Capital Times’ editors understood that our challenges don’t cease to challenge us just because it’s Christmas Eve, Stevie Wonder knows it too. And he knows that on December 26th, we’ll be back in a place that’s a long way from where we wish we were. Sure, it could happen: Someday all our dreams could come to be. Sure, the world could be made free from loneliness and want, failure and war. But not on a happy timetable: “Maybe not in time for you and me.”

“But someday at Christmastime.” Because as sure as Christmas comes again, we never stop dreaming of the things that could be.

Records Under the Tree

I haven’t got anything worthwhile to say today, although various blog friends have said very good things indeed recently. Some of these posts you have probably seen, but if you haven’t, go read ‘em, and grab the downloads while you still can.

Jeff at AM, Then FM, has several Christmas songs from recent years that should have been hits. Among them, “Soul Christmas” by Graham Parker and Nona Hendryx is going on a continuous loop at my house. “Soul Christmas” name-checks some people you will find when you visit Any Major Dude With Half a Heart, which has reposted a number of Christmas mixes from recent years. These include three superb Any Major Soul mixes packed with stuff you’ll want in your holiday library.

Barely Awake in Frog Pajamas looks around the living room at Christmastime and thinks, yes, it’s a wonderful life.

It’s Christmas on Hope Street, and there are records under the tree.

Ken Levine tells about getting fired from a radio gig at Christmas. This is something I am hoping to avoid this year, although theoretically I’ll have the opportunity if I accidentally say something obscene while introducing “The Christmas Shoes.” I’ll be playing all Christmas music on Magic 98 today and tomorrow from 2-7PM (US Central) and on Christmas Eve from noon to 4. And it’s time to go.

180-Proof Atmosphere

Over the weekend, Jeff at AM, Then FM tipped me to an article about how difficult it is for new holiday songs to become perennials. Among the most-played Christmas songs on radio, the newest is “All I Want for Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey, which was released in 1994. It’s counter-intuitive to suppose that the rise of all-Christmas formats has something to do with it. You’d think that such formats would be starving for new material, but they aren’t, as the most-played statistics—or half-an-hour spent listening—will reveal. On adult contemporary radio, new holiday songs make up the bulk of the adds this December, especially cuts from the new Michael Bublé and Justin Bieber albums, although they’re versions of familiar songs (including the Bieber duet of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” with Carey) as opposed to brand-new songs.

This information seems to jive with our posts last week that noted how much of the popular Christmas music of the mid 1960s had been recorded in earlier years. In our most nostalgic of seasons, we are forever drawn back to what we know best.

Related thought: Last week, friend and man of learning Yah Shure commented, “I really do miss those beautiful music FMs this time of year.” I worked for one, and as I noted not long ago, we were pretty sure we were #1 in the market on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, when people who wouldn’t otherwise tune in were looking for the 180-proof Christmas atmosphere only a beautiful-music station can provide.

Now that beautiful music is dead, that’s a tough thing to find. My station, Magic 98, does Christmas atmosphere about as well as it’s possible to do it anymore, with “98 Hours of Christmas Magic” starting at 10PM on the 21st each year and running through midnight on the 25th. We do our regular jock presentation until sometime in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, then the show runs jockless to the finish line. The music is carefully chosen—you will not hear “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” (although you will hear “The Christmas Shoes” and “Same Old Lang Syne”)—and the other formatic elements are meant to fit seamlessly with it. It’s probably as close as we’re going to get to the old WLS Holiday Festival of Music, which is still the gold standard for holiday radio in my world.

Radio stations are not always so careful. One Christmas Eve nearly a decade ago, we were visiting the family in small-town Michigan and heard the single most hideous Christmas music presentation since Marconi invented the medium. They simply loaded the automation with Christmas songs and let ‘em play at random, and followed each one with pounding, uptempo formatic elements. You cannot, must not, follow Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” with “Funky New Year” by the Eagles, even if you put a shitty liner between them.

I expect that new posts will be a little light around here for the next couple of weeks, unless inspiration strikes hard. I will continue to post at WNEW.com, however, and I’ve got some interesting stuff lined up there this week. My author archive is here, and I try to tweet ‘em and put them on Facebook when they appear.

Traveling Directions

In the fall of 1983, it seemed like a good idea to move to Macomb, Illinois, but after a week, I realized I had made a terrible mistake. The job was not what I thought it was going to be, partly because the radio station had misrepresented itself during the interview process as something it was not, but mostly because I was 23 years old and green as grass, and I had no idea how to evaluate a job situation. After I’d been there a few months, I moved to a station across town, and things were better for the next couple of years. But in the fall of 1986, I decided it was time to get out. A new owner had bought the station earlier in the year, and his priorities and mine didn’t match. By Christmas I had found another job and given my notice, and we planned to move on.

Thinking back on it, I recall that nobody seemed especially sorry to see me go. I don’t remember any sort of going-away party, lunch, or happy hour, or anything else beyond my last show, which I ended with “Wasted on the Way” by Crosby Stills and Nash, thinking of it as a poignant commentary on the passage of time, but which could just as easily have been construed as a slam on the whole experience. Although I was beginning to mellow, a large percentage of me was still a know-it-all asshole, and I had probably worn out my welcome.

My last day was December 23, 1986. I had prepared the station’s Christmas programming before I left, along the lines of what we’d done in years past—50% holiday music until sometime on the afternoon of the 24th, and 100% through sign-off Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day, with a full boatload of Christmas flavor copped from the old WLS Holiday Festival of Music. But because we were on the road to the in-laws in Michigan before sign-on the next morning, I never heard any of it—and I wonder now if they ran any of it. Because when we got back to Macomb early the next week, I turned on the station and found that every trace of my presence had been erased. The format clocks had been changed, and everything with my voice on it was gone.

I understand now, of course, that it wasn’t my sandbox to begin with, and I didn’t work there anymore, so they were entitled to do whatever the hell they liked. But at the time—still green as grass—it bothered me. Had everything I’d done there over the last year been for nothing? Maybe they really weren’t sorry to see me go. Twenty-five years later, however, it is, as CSN sang, “water moving underneath the bridge.” I know that I programmed a pretty good radio station there for a couple of years, and if the people running the place didn’t like the way I did it, that doesn’t change anything,

On the flip, you’ll find five songs my station was playing during those final weeks, as shown on the Cash Box chart for December 13, 1986.