Consider the office Christmas party. Your employer, who grows prosperous from the sweat of your labors, forks out for dinner and drinks at a nice restaurant, and you can let your hair down for a while with your fellow wage slaves. Sounds like a good thing—so how come so many of them are so awful?

One year, the owner of the radio station I worked for scheduled our Christmas party for a mom-and-pop restaurant willing to trade the cost of the dinner for advertising. Imagine having the party at Denny’s, only with a limited menu, and you’re getting close to the vibe. The message to the staff was pretty clear—this is all you’re worth to me. And maybe it dawned on him that he’d skimped, because the next year, the party was scheduled for the most exclusive restaurant in the city. As the waitstaff brought the menus that night, the thought flashed from table to table instantaneously—let’s stick it to him. And so everyone ordered appetizers and bottles of wine, expensive entrees and desserts. The owner had a little facial tic, which grew more pronounced whenever he had to spend money, so that night he sat at the head table vibrating like a tuning fork. The Mrs. and I racked up $85 worth between the two of us. Two decades later, it’s still one of the most expensive dinners we’ve ever had.

Even though I loved many of the people I worked with, the company Christmas parties at my post-radio jobs were almost always dreadful. Dinner and drinks were fine. Even the little speech by the company president was OK. But when the party was planned by a committee, there always had to be an entertainment program of some kind—and I am convinced that there’s never in history been an office-party entertainment program that’s actually entertaining. Memo to party planners everywhere: Don’t waste money hiring a hypnotist or some damn thing—just reopen the bar and let everybody get back to drinking, because it’s drinking that provides the real entertainment at these things.

You can make the most fascinating sociological observations while watching people drink at office parties. Young people—those within, say, five years of college, who frequently spend Saturday nights out drinking—sometimes fail to see the difference between a typical night at Chasers and this distinctly work-related function, getting cheerily fucked up on appletinis and Miller Lite, depending on gender. Older people—couples in their 30s who are usually tied down with children but got a babysitter tonight—are a little more discreet, but only just, because they still think of themselves as college students who haven’t lost their ability to party. (And I can tell which couples have left the kids with Grandma for the night and booked a room in the hotel—usually by the look in the husband’s eye.) People 40s and up are harder to generalize about. My sympathies are always with the husbands of female employees, many of whom sit with a fixed smile on their faces, nursing a beer and pretending to watch with interest whatever’s going on around them. My sympathies are with these people because I was one of them—at least until The Mrs. excused me from having to attend any more of her office parties.

Since I got back into radio, I don’t go to the station’s parties, either. Nobody minds, because I usually volunteer to work that night so somebody else can go. But not all employers view party-skippers so benignly. At one company I worked for, the HR manager visited the cubicles of those who had declined the invitation to find out why. Sometimes I had a valid excuse, and sometimes I lied. One year I said I had tickets to a Badger game, which was true. She told me one of the vice-presidents had given up his tickets to the game, with the suggestion that if I were a good corporate citizen, I’d do the same. But I knew something she didn’t: I wasn’t a good corporate citizen.

There’s no natural musical angle to this post. (Sorry.) So this is as good a place as any to shift gears and unleash the 2009 Christmas podcast, recorded live in my living room and featuring the cat. I’m not happy with either the quality of my microphone or the quality of the production generally, but I hope you like it anyhow. It runs about 31 minutes and features a rarity by Darlene Love, plus Aimee Mann, Simon and Garfunkel, and a handful of songs I’ve written about this holiday season.

Christmas Podcast 2009

July 16, 1971, is a Friday. Life magazine reports on the three Soviet Soyuz 11 cosmonauts who died during re-entry on June 29; consumer advocate Bess Myerson is on the cover. Preparations continue for the Apollo 15 moon mission, which will launch in 10 days. Maryann Grelinger of Kansas City, Missouri, sends President Nixon a telegram in response to his announcement yesterday that he will visit China. It says, “Have fun in Red China. Hope they keep you.” At the Western White House in San Clemente, Nixon meets with the National Security Council to discuss the Middle East and South Asia. Demographers estimate that the population of the world has passed the four billion mark. Future actor Corey Feldman is born. Radio relay operator Rick Holt of Dundalk, Maryland, writes another letter to his parents from Vietnam. (During his year in Vietnam, Holt writes his parents nearly every day, sometimes more than once.) Jeanne M. Holm, director of Women in the Air Force, is promoted to brigadier general, becoming the first woman in the U.S. military with that rank. NBC Nightly News reports the discovery of the Tasaday, a Stone Age people living in an isolated part of the Phillippines. (Years later, some anthropologists accuse the discoverers of the Tasaday of perpetrating a hoax.) A paper titled “Fiber Digestion in the Beaver” is accepted for publication by the Journal of Nutrition. New movies for the weekend include The Hunting Party starring Candice Bergen and Gene Hackman, The Devils (which originally was given an X rating), and Walkabout. Top movies already out include Shaft, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Creedence Clearwater Revival plays in Boston. Duke Ellington plays at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Top 40 fans are enjoying one of the greatest weeks in history, a harmonic convergence of great radio records and superb summer songs is pumping out of AM radios everywhere. The only way to capture the flavor is with our first podcast in far too long—26 1/2 minutes of big Top 40 fun. Play it loud.

July 1971 Podcast

A story appeared over the weekend about the closing of the Jazz Showcase in Chicago, the second-oldest jazz venue in the country behind the Village Vanguard in New York, and a place where everybody who was anybody in jazz over the last 59 years took the stage. While there’s reason to lament the demise of such a place, it occurs to me that the club’s demise isn’t due so much to the death of jazz as it is to the way the scene has changed.

Jazz hasn’t been America’s most popular musical form since before the Jazz Showcase opened, so pining for the return of those days is futile. Yes, there are lots of jazz fans who wish mainstream jazz was bigger than it is, that it wasn’t as marginalized as it is. I’m one of ‘em. But I’m also somebody who understands the world we live in. And it occurs to me that in an artistic marketplace as fragmented as the music world is, everything’s marginalized. I wrote last week how difficult it is to keep abreast of everything worth hearing–you can’t, fewer people are even trying, and so what’s the point? There’s a lot more payback in immersing yourself fully in something you love than there is in worrying about why more people aren’t immersing themselves in the same thing.

I’m fortunate to live in a town with what passes for a thriving jazz scene in 2007–fan interest enough to support a decent summer jazz series and separate local jazz festival every summer, a couple of full-time jazz clubs (albeit attached to swanky hotels) and other places that schedule a healthy number of jazz dates each year. Of course, the majority of the most popular jazz musicians locally aren’t making a living at it on a full-time basis. Nevertheless, the fact that we have enough of them to call what we have here a “jazz scene” makes us a lot better off than other towns around the country. Chicago still has a scene too, despite the demise of the Jazz Showcase. Does it have fewer venues? Yes. Is it less vibrant than it used to be? That depends what you’re comparing it to. You may not be able to go to the Jazz Showcase anymore, but the next time you’re in Chicago, you’ll be able to find jazz if you want to.

(If you want to get righteously upset about something in jazz, get upset about the way muzak-y “smooth jazz” is taking up the oxygen previously reserved for mainstream jazz. But that’s another post entirely.)

One More Thing: 2006 was the year we started podcasting at this blog. In case you missed any of the podcasts (or if you’d like to hear them again, and thanks a heap if that’s true), here are the links:

Forgotten 45s (just music, no talk, February)
The Drive at Five (highway tunes, April)
73 and 77 (hits from the month of May)
October 1975
December 1971
Christmas 2006

In the fall of 1978, I became a radio guy. I was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin at Platteville, majoring in radio and television. I couldn’t wait to start working at the campus radio station, WSUP. I was on the music staff at first, having sufficiently impressed the music director with my knowledge of the arcane. One of my first assignments was to pull 45s from the library to put in the studio bin for airplay, and I still remember how it felt to hear on the air one of the songs I had picked.

But I wanted to be behind the microphone. Before I could do that, I had to get my license. In those days, on-air people who operated a station’s transmitter needed a third-class radiotelephone operator’s license. To get that, you had to pass an actual federal test. In October, I took the four-session prep course the university offered, but was disappointed to find that the test wouldn’t be offered at the Federal Building in Madison on a Saturday until December. However, I found out I could take it in Rock Island, Illinois, in November–and so, one fine Saturday, I went there–2 1/2 hours each way.

I passed the test and got the license. A couple of weeks later, it came in the mail–a government-issued certificate with seals and signatures and everything. Next, I had to make an audition tape in the station’s production studio (“The Cave”) and submit it to the chief announcer so I could be “cleared for air.” I must have impressed him. Normally, freshmen didn’t get to do morning shifts, but it was finals week and the chief announcer badly needed a morning off, so on Thursday, December 14, 1978, from 6 to 9AM, I did my first real radio show. (First song: “Everybody Needs Love” by Stephen Bishop.) With a little help from the newsman (who’s now a writer and anchor with ABC Radio in New York), I made it through the morning, and shortly before the end of the show, the program director came into the studio. He asked, “Are you sure you’ve never done this before?” Almost 28 years later, it’s the highest compliment I’ve ever gotten for anything I’ve ever done. To tell the truth, however, I had done it before–in my head and in my dreams for a lot of years leading up to that day.

There were better songs on the radio than “Everybody Needs Love” in October 1978, including:

“Hot Child in the City”/Nick Gilder. On my second day on the air, I played the album version of this, from City Nights, which has a different ending, instead of the single, as the station’s format required. I must have felt pretty comfortable to be breaking the rules on my second damn day.

“Reminiscing”/Little River Band. This song is capable of transporting me back to my dorm room in McGregor Hall, which I occupied for only a couple of months before moving in with a friend from home, who lived in another dorm. There were nine of us from my graduating class at Platteville that fall. One of the nine was my on-again, off-again girlfriend. We were on again, briefly, at the start of the year, only to end up off again soon thereafter, permanently.

“Who Are You”/The Who. I actually got on TV at Platteville before I got on the radio. For a week in September I anchored sports on the campus station’s 5PM newscast. I remember it every time I hear “Who Are You”–Keith Moon’s death was the newscast’s lead story one night. The experience taught me to stay the hell away from the business end of a television camera–I never went back in front of one.

“Right Down the Line”/Gerry Rafferty. City to City is one of those albums that grows in my estimation as the years pass. There’s a warmth and intelligence on that record I couldn’t have articulated in 1978, although I certainly felt it. Whenever “Right Down the Line” came on back then, it always gave me a lift, which I often needed as I navigated my new world.

“Love Is in the Air”/John Paul Young. This record doesn’t involve very much–an insistent bass line, some high-hat cymbal, rhythm guitar, piano–and the lyrics aren’t much, rhyming “look around” with “sight and sound.” But put it all together and “Love Is in the Air” works spectacularly well, especially the way it keeps going up the scale and building in intensity. If it went on for 15 minutes, I’d keep listening.

October’s almost over, but we’ll make it to 1979 before November arrives. Coming next: the girl in the red-and-white sweater.

I’ve made pretty clear on this blog during the two-plus years of its existence that October is my favorite month of the year. As I put it last year, it’s a time when “the temperature falls, the leaves change, and time runs in reverse.” A lot of the most fondly remembered tales from my younger days take place in October. This month I’m featuring a bunch of Top 5 lists, mostly from the 1970s (and not just on Fridays), because they provide the soundtracks for some of those tales. This is the fifth post in the series. Part four, at which you can find your way to the other parts, is here.

Think about the house you grew up in, or the place you associate most closely with the concept of “home.” Now, think about this–what season is it when you picture that place?

I grew up on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin, almost within sight of the Illinois border. One autumn night during high school–it would have been 1976 or 1977–I was driving home in the dark after wrestling practice. I crested the hill east of the farm and started the slow climb up the next hill, where our farm was. For a moment, the farmstead in the distance resolved itself like a painting–a little oasis of warm light in an otherwise dark and vast night. I carried the picture in my head for years before I knew what it represented: It was a metaphor for the life we lived in that place, as a family while we were growing up. The world was a big place, not always easy to navigate, not always friendly–but we had our oasis of warmth and safety there, halfway up the hill. There were rocky times, as in every family–we let our parents down in various awful ways, and sometimes they were oblivious to the reality of our lives. But underlying all the temporary crises was the rock-solid assurance that in the long run, everything was going to be OK if we’d just hang on, both to that place and to the people who lived there. So we did, and it was. When I think back on growing up in that house, it’s almost always autumn. I remember vividly what it was like to live in that house during those years when the security of the place mattered most.

By the fall of 1975, I’d switched radio stations, to Chicago’s WCFL, and I listened to Madison’s Z104 when ‘CFL became inaudible after dark. Five tunes playing on both of those stations are part of our first podcast in approximately forever. It runs about 19 minutes, and you can download it here. It includes some politically incorrect commentary on the battle of the sexes, the irresistable comeback hit from an important 60s group, my favorite single of all time from one of the best albums of the 1970s, a slice of mellow gold that Jason Hare should get around to someday, and a fine cross-pollinated soul/disco record that sounds insanely great. Hope you enjoy it.

Coming next: One day in your life.