Radio relay towers, won't you lead me to my baby
The other day, I was driving somewhere and listening to Little Steven’s show on Underground Garage. He was talking about Brian Jones’ death, and I appreciated that he actually said the words “murder” and offered his opinions on who was behind this unfortunate occurrence. I was listening to him talk and having my own conversation alongside of it, like, “Okay, Stevie, what are you about to say?” and then nodding vehemently in agreement. He can’t hear me, but that doesn’t stop me, that’s never stopped me when I listen to radio, whether it’s Underground Garage or KEXP or WFMU, the radio stations I listen to the most.
I had given up my Sirius XM subscription a while back when I was trying to cut down on monthly expenses, but made the decision that I absolutely missed listening to Underground Garage enough that I needed to make room for it in my budget. This also required changes to my data plan, another thing that had gotten reduced back in pandemic times but was no longer actually serving my needs. I drive places, I leave my house, and listening to various podcasts (and having to be sure to remember to download them before I walked out the door) was just not doing it for me.
I don’t listen to many podcasts. I know people connect to them in the same way I connect to live radio, but the elements that people resonate with -- the quirky side convos, the lack of focus, the personal references -- are the ones that end up driving me bonkers, even if I genuinely like the people. But instead of complaining that a podcast is not to my liking I just… don’t listen to it! It’s amazing, that we have this personal autonomy. But it dawned on me that I was listening to true crime podcasts (I like Buried Bones because I like Kate Winkler-Dawson and Paul Holes, and because they have a rapport and we get little glimpses into their personalities, but they’re very judicious about how much of it is in the show) but I wasn’t retaining any of it. It was just something to occupy my brain while I was driving, and I absolutely hated that feeling.
[Sidebar: I know this is supposed to be about radio and I’ve just gotten done telling you why I don’t listen to podcasts, BUT I do want to give a shoutout to KCRW’s Lost Notes and their current installation, Groupies: Women of the Sunset Strip from the Pill to Punk, which I 100% recommend if you are at all interested in the history of that particular era. Notice how I said “history of the era” and not just “groupies.” I know people have winced when I’ve mentioned it and I get why they’d have that reaction but it’s not salacious. It’s truthful and it’s authentic but it’s not prurient, like most other media coverage of these particular women have been. And most importantly, it is centering the voices of the women and is talking to them and not just about them from an agenda that’s predetermined or borderline salacious. I may still write more about this at a later point but I’m already mentioning this by the time all the episodes are live and the rollout is over, but podcast eps are forever.]
What I realized I was missing was the thing I knew I could reliably count on live radio to provide to me, so I figured out how to return that to my life. I cannot tell you how much good this decision has been for my personal outlook and mood and brain plasticity. Even if I don’t like The Coolest Song In The World This Week, having live radio around again consistently makes me feel more like myself. I don’t have to make a decision about playlists or make sure a record is on my phone, I can just listen and I can also learn things, which is another reason to love the Underground Garage, who seem to have one of the best research teams, or at least I’ve never heard them declare something as fact and thought ‘Hmmm’ and checked it later and found them to be incorrect. That matters for many, many obvious reasons, but most of it is that there’s no quicker way to take me out of the experience I am having than to make a blatantly wrong statement. (Again, another thing that drives me batty about podcasts.)
Caryn Rose
The whole point of radio for me is the live connection, that invisible thread that ties me to everyone else in the world who’s listening to the exact same thing at the exact same moment. Is anybody alive out there, as Mr. S. sang. It is part of music fandom, it was how I got started, this magic machine that I turn on and MUSIC comes out of it! It is how to learn about new music. It is how to hear new music in a way that’s more personal and relevant than a weekly Spotify playlist generated ostensibly “for you.” The radio isn’t “personalized,” sure, but I have never loved the algorithm, even back in the Pandora days.
And also? There should be a little friction involved. I always tell younger people that learning what you don’t like is just as important as learning what you do. In the old days I would just click to another radio button until I found something I liked or at least something I could temporarily settle on. It is why I know the words to every Eagles song despite always actively disliking them. There is something to be said about the benefits of wide and broad exposure to music, especially things you might not normally listen to. I once drove with some friends from Chicago to Minneapolis to see Patti Smith and halfway through the drive, one of them commented that they hadn’t listened to that much Southside Johnny in decades. They didn’t dislike it, it just wasn’t something they would have picked. It was just in the shuffle, not that I have wall to wall Southside on the phone. I think I just have the important songs!
The one exception in my Sirius listening is that I am thrilled that I get to listen to David Johansen’s Mansion of Fun. He is such a font of knowledge and seriously gifted at how he thematically creates his shows. It’s a lot of “theme, but the rest of it is vibe” and that works because he’s David fucking Johansen and because he is someone whose knowledge and taste I innately trust and have faith in. It definitely feels different when I listen to it, though, even though it’s in the same app, it has a scheduled time slot but the rest of the time, it’s on demand. So I get to hear the transition from the previous DJ on the Loft, with his introduction of “Shri Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong Johansen” but that synchronicity of it being broadcast at the same time for everybody is missing, which is fine because I’m listening to it because of the person who created it, I have a relationship with that person’s music and history and musical taste.
I tend to listen to KEXP in the mornings when I get up, even though they’re three hours behind me; I lived in Seattle for almost a decade and everyone I knew always had them on. It was part of the conversation and the dialogue of music fandom. These days I’m either listening to the Morning Show or for the Saturday reggae show, Positive Vibrations, which I still enjoy turning on for sentimental reasons, as it was part of weekends for a decade. It was always a very chill thing to have on in the car while you were trying to do errands and it is a genre I am admittedly not conversant in beyond the basics. I love that it is still going, I love that there are still a community of folks who enjoy this genre who are communicating with each other through requests and shout-outs.
Caryn Rose
In the conversations recently about toxic fandom, I’ve been thinking a lot about what is missing and why we keep seeing the negative fandom traits showing up more than the positive ones, and I think that a lot of it is because the activities and engagement that used to be part of fandom no longer exist. They buy tickets on their phones, they only go to record stores for Record Store Day, going to actual shows is such a gauntlet of parking and security and policing that it doesn’t do a lot for the ability to socialize with other fans, no one is buying music magazines and reading them and developing a relationship with the people writing music criticism (well, some of you are, that’s what you’re doing here, at least partially). You learned to do these things because other people were doing them and so you just did them too.
This is why we have brigades of fans who go online to attack writers and anyone who says anything negative about a musician; they see other people doing it and think, This is how you are supposed to act as a fan. It’s not the only reason modern fandom is toxic but it is definitely a large part of it. I know that there was plenty of toxic fandom back in the day – the Beatles’ wives went through absolute hell, for example – but you could look at those people and clearly see the divide between normal and extreme. People want ways to express their fandom and to connect with others who feel the same way they do about music. I wish they had more options. But for now, I recommend picking a radio station and listening to it live on a regular basis, especially if you’ve never done it or you used to but stopped.
