One of the few advantages of living in the cultural wasteland of post-industrial Racine (Wisconsin, USA) is that it lies on the northern edge of receptivity for Chicago FM radio. On a recent Saturday morning I got to hear a special broadcast of WBEZ's syndicated Sound Opinions program, featuring a frank & funny interview plus acoustic mini-concert with Neko Case, who's currently on tour with her own backing band (including vocalist Kelly Hogan, a Wisconsinite). It was recorded in January at The Hideout, the Chicago alt-country/indie-rock club where Neko tended bar in the early 2000s.
Still living on her Vermont farm, Neko released her sixth solo album this autumn, featuring her first batch of truly confessional songs. I have attached a link to the podcast below for those of you who can only access this weekly program about popular music, hosted by eminent Chicago rock critics Greg Kot & Jim DeRogatis, via the World Wide Web. Be sure to catch the desert island jukebox feature, a Harry Nilsson song produced by John Lennon circa 1976. And stick around for the closing voicemail messages from listeners around the USA, one of my favorite parts of this excellent syndicated show.
WBEZ (91.5 FM), of course, is the same public radio station that gave us Ira Glass's brilliant NPR storytelling program This American Life. You can occasionally hear the always charming & insightful Michael Phillips (a Racine native & fellow alumnus of St. Cat's Class of '78), chief film critic for the Chicago Tribune, on WBEZ's Filmspotting program.
Years before I discovered public radio (in Madison, 1980), I enjoyed listening to legendary Chicago disc jockeys Larry Lujack & John "Records" Landecker on WLS, a 50,000-watt monster audible at 890 AM across much of North America in those days. Their sardonic comments on Top 40 music, its shrinking AM audience & current events (e.g. Mayor Jane Byrne's ill-advised 1979 stay in the Cabrini Green housing project) made all those obnoxious commercial-radio ads bearable. I still remember fondly the sly leer in Landecker's voice when, introducing a song by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, he recited its sophomoric double-entendre lyric: "When you're in love with a beautiful woman, it's hard..."
Around 1975, on the soothing blue dial of my wood-encased Marantz stereo receiver, I discovered Chicago's WFMT (98.7 FM). That early stereo station, mainly a staid classical & jazz outlet, blessed Chicagoland for decades with author/raconteur Studs Terkel's incomparable daily talk show. Studs interviewed all manner of artists, musicians, intellectuals & social rebels, from Bob Dylan (c. 1963 - "No, it's not an atomic rain. It's a hard rain.") to Mahalia Jackson to Gloria Steinem. The program always closed with Studs's exuberant nod to Woody Guthrie: "Take it easy, but take it!" WFMT also loosened up late on Saturdays when it broadcast a mix of folk music and hip humor called The Midnight Special, where I first heard the quirky comic dialogues of Mike Nichols & Elaine May as well as Arlo Guthrie's 1967 satirical counter-cultural masterpiece of a song, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree."
Sometime in the 1990s I grew to love WXRT (93.1 FM), "Chicago's finest rock" - and one of the few commercial radio stations in the country that still plays blues records from time to time. It happened to be on 'XRT that I first heard Neko Case's catchy 2009 singles "This Tornado Loves You" & "People Gotta Lotta Nerve," a fierce animal-rights themed vengeance ballad ("You know they call them killer whales / still you're surprised...").
And so, finally, I come full circle back to Ms. Case, who began her music career as an art student in Vancouver (BC, Canada), a woman brave & sensible enough to discuss her mood funks & love troubles on global radio without sounding self-indulgent. I'm grateful to her & to the best of Chicago radio. Although I only lived in the Windy City for 2 months (in the year 2000, in a friend's high-rise condo on Lake Shore Drive, with a view of Wrigley Field a mile to the west), it holds a special place in my memory thanks to some of its gifted broadcasters.
Well, that's enough nostalgia for now. Good radio will never die because radio is the most intimate medium humans have yet devised. The Internet, that insatiable digital behemoth gobbling up most analog media, might co-opt it, but it can't kill radio broadcasting entirely.
Picture the World Wide Web as a raging robot Godzilla: having arisen from the contaminated Pacific waves, he approaches Fukushima wielding a bullet-train car in one paw while stomping on an ancient Buddhist temple. Suddenly he hears an abandoned radio playing Sinead O'Connor's eerie soprano rendition of "Nothing Compares 2 U." The techno-lizard pauses to listen. A silicon tear wells up & drops. The beast retreats into the ocean. Sublime radio strikes again!
Picture the World Wide Web as a raging robot Godzilla: having arisen from the contaminated Pacific waves, he approaches Fukushima wielding a bullet-train car in one paw while stomping on an ancient Buddhist temple. Suddenly he hears an abandoned radio playing Sinead O'Connor's eerie soprano rendition of "Nothing Compares 2 U." The techno-lizard pauses to listen. A silicon tear wells up & drops. The beast retreats into the ocean. Sublime radio strikes again!
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