'I'd like to buy a vowel, Pat'

"Can I have an 'E'?"

Oh, I'm sorry, there's no 'E.' Telstar . . . it's your spin.

"Can I have an 'S'?"

There is one 'S.'

"I'd like to solve . . . The Tornados!" With "Telstar" from the summer of '62."

1968: The psychedelic Bee Gees

From 1968 and West German television . . . the Bee Gees no one remembers today -- the psychedelic brothers Gibb.

Here now is the title track from their "Idea" LP. Enjoy.

Robin Gibb, 1949-2012

The thing about the Bee Gees was this: Even if you were young and opinionated in the late 1970s -- a foot soldier in the "Disco Sucks" army, even -- you had to acknowledge just how damned good the brothers were.

Because you remembered this song, among others the brothers Gibb -- Robin, Barry and Maurice -- had recorded. You had loved those pop-music classics first heard through a little earphone and eight transistors, classics that lived in the grooves of the soundtrack album of your life. Soon enough, you would realize that the brothers' disco-era incarnation was part of that soundtrack, too.

And you were OK with that. Quality endures, even though the earthly body does not. Not Maurice's. And now, not Robin's.

May he rest in peace, along with all the stilled voices of my youth.

Who needs radio? Not Mad Men

Back when Top-40 radio was in on the national conversation, it could take a song from a TV show and turn it into a hit record.

The last time I remember this happening was in the mid-1990s when Friends debuted on the small (and low-def) screen. And now?What is this "radio" that you speak of?

Don Draper, superb Mad Man ad man that he is, don't need no stinkin' radio to stir the cultural pot. He just needs a TV show, iTunes and social media.

And now, a mere 24 hours after appearing on the HD screen in living rooms across America, the new Mrs. Draper -- otherwise known as actress Jessica Paré -- had taken her remake of the Mad Men-era "Zou Bisou Bisou" to No. 109 on the iTunes "Top Songs" chart with a bullet.

Or at least an amazing pair of . . . uhhh . . . fishnet stockings.

OH, you also can buy "Zou Bisou Bisou" as a 7-inch vinyl single on the Mad Men website.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Showing a lot of leg — and chutzpah — the new Mrs. Megan Draper (Jessica Pare) delivered a sexy serenade to her husband at his surprise 40th birthday party, purring the early ’60s French pop song “Zou Bisou Bisou.”

The French-Canadian chanteuse’s performance made the unflappable Don Draper blush and his co-workers’ jaws hit the floor, while the Twittersphere lit up and countless viewers were infected with an earworm that sounds like Scooby Dooby Doo.

“At the time, I was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m new on this show and the first thing I have to do is an entire song-and-dance routine for the whole cast of “Mad Men,’’ ’ ” said Pare, who catapulted from a peripheral character last season to center stage in Sunday’s premiere. The two-hour episode drew a series-high 3.5 million viewers, a 21 percent increase over last season’s premiere.

MAINTENANT, MES AMIS, je te présente la version 1961 de «Zou Bisou Bisou» par chanteuse anglaise Gillian Hills:

I . . . I . . . uhhhhh . . . you . . . well . . . HUH???

This may be the single most idiotic thing I have ever seen in print.

This is so factually wrongheaded -- and concerning some pop-culture knowledge so basic -- that I suspect it may have been written and edited by space aliens undercover at The Gateway, the student newspaper at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

You won't believe it. You won't buy a word of it. You'll go slack-jawed. Unless, of course, you're 5 years old . . . or you're a space alien, too.

OK, here it is:

An interesting thing I've heard is that pop radio is an Omaha invention. When I asked Montez about this historical lore, he had some compelling details to add. He said that during some refurbishing in the Benson area, his father recovered memorabilia from a restaurant called Sandy's Escape.

In 1944, Sandy Jackson, who is considered Omaha's first pop disc jockey, got the chance to do a live one-hour show from 11 p.m. to midnight playing groups like The Hollies, The Beatles, The Byrds, The Beach Boys and The Mamas and the Papas on KBON radio. [Emphasis mine -- R21] Soon, he added "The Rhythm Inn" in the afternoon, and by 1946, he was on the air opposite WOWT (Woodmen of the World-TV) star radio host Johnny Carson.

IN FACT, should you follow the link and read this January article about the Omaha roots of Top-40 radio, be aware that it contains pitifully few facts amid an ocean of inaccuracy and sheer ridiculousness. In fact, had an editor cared to actually edit the story, he or she couldn't have -- the only remedy would be to start from scratch.

And by "scratch," I mean start by not interviewing Channel 94-1 disc jockey Montez, because the man either is clueless or was pulling the reporter's leg. Then, after not repeating that first fatal error, the writer would have to re-research the article and conduct interviews with people who know what the hell they're talking about.

He could start here. And here.

After, of course, he relived a major portion of his young life -- this time paying attention.

It takes a lot to shock me after 51 years on God's green earth. This newspaper feature did the trick.

Way to go, Gateway.

Listen and win!

Ladies and gentlemen, I present our last best hope for financial security amid our present economic desolation and tribulation.

Unfortunately, that cash train left the station in 1978. Our Lady of Listen and Win on the Big 910, pray for us.

Music in the ruins

Long ago and far away -- when I wasn't yet who I would become but sure that I was what I'd always be -- the soundtrack of my and my friends' lives was a three-track tape.

WLCS.

WIBR.

WFMF.

Two of these things were much like each other on the AM radio dial around Baton Rouge, La. -- WLCS and WIBR. They were the stations of our Top-40 selves. They played the hits; we tuned in; they fought like dogs to attract the bigger share of us.

WFMF was for our hippie selves. Sometimes, you feel like a freak . . . sometimes, you don't.

But it was WLCS and WIBR which ruled the airwaves. On AM. One ruling from 910, high over downtown Baton Rouge; the other counterattacking at 1300, nestled amid the sugarcane fields of Port Allen, just across the Mississippi River.

It was kind of like the Cold War, only in a sleepy Southern capital and with burgeoning arsenals of records, T-shirts and bumper stickers instead of hydrogen bombs.

"We will bury you!" thundered Joe London and B.Z. "You'll never make it past the Prize Patrol," smirked Chucker and Scotty Drake.

AND THE YOUTH of Red Stick lined up behind their leaders, pledging allegiance to one radio ideology or another -- that of the Big Win 910 or its mortal enemy, Radio 13.

Some non-aligned parties looked on from afar, ganging a bong . . . er, banging a gong over at 'FMF -- Loose Radio -- but they still had their Top-40 leanings, left and right side of the dial.

Mutually Assured Top-40 Destruction brought a certain stability to teen-age society. Had for decades. We thought it would last forever, and the biggest worry in the world would continue to be that your future children of the groove might someday defect to Them, whichever station was Them to your Us.


WE WERE wrong. Just like we were about being forever young, eternally slim and always having a full head of hair.

Today in Baton Rouge, the only thing to be heard at AM 91 or Radio 13 is . . . nothing. Maybe some static. Maybe -- after the sun goes down and the tree frogs begin their bayou serenade -- you'll hear a station from far away riding in on the Ionosphere Trail.

High above downtown, somebody else inhabits Suite 2420 of One American Place, if that's still what they call that particular high-rise that once was the home of 'LCS.

Over in the Port Allen canefield, a ways down Lafton Lane, the old WIBR is a ghost studio with a busted satellite dish and dead towers. A vine runs across the peeling paint of a fading sign.

IT REMINDS me of a Walker Percy novel. Specifically, Love in the Ruins, the tale of a time near the end of the world. Well . . . at least our particular one.

At first glance all seems normal hereabouts. But a sharp eye might notice one or two things amiss. For one thing, the inner lanes of the interstate, the ones ordinarily used for passing, are in disrepair. The tar strips are broken. A lichen grows in the oil stain. Young mimosas sprout on the shoulders.

For another thing, there is something wrong with the motel. The roof tiles are broken. The swimming pool is an opaque jade green, a bad color for pools. A large turtle suns himself on the diving board, which is broken and slanted into the water. Two cars are parked in the near lot, a rusty Cadillac and an Impala convertible with vines sprouting through its rotting top.

The cars and the shopping center were burnt out during the Christmas riot five years ago. The motel, though not burned, was abandoned and its room inhabited first by lovers, then by bums, and finally by the native denizens of the swamp, dirt daubers, moccasins, screech owls, and raccoons.

In recent months the vines have begun to sprout in earnest. Possum grape festoons Rexall Drugs yonder in the plaza. Scuppernong all but conceals the A & P supermarket. Poison ivy has captured the speaker posts in the drive-in movie, making a perfect geometrical forest of short cylindrical trees.

Beyond the glass wall of the motel dining room still hangs the Rotary banner:

Is it the truth?

Is it fair to all concerned?

Will it build goodwill and better friendships?

But the banner is rent, top to bottom, like the temple veil.

The vines began to sprout in earnest a couple of months ago. People do not like to talk about it. For some reason they’d much rather talk about the atrocities that have been occurring ever more often: entire families murdered in their beds for no good reason. “The work of a madman!” people exclaim.

PRETTY MUCH, that's radio today. Any kind of common culture today . . . ruins. Covered in vines, surrounded by weeds.

How did it get this way?

The work of a madman!

Madmen, actually. Perfectly sensible-looking, upper-crust ladies and gentlemen in board rooms across the land -- cultured folk prone to fits of business-school jargon about reimbursement packages, shareholder value, efficiencies of scale and "right-sizing." All of them bat-s*** crazy. All of them weapons of mass unemployment.

They are veritable neutron bombs that eliminate the heart and soul and local voices of broadcasting while leaving bricks and mortar relatively intact, ruins to be consumed by flora as tempis fugits and young people grow into old ones.

My memories remain young. Sometimes, 30-something years ago seems like 30-something minutes ago.

I drive north on La. 1. I turn left at a red light. I drive down the road, between the sweet fields of south Louisiana, thinking sweet thoughts about lost youth. I hang another left, a sharp left, into the gravel parking lot.

And step into the ruins of Radio 13.

Of me.

Of us.

I step into silence where once there was music, and I cannot go home anymore.

Old man, get off of that stage

People try to put us d-down
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we get around
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)

-- The Who,
My Generation

When you're 20, a song can be profound because it captures -- perfectly -- your fear and loathing of the Establishment.

When you're somewhere on the far side of 50, that same song can be profound because it captures -- perfectly -- your fear and loathing of the Establishment. Which now is you.

I'm talkin' 'bout my generation. Or, in this case, the one immediately before mine -- not that my Baby Boom generation is any better.

Above, from 2009, we see Gary Puckett singing his 1968 hit "Young Girl" at The Villages, a massive central Florida retirement community. Now it's creepy enough when you have a 26-year-old warbling an ode to age-inappropriate relationships which, back in high school, we used to call "15 will get you 20."

TODAY, the same dynamic will get you nabbed in a police Internet sting. You know, like when the pretty young thing posing as a 14-year-old asks you if you brought the "protection," goes to the back of the house to "freshen up" and then Chris Hansen walks in and says "Why don't you have a seat right over there?"

When the guy who can't get that young girl out of his mind -- or his set list -- is 67 years old, we suddenly have reached the second act in the profundity of "Hope I die before I get old."

Failing that, perhaps I just can claw my eyes out before watching this again.

It's almost as if Pete Townshend, when he wrote "My Generation," subconsciously saw what was coming in a mere four decades. Like old men singing young men's songs about jail bait to an audience of aging hipsters in a Florida retirement village. Needless to say, I don't think we'll see The Who performing "Young Girl."

Sometimes, I wonder why don't we all f-fade away.

Talkin' 'bout my generation.

3 Chords & the Truth: You better run, girl. . . .

Young girl, get out of my mind.

(And get into this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth.)

My love for you is way out of line! Better run girl . . . you're much too young, girl.

But would you mind terribly if I channeled my testosterone and visions of carnal knowledge into a Top-40 smash hit? C'mon . . . people will love it.

So hurry home to your mama. I'm sure she wonders where you are. . . .

Get out of here before I have the time to change my mind . . . 'cause I'm afraid we'll go too far.

BUT . . . then again, too far is such an antiquated relic of the semi-Victorian era of the 1960s. Maybe I can do a rap about going as far as we can before Chris Hansen shows up with a camera crew.

Sex.

Girls.

Danger.

Desperation.

We got it all this week on the Big Show. How big is it?

Well, 90 minutes, of course. What did you think I was going to say?

Shame on you. This is a fambly show.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords & the Truth: Have a nice show

So far, it's been a crappy week.

I don't know about you, but I'm going to my happy place on this episode of the Big Show. Musically, my happy place -- oddly enough -- is my elementary and junior-high years.

Oddly, because elementary school and junior high were adolescent hell for me. Hated elementary school. Hated junior high. Hated what was a difficult existence at home.

Hated it, hated it, hated it. It's my happy place. This week on 3 Chords & the Truth, it's all about the happy place.

With a little popular insurrection thrown in as teenage drama.

BEFORE YOU call the men with the nets and white coats, let me explain. It's my musical happy place because then, my happiness was on the radio. The Top-40, No. 1, pick-hit, blowtorch, adolescent-escape-pod, AM-by-God radio of the 1970s.

School might be hell and everything absolutely all wrong at home, but the radio always was all right. In Baton Rouge -- where I grew up -- the Big 91, WLCS, was more than all right.

IN OMAHA, that distinction went to the Mighty 1290, KOIL.

We start out 3 Chords & the Truth with a middle-age tip o' the hat to those days and those stations . . . and Barry White, who channeled our pubescent thoughts -- only cooler.

Baby.

OF COURSE, WLCS in Baton Rouge, the Mighty 1290 in Omaha, blowtorch Top-40 radio and my youth are all long gone. Of course, I'd like to have them all back -- especially after, as I said, a crappy week.

But the music remains. And I have this here show. We'll make do so that, maybe, you can find your happy place, too.

We're all in this life together, you know.

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

The world I used to know

I just turned 50. That's a blessing and a curse.

The blessing of making it to 50 is the wisdom that comes from remembering 50 years' worth of stuff. The curse is the burden of remembering 50 years' worth of stuff.

See, in some respects, ignorance is bliss. There is a certain contentment in not knowing what you don't know.

Take the state of radio, for example. It's the little story that tells the big story of life in these postmodern times.

If you don't know anything about what radio was, it's difficult to get all grief-stricken about what radio -- and by extension our society -- has become.

I have loved radio for as long as I can remember. When I was a little kid -- back when music came on records, sound got recorded on reel-to-reel tape and computers were the size of small rooms -- I used to trek up and down the dial of our big five-band transistor set, listening to all the world that would fit in (and squeeze through) a six-inch speaker.

I would listen to a wonderful world of music -- all kinds of music. I would listen to network broadcasts from New York . . . and the world. I would listen to, and wonder about, life in exotic places like . . . New Orleans. Nashville. Little Rock.

Little Rock? Little Rock. When you're 8 or 9 and growing up blue collar in Baton Rouge, exotic is a catch-as-catch-can affair.

Little Rock was the Mighty 1090, KAAY, with rock 'n' roll in the night. And as I was to learn through the magic of someone long ago hooking a reel-to-reel tape recorder up to an AM radio, Little Rock also was KARK. Or, as the announcers there said back in 1971, "Kay! A-R-K."


IF YOU'RE a lot younger than my 50 years, the above hour of KARK, circa May 19, 1971, must sound like a transmission from an alien culture. That's because it is.

In 1971, the mass media was just that. While in many respects, we were just as much a tribal society 40 years ago as we are today, all our various tribes were on a first-name basis. Even when we hated one another's guts.

Though alienation was a fact then just as it is today, alienation was not a business model for mass media. Though we often screamed at one another four decades past, radio and television by and large weren't about displacing light with heat. Or hot air.

Radio stations like KARK -- those one's parents were most likely to favor -- were all about being the voice of a community. Today, by contrast, the picked-over carcasses of stations like KARK (now KARN) are all about being the cynical voice of an outraged sociopolitical demographic, usually on the far right.

Today, if you don't want to listen to a single thing "The Other" has to say, you don't have to. You can get all your "news" from people who think just like you do. You can listen to radio stations that pull angry voices from the sky -- via satellite -- that tell you exactly what you want to hear.

YOU CAN wander across the AM dial in search of exotic voices from exotic places, only to find that everywhere is just like Nowhere . . . that nondescript backdrop for our unremarkable lives of quiet desperation. The voice from New Orleans is the voice from Omaha is the voice from Little Rock is the voice from the satellite.

The overwrought voice of outrage.

The voice that shouts but never sings.

A few years after the time of our 1971 archived transmission from an alien culture, Harry Chapin sang about a "bright good-morning voice who's heard but never seen." That guy got fired years ago.

Now there's Ryan, or Rush, or Glenn, or Laura, or Sean . . . or the conspiracy theorists selling doom late at night. They're not from around here.

THE BLESSING of my 50 years on this earth is I can remember a time when I had a working knowledge of subcultures not my own. When the snot-nosed kid that I used to be couldn't help but have broad familiarity with my parents' Squaresville landscape. With their history, their cultural underpinnings.

Memory also is the burden I bear. This curse is born of a half century of learning the hard way that "progress" oftentimes isn't -- that things don't always get better and better.

When I close my eyes and shut off the noise we can't ignore, I hear music. I hear exotic voices from magical places. I hear New Orleans. I hear Baton Rouge.

I hear Omaha.

I hear Nashville.

I hear Little Rock.

I hear 1971. It's right there . . . the troubled but magical world from when most of my life was ahead of me, not behind.

I hear it . . . I can almost touch it. My blessing.

I open my eyes, and now it's gone.

My curse.

DIckens 4-5275

Good afternoon, WAIL.

Hello, Marge?

This is Marge.

Hey, Marge. Let me talk to Pappy.

I'll transfer you to the studio.

Pappy? Can you play "Blue Moon"? My newborn baby boy is gonna grow up to really like that song, I think, and I was wonderin' if you could put it on. I'll put that GE table radio I won from you last year next to the crib.

I'll get it on for you.


Thank you kindly, Pappy.

Simply '70s: Life is a rock . . .

. . . but the radio rolled me.

Gotta turn it up louder, so my DJ told me . . .



Life is a rock but the radio rolled me . . .



At the end of my rainbow lies a golden oldie . . .

Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me. . . .

Simply '70s: Sucks to be them

1978: Orlando, Fla. -- home of Mickey Mouse and Disney World.

And also the home of the most unfortunately monikered radio station in the history of the world, BJ-105.

Simply '70s: The day the music died

Back in 1976, the music really did die in Omaha.

That's when, on Sept. 2, just after midnight, the Federal Communications Commission ordered legendary Top-40 blowtorch KOIL off the air. As in canceled its license.

According to the commission, Star Stations owner Don Burden did very, very bad things. According to Burden and his employees, political and business enemies railroaded the Omaha radio tycoon.

Nevertheless, the flagship Star Station -- KOIL -- was toast after 51 years on the air. So was its sister FM station, KEFM. So were Top-40 giants in Portland (Vancouver, Wash.) and Indianapolis.

THE FEDERAL "death penalty" made news across the country. It was all over Broadcasting magazine (here and here) and the other trades.

And the Mighty 1290 was no more . . . for a while.

KOIL came back to the Omaha airwaves in December of '76, with a new owner. But never again was it truly mighty.

And soon enough, all that was left were the call letters, parked by corporate owners on another frequency, a robostation spitting out whatever the satellite and the automation dictates.

See, some things are worse than death.

Simply '70s: When radio was

Listen up, kiddies, and you will hear . . .

Top-40 radio back many a year,
John Records Landecker back in '77,
With WLS turning it up to 11
As the Big 89 slams it into gear

Across the glass, the engineer racks up some carts,
And your intrepid DJ opens his mike
As the "Boogie Check" music starts


Then the phone lines all start to light
As callers wait their chance to see
If a shooting star of the air they'll be,
Or whether their wit will just buy the farm
Will the man whose name is Records, with all due charm
Just yank their call like a fire alarm?

Boogie Check, Boogie Check, ooh ahh!

The Needle Drop Top-40 Record Shop

No, there's no real point to this.

It's just a photo essay, born of fooling around yesterday afternoon and reflecting on my misspent youth. Which, alas, went out about the time turntables did.


Turntables are making a small comeback, though. I suspect radio has a better chance of following in vinyl records' -- and record players' -- footsteps than my lost youth does. And radio's chances lie somewhere between slim and none.


Still, it's nice to remember old friends and good times.


And remember, boys and girls, the only two numbers that matter in life are 33 1/3 and 45.

For true.

Your Daily '80s: True

Spandau Ballet was all over the charts with "True" the summer and fall of 1983 -- it hit the Billboard Top 40 on Aug. 27 and stayed there for 10 weeks, peaking at No. 4.

Not only is "True" a great pop song, it also forever will take me back to being a newlywed; it hit the Top 40 exactly one week after Mrs. Favog and I were married.

We had just moved across the country, from North Platte, Neb., to Baton Rouge, and I was heading back to LSU to finish my degree.

Good times, and a fitting soundtrack.

Your Daily '80s: The day the music died

May 10, 1982. Noon.

WABC -- Musicradio 77 in New York and one of the biggest Top-40 radio stations ever -- became Talkradio 77. Decades on, radio fans refer to that day as "The day the music died."

At 12:01 p.m., May 10, 1982, there was only one Top-40 AM station standing in New York, 66 WNBC. Top-40 held on there for a time, but then WNBC evolved into more of a talk station with bits of music here and there.

And then, in 1988. . . .


After 66 years on the air, WNBC was no more.

Your Daily '80s: On the radio

The hits kept comin' in Vancouver on CFMI, FM 101.1. Here's the way it was 30 years ago, on Oct., 1, 1980.