Radio and dance in an age of theology and geometry

In 1941, WJBO -- 1150 on Your Dial! 5,000 watts! -- was the only radio station in Baton Rouge.

But at Louisiana State University, "WJBO" was a modern-dance composition, too.

I'm unsure what the LSU WJBO says about the state of modern dance 76 years ago in a sleepy, Deep South state capital. But I damned well can tell you that, today, listening to Rush Limbaugh on your average denuded talk-radio station (enter the 2017 incarnation of WJBO) might inspire me to do many things, but dancing isn't one of them.

Alas, in 1941, radio was radio, and dance was dancing, and my parents and grandparents were spared the likes of what stations like WJBO have become.

The State-Times (peace be upon it), gave its readers a preview of this exciting danse electronique, in which collegians chase electrons to and fro:

"WJBO," illustrating in the dance the various types of programs available from the push-button radio, will open the recital. Elizabeth Green of Haynesville, graduate student, is the composer. First there will be war news, with dictators presented against a background of sorrowing women and children. Another push of the button will bring the serial, a very usual sort of triangle story which will be interpreted by David Stopher and two girls of the dance group. Next will be the symphony, which Miss Green will give, and at the conclusion Linda Lee's social column of the Air, to be presented by a group.

MY PARENTS' generation, God bless it, obviously did not yet lack for theology and geometry. I scarcely can picture what a contemporary "WJBO" might look like. I assume it would involve a fat guy waddling around with a microphone, pantomiming a conniption fit as a large troupe rhythmically evoked opioid abuse and falling IQs around him.

In the second movement, the microphone may or may not be placed where it was not designed to go.

I'm not sure about the third and final movement. I don't think anyone would stick around that long. Kind of like AM radio today.

That concludes your news from May, 14, 1941. I'm your Mighty Favog. Next, Your Esso Reporter. Good night.

The neon beacon of Underwood Street

Shining over Underwood Street, July 28, 2017

April 1957

Like the rest of radio today, especially AM radio, the carrot shavings have become pretty shrived and the lettuce gone pretty brown since KFAB's salad days.

Omaha's onetime purveyor of Jerry Vale, Bert Kaempfert, Dean Martin and the most relied-upon school closing reports in the Great White North -- the News Beacon of the Great Midwest -- now trades in right-wing talk radio, gutted by an iHeartMedia filet knife called economies of scale. Or something that sounds better than "gutted."

Nevertheless, the neon KFAB sign that shines over Underwood Street in the Dundee neighborhood is as big and bright as always.

Shine on.

This was the city: Omaha, Nebraska

It was a Saturday — July 3. It was hot and muggy in Omaha, Nebraska.

We got up at the usual time that morning, 7:45. About 8:30, we started to open every window, turn on every fan.

We started to draw the blinds to block the hot sun come afternoon. It was supposed to be almost 90.

While we were doing that, we turned on the radio. My brother’s Winthrop. We call him Stinky. The boss was Dad. My name’s Favog.

GREAT. Mom left the thing on KFAB, not KOWH. Must have been listening to her soap operas. I always preferred Sandy Jackson.

Eight forty-five. What was "Big Mike" selling now? He was talking to the salad dressing guy -- Louis Albert. It seemed strangely interesting.

We sat down to listen. . . .

We're gonna party like it's . . . 1992

This is 90-something minutes of alternative rock 'n' roll greatness.

This is WBRH, 90.3 on your FM dial in Baton Rouge, La., almost a quarter century ago now. This also is a high-school radio station -- the broadcast voice of Baton Rouge Magnet High School.

I don't know who the DJ is . . . but she is on fire with the music she's choosing.

Likewise, I don't know when in September 1992 this aircheck was recorded, nor do I know the time of day. All I do know is this is my old station (1977-79) near the height of its musical powers.

I had been living in Omaha for more than four years by the time someone rolled tape on this bit of radio history . . . and there is no way the much larger city up Nawth had a rock station as good as this back then.

Or now, for that matter.

Christmas 1962 . . . in full-fidelity FM stereo

Here, the tree stays up until Epiphany. We do things in the proper manner.

In that spirit, Revolution 21 presents Yuletide as it was heard in 1962 -- an hour and 19 minutes of Christmas Day programming in "full-fidelity FM stereo" on KQAL radio in Omaha. If you don't remember the 1960s, particularly FM radio in the early '60s, this will be a revelation to you.

Click for full-size version

This is not today's FM radio. This is . . . how shall we put it . . . laid back. Radio by grown-ups, you could say.

It's not all that slick. Technology was more difficult then. Records skipped, and there wasn't much money in FM in 1962. The money was over on AM, back when AM radio mattered. Really mattered.

In 1962 (in 1972, for that matter), FM was for dentist offices, your mom and dad and grandma and grandpa with their "elevator music" (look it up), and frequency modulation was for the "longhairs." No, not hippies. There weren't any yet -- "beatniks" were as counterculture as you got back then. The longhairs listened to classical music, and they were a lot more cultured than you and me.

HERE, KQAL was for the longhairs and elevator-music lovers from its inception April 19, 1959. And in 1962, it was the only station in these parts broadcasting in that newfangled "FM multiplex stereo," which became a thing in June 1961 after its approval by the Federal Communications Commission.

But you'll hear from this recording that FM receivers (or multiplex adapters, which also used to be a thing) weren't as good as they would be . . . and a 54-year-old reel-to-reel tape probably doesn't sound quite as bright as it once did. And you'll hear that stations like KQAL, at 94.1 on your FM stereo dial, still were figuring out what to do with that extra channel of audio when the records weren't playing.

Sometimes it could get weird. Listen, and you'll hear what I mean. No, I will not spoil it for you.

Some day soon we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow

BUT THAT'S NOT what's important.

What's important is that this is the sound of Christmas in my 55-year-old head and my 55-year-old heart. It's the sound of the holidays when adults ran the world, and I was far from being one.

When I think of Christmas in our two-bedroom, one-bath house on Darryl Drive in Baton Rouge, La., this station from long ago in Omaha, where I now have lived far longer than I did in Louisiana, is pretty much what I hear. For the record, I also smell fruitcake, pecans and walnuts, fresh oranges, strong coffee, a huge spruce tree in the living room . . . and Bruce floor wax.

I hear and smell these things that are no more. The older I get, the more it happens.

With each passing year, there also are more and more "no mores." At Christmas, I see the loved ones who once filled my house and my life but are no more. I hear the voices long silent.

I remember a Christmas Day soundtrack that sounded kind of like this. As it turns out, my memories are in full-fidelity FM stereo, too.

Godspeed, John Glenn

John Glenn is dead.

And with the great astronaut's passing at age 95, so dies a part of every star-struck child of the 1960s. There's not much more a man can say -- the life of an American hero speaks for itself. And what a life Glenn had.

In an age so devoid of greatness -- in an America now so impoverished -- this is what greatness looks like. And below, as broadcast Feb. 20, 1962 on KFAB radio in Omaha, is what greatness sounded like.

Sit back and enjoy this NBC Radio special report reviewing the flight of Friendship 7.

Godspeed, John Glenn.

BRRRRRRRRAAAAAAP!!!

I love this newspaper ad for one of the radio stations I listened to during my misspent youth in Baton Rouge.

Look closely, though, and connect the dots on the ol' schematic.

Isn't this really a very 1970s-cool advertisement for some rock 'n' roll electroshock therapy? Inquiring minds -- what's left of them -- want to know.

On the other hand, I was told by a Republican presidential candidate that it's not really torture unless the radio is playing "Muskrat Love" by the Captain & Tennille.

Decent people's mileage may vary.

America today: Outrage will Trump dialogue

Donald Trump just might win.

Stuff like Pittsburgh's l'Affaire Wendy Bell will ensure that most terrifying of electoral outcomes.

What's l'Affaire Wendy Bell? You'll be sorry you asked.

Wendy Bell is . . . uh, was . . . a popular news anchor at WTAE television in Pittsburgh. That is, until she got fired Wednesday for saying the kind of thing white folks sometimes say when they unwisely let their guard down.

Wendy Bell, an award-winning journalist with WTAE-TV for 18 years, was fired Wednesday for comments she made on her Facebook page.

A statement from Hearst Television, the station’s parent company, said, “WTAE has ended its relationship with anchor Wendy Bell. Wendy’s recent comments on a WTAE Facebook page were inconsistent with the company’s ethics and journalistic standards.”

WTAE-TV president and general manager Charles Wolfertz III confirmed the news and declined to comment.

 (snip)

Ms. Bell did not return phone calls for comment from the Post-Gazette, but she told the Associated Press that she didn’t get a “fair shake” from the station, and that the story was not about her, but about “African-Americans being killed by other African-Americans.”

“It makes me sick,” she told The Associated Press when reached at her home on Wednesday. “What matters is what’s going on in America, and it is the death of black people in this country. ... I live next to three war-torn communities in the city of Pittsburgh, that I love dearly. My stories, they struck a nerve. They touched people, but it’s not enough. More needs to be done. The problem needs to be addressed.”

Ms. Bell joined WTAE in 1998 and has won 21 regional Emmy Awards.

Ms. Bell had been off the air since Mr. Wolfertz aired a public apology from the station last week, citing Ms. Bell’s “egregious lack of judgment” in posting racial stereotypes on her official Facebook page.

After a mass shooting March 9 in Wilkinsburg in which police still have made no arrests, Ms. Bell wrote, in part, “You needn’t be a criminal profiler to draw a mental sketch of the killers who broke so many hearts two weeks ago Wednesday... they are young black men, likely in their teens or early 20s.

“They have multiple siblings from multiple fathers and their mothers work multiple jobs.”

She then wrote about a young African-American man, this one a worker she saw in a SouthSide Works restaurant. She said she called over the manager and praised the man, adding, “I wonder how long it had been since someone told him he was special.”

THINGS LIKE l'Affaire Wendy Bell ensure that no, we can't talk to one another. That, yes, speaking your mind can wreck your life. That, probably, when people get tired enough of walking on eggshells for fear of becoming a cultural Untouchable -- when people figure out that social and economic ruin await some lunkheads (like them) and not others (not like them) -- their long, anxious journey eventually leads to the Land of What the F***.

And, they figure, "What the F***" will set us free. It won't, of course, but people take hope wherever they can find it these days.

Having grown up in Louisiana -- and most importantly, having grown up in the Gret Stet in the 1960s and '70s -- I think I know the difference between someone being maliciously racist and someone not-so-artfully jumping to a conclusion, and then a stereotype, and then trying to soften it all by being patronizing.

I'd like to think it's the difference between being flat-out hateful and being cluelessly ignorant. I think Wendy Bell probably was, with all the best flawed intentions, guilty of some iteration of the latter and certainly not the former. There is a big difference between the two, and we ultimately are making this country a lot worse for people of all races by deploying the same one-size-fits-all nuclear weaponry against the clueless as we do against the malicious.

Does "white privilege" exist? Certainly. Does extreme dysfunction exist among the black underclass, and does that have an impact on violent crime? Certainly. Can we talk about that without resorting either to mau-mauing on the one hand or race-baiting on the other? Oh, hell, no.

NO, WHAT WE'RE  going to do is this. We're just going to double down on emoting and Facebook posts WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS, and we're going to fire TV anchorwomen after they get a little too "real" in response to corporate insistence that they build a social-media "brand" and "keep it real."

Well, then. If this is what being "real" and "relatable" and "relevant" gets you as you build a personal "brand" on social media, I think I'd stick to complaining about the weather, "bless his heart" posts and links to the Puppy Christmas video on YouTube.

If we, the politically correct, have no response to someone who sees through a glass darkly other than to scream "Racist!" and send her off to some figurative Siberia -- just like we would some skinhead with a Nazi flag in his hand and the N-word on his lips -- we really and truly are sunk as a country and a society. Shutting someone up is not the same thing as showing them the light.

Shouting someone down is the antithesis of arguing our way toward the truth. Scaring corporate cowards into "disappearing" TV anchors for unwisely saying what a lot of their audience is probably thinking (and a lot less politely at that) will not suddenly embolden the media to proclaim the truth, no matter what.

Here's some truth for you: When we no longer can "reason together," the only thing left is to eliminate the Other.

Wendy Bell, on her Facebook post, emoted before she had all the facts. She took the real problem of familial breakdown among the black underclass (a phenomenon now trending among white folk near you) and weaponized it as an explanation for the actions of still-unknown killers. And then she unwittingly, I'm sure, stumbled right into some "good nigger" condescension straight out of the Bad Old Days.

Did she mean any harm to African-Americans? I'm absolutely sure she didn't. She was frustrated and angry, and she wanted the damn killing to stop. And she blurted.

Everybody blurts. If we're lucky, it's not on Facebook.

Trouble is, today we -- especially those of us in the media -- are expected to do our blurting in public, online, to be seen by whomever and instantly preserved in the postmillennial amber of a screenshot. Let the outrage begin.

Victims Outraged by Evil (fill in the blank) is the new black, and "Sweetie, did you really mean to say that?" is so gauche. "Sweetie, did you really mean to say that?" doesn't have a chance in hell.

HELL. Funny I should mention hell.

You see, if we keep this up -- this perpetual outrage and this continual inability to separate the malicious from the clueless -- hell is exactly where we're going to end up.

Hell is that place where we're always looking behind our backs and Facebooking lots of links to recipes and Puppy Christmas as we try to stay on the good side of President Trump and his What the F*** brigades.

Satan overplays his hand

Yes, the National Abortion Rights Action League would like you to believe that fetuses actually are toasters, not humans.

The insanity of these people is self-evident, as is their humorlessness and rigid ideology. The devil may have all the good tunes, but he has to own the angry, death-loving harpies as well.

OH . . . Angry Scolds for Death hated this Hyundai ad, too. Perhaps Kevin Hart was messin' with their business model; I dunno.

At any rate, I stand with Jim Minardi. Even the devil drunk tweets from time to time, ending up overplaying his hand and giving us all a glimpse behind the unholy veil.

30 years

Three decades ago today, my wife and I were on the road somewhere on U.S. 60 in south-central Missouri, on our way to Washington, D.C., from Springfield, Mo.

We turned on the radio. There was network special coverage on. The space shuttle? What happened?

Then the punch in the gut. It's a cliché because it's true.

America was warned

March 4, 1963.

That was the day Frank Zappa, age 22, appeared on the Steve Allen Show and played the bicycle.

We cannot say we didn't see what was coming.

Ads that will embarrass y'all in 60 years

For the hell of it, I've been going through some mid-1950s editions of Television magazine, immersing myself into an archival wayback machine.

Trade advertising was fascinating then -- at least to me -- sometimes dry, sometimes cute, occasionally  sophisticated . . . and too often, through the clarifying lens of 2015, horrifying.

Let's just say my little "wayback" exercise is a quick and effective manner of coming to grips with how a culture you were reared in -- and, frankly, didn't think much about at the time because people never see the forest for the trees -- actually was pretty horrifying in many ways.

IN THIS CASE, looking back at 1955 and 1956 through the lens of a television camera, we see a culture that was both deeply racist, quick to stereotype and completely hung up on the glories and nobility of "the Lost Cause." We see a culture dedicated to whitewashing (both literally and figuratively) its defining narrative and embracing an identity that you could sum up as They Who Give the Finger to the Yankees.

The South's past: Not forgotten because it's not really past.

Of course, to be fair. one Minnesota TV station had a trade ad touting itself via the ugg-a-mug stereotypical language of the American Indian, but you have to admit that the South set the standard for casual bigotry in the United States. We Southerners leave our subtlety at the door.

NOW, this has me thinking about matters not of the past but of the future.

My wondering goes something like this: When future generations of Americans -- or whomever -- look through the cultural output of post-millennial America, what things will horrify them that we hardly think about at all? Which of our cultural assumptions will testify against us and our age?

You know, sort of like watermelon-eating black children, branding yourself with the Confederate battle flag or the "gallantry" of Nathan Bedford Forrest?

He meth have misspoken

This is your anchorman. This is your anchorman on . . . meth?

At least this is your anchorman with meth on the brain. Well, this certainly explains a lot about Channel 6 here in Omaha.

I understand this clip made it to the Tonight Show.

They don't call it Channel Sux for nothing. And remember, pass the meth pipe from the left-hand side. Now, name that '80s pop-culture reference.
 
Now back to Mary Jane at the anchor desk.

Where the music takes you

Wondering what the deal is with 3 Chords & the Truth?

This, pretty much.

Anymore, you'll be hard-pressed to find freeform radio on your radio dial, AM or FM. But you will find it here on the Big Show.

Of course, we add our own little twist to the concept . . . but then again, it's freeform. Everybody adds their own little twist to the concept.

That's the beauty, and the vitality, of freeform radio. Which you'll find right here on 3 Chords & the Truth. Just on the Internet. And a new episode's coming in just a couple of days.

Be there. Aloha.

Viral police videos we like to see

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

John 1:5

Live from the riot

 Not particularly safe for work. It's a riot . . . uncensored.

It's amazing how a situation can go south in an instant. 

Rage is a seductive, untamable beast.

Charlie LeDuff of Fox 2, WJBK in Detroit, documents what's all the rage today in America from news of the non-indictment of the cop who shot Michael Brown to the descent into mayhem on the streets of Ferguson, Mo.


WHAT'S interesting is how LeDuff tries to tell the aggrieved and enraged that, as a Detroiter, he knows a thing or two about riots and how they kill cities dead. What's unsurprising is that rage is deaf . . . when it's not being blinded by tear gas.

Welcome to your future, America. It looks a lot like the 1960s, only with a harder edge and a lot less ingrained hope for the future. Really.

This won't play on the blog. But the video is here.

IT IS at this point that I turn the microphone over to Jeff Daniels, as seen in the opening scene of the HBO series, The Newsroom. Behold some of the most bare-knuckled truth ever in a TV series.

Still Shocked after all these years

I'm 11 again.

After 40 years, I'm watching Shock Theater and reveling in the snark and camp that was Dr. Shock, Igor and the merry band of creepy idiots that was must-see TV when I was a kid in Baton Rouge.

Saturday-night routine: Turn on TV set about 10. Adjust the loop antenna during the 15 minutes of the ABC late news on WRBT to get a good picture on Channel 33. Because UHF.

SETTLE IN for a couple of hours of the oddball antics of Dr. Shock, along with a classic(ly bad) horror flick.

Wait for next Saturday at 10:15 so I could do it all again.

Truly, Shock Theater helped to make me the (extremely warped) man I am today. Today's kids should have had it so good.

But they didn't. And poorer are they for the absence of bad horror movies and smart-assed, tongue-in-cheek offerings from local TV.

They also would have learned patience from adjusting that #$&*!@%!! UHF antenna.

This was radio

Luther Masingill was radio to the good people of Chattanooga, Tenn.

He started at WDEF radio in 1940, when he was still in high school, and he stayed there for a long, long time. In fact, he was there until he died Sunday night at 92. Needless to say, that's a record -- one that likely never will be broken.

Ever.

Chattanooga Radio & TV

Luther, as he simply was known to a city for generations,  was the go-to guy if your dog was lost or if you needed to raise money for a cause or a hurting family. Luther also was at the WDEF microphone when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor . . . and when terrorists struck New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.

Luther was the man a city and its people came to depend upon in the 1940s and on. And on. And on.

Luther was radio. Luther was what radio was meant to be.

Masingill's first day on the job at WDEF was as an 18-year-old on New Year's Eve in 1940. Other than his time in the military working as a reporter during World War II, he has been at the station ever since. He also worked at WDEF-TV 12 since it signed on in 1954.

He is a National Marconi award winner and a member of both the National Radio Hall of Fame and the Tennessee Radio Hall of Fame.

"I'd like to say he taught me about radio, but really he taught me how to be a good father, and a good husband and a good person," says Masingill's on-air partner for the last 15 years James Howard.

Howard was one of those listeners who Masingill helped locate a lost dog, and he was at the station Monday morning taking calls from listeners remembering the legendary Masingill. Known as one of the friendliest and cheeriest people around, Howard was emotional talking about his friend and colleague.

"He also taught me that the key in radio is to be real and to love my community and to answer that phone. "Don't let it ring more than twice because on the other end is somebody you can help. Radio is not about car giveaways and promos. It's about public service, but I knew that before I started here because I listened to Luther."

LUTHER WAS the embodiment of public-service broadcasting. He loved his medium, he loved his city, and he loved his listeners.

Who will love them now? Who will love your city now?

Someone behind a microphone at some station somewhere might, so long as there's still a wheezing breath in this thing we call radio. But as the Luther Masingills of this world, and this medium, fade into memory and static, we no longer can take that for granted.

That "bright good morning voice, who is heard but never seen."

Nattering nabobs of know-nothingism

I miss Eric Sevareid.

I miss the days when newscasters stuck to the facts and not their ill-informed opinions. I miss the days when silence, or moving on to the next story, was a viable alternative to babbling about those things one does not yet know with certainty.

I miss the days when grown-ups sat behind the TV anchor desk, not overgrown teen-agers emoting when thought -- or silence -- would be more appropriate.

Those are not the days in which we live.

Eric Sevareid

THE CLIP ABOVE represents the days in which we now live. Days in which we are free to speak ill of the dead, so long as we put on a somber face and gravely speak words which signify nothing apart from our ignorance and prejudices. Fox News' Shepard Smith must have thought he was saying something when he blithely proclaimed that "something inside you is so horrible, or you're such a coward -- or whatever the reason -- that you decide to end it."

Like too many journalists today, Smith doesn't know what he doesn't know.

But that doesn't matter today so long as the words -- which words matter not -- just keep spewing from one's mouth like vomit out of a drunk behind your local tavern. It's all good. If forced to, you can vomit out an apology later.

Over at CNN, entertainment reporter Nischelle Turner inadvertently -- Isn't that always the case? -- indicted her genre of journalism and all its malpractitioners:

“I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from the mental health community in using that word,” Turner said. “A lot of times when we’re doing live coverage we say things and we’re talking and we don’t realize what we’re saying. They’re absolutely correct. That it is a disease, so I apologize for using the word demons.”

HERE ARE some words to live by for broadcast journalists when the red light goes on: If you don't realize what you're saying, it's far better to say nothing at all.

Still, all of this nonsense today apparently is much preferred over researching a subject, mulling it over and committing reasoned and humane commentary.

Because Eric Sevareid is dead. And journalism -- particularly that of the broadcast variety -- is busy at present committing suicide. Are all the Shep Smiths in the world just so many cowards, or is it that something inside of them is so horrible that they just can't help themselves?

Film at 11. Until then, we'll just prattle on about things we know not.

While today's talking heads are doing that, watch this master of the past and weep for the present.

Goodness knows, Clear Channel blows

I don't care who ya are, this is funny!

Well, it's probably not too funny if you're Bob Pittman, but who cares? It's guys like him who have been ruining radio and throwing away the kind of talent who can produce one screamingly funny parody . . . while standing in line at the unemployment office, no doubt.