'Sweet' sign at the supermarket

Here's the deal. It's always yesterday somewhere.

And in the parking lot of the Peony Park Hy-Vee in Omaha, you still can party like it's 1999 -- at least judging by the vintage Sweet 98 radio station and "Gary Coleman Has a Posse" stickers on the back of a sign there.

If you've been in Omaha a while, you certainly remember Sweet 98, which reigned as the undisputed champion of FM radio here for a couple of decades.

NOW, IF YOU'RE new to town or happen to be under 20, you would be one of the few people who don't still call KQKQ radio "Sweet 98," even though it changed format and name six years ago. For your edification, that previous incarnation of Q 98 Five played all the hits, had all the great contests and enjoyed the undying loyalty of every teenybopper in eastern Nebraska (and some of their parents, too).

It goes without saying that -- like the vintage bumper sticker there in the Hy-Vee parking lot -- was back when teenyboppers still listened to the radio. Which, of course, was back when radio was the picture of health and the iPod hadn't come out yet.

Back in the day, however, Sweet 98 was a hell of a station . . . if Top-40 was your thing. It inherited the mantle of "king of the teen-age hipsters" from the previous Omaha Top-40 powerhouse, "the Mighty 1290" KOIL (always said as "coil").

Always.

KOIL reigned from the late '50s through most of the '70s, but difficulties with the Federal Communications Commission knocked it down -- even off the air for about six months -- and then when "Sweet" came along in 1980, that was that, forever and amen.

I'm not from here, and my glory days were in the '70s, not the '80s, but I understand how it is. Sweet 98 was to KOIL here what KOIL was to WLCS, which wasn't in Omaha, but instead in Baton Rouge, La., where I grew up. Are you following me here?

IN OTHER WORDS, when I was a kid, "the Big Win 910", was like KOIL, which was like Sweet 98, except that 'LCS got knocked off by WFMF, not KQKQ. Get it?

Whatever. If you're from my neck of the woods, and you still miss WLCS, go to the Big Win 910 CafePress shop and buy one of my shirts. Poppa needs a MacBook, OK?

They call this "full disclosure," I think.

But what we're really talking about here is sainted memory, isn't it? The little things long gone and -- objectively -- of little import, but which mean the world to me. And you. And everybody.

Usually, these things live on only in our hearts and minds. But sometimes . . . sometimes . . . they hang on and hold out -- kind of like those long-ago Japanese soldiers deep in the jungle on an island somewhere in the South Pacific, still fighting a war that ended long before, fighting on simply because no one told them it was over.

Obviously, not many people -- OK . . . no one, actually -- would mistake the parking lot at 78th and Cass for deepest, darkest New Guinea. But there, Sweet 98 holds out, ambushing unsuspecting grocery shoppers with promises of "Today's Hit Music."

Trying to win a brutal Top-40 ratings war that, for the rest of the world, is nothing more than a distant memory. A "sweet" memory of a time when radio mattered, and kids still listened.

The day the music died

One thing kids today will never know is what it was like to have your own radio station.

Not what it's like to be a bazillionnaire and own your own big-time broadcast outlet but, instead, what it's like to be devoted to a radio station, this hometown entity that plays cool tunes (well, mostly) and becomes your window on a world much, much larger than the hick burg in which you find yourself trapped. Face it, unless you're a kid growing up in New York, L.A. or Chicago, you think where you're from is That Which Must Be Escaped.

And I'll bet L.A. and New York kids probably want to flee to Paris or Rome. Maybe London.

You see, long ago, radio stations were living things. They were staffed by live human beings whose job it was to entertain and enlighten other live human beings. These were called "listeners," something radio has radically fewer of these days.

Oftentimes, way back deah den (as my mom says), people would find one station or another's personalities and music so compelling that the station, in a real sense, became "their" station. Listeners took emotional and figurative ownership.

They listened day and night. They called the DJs on the "request line." (And note, please, this was an era when "DJ" immediately brought to mind a radio studio, not a dance club.)

Listeners went nuts for the contests, whether it was the chance to win $1,000 or just a promotional 45. They'd pick up a station's weekly survey to see where their favorite songs ranked this week.

They'd wake up to the "morning man" and boogie down to the groovy sounds the afternoon drive guy was spinning out through their transistor radios.

Boogie down to the groovy sounds? Ah, screw it. You had to be there.

THE REAL business radio was in back during its second golden age -- the Boomer age of Top-40 AM blowtorches . . . and of laid-back, trippy FM free-form outfits, too -- was the business of making memories. That stations sold some pimple cream while selling even more records was just a happy accident, at least from the perspective of their loyal fans.

Back when the Internet was more like the Inter-what?, radio was the Facebook of its day. It told us about the world . . . and about each other. It served up new music for our consideration.

Likewise, a station's listeners formed the pre-social-networking incarnation of what became Facebook groups and fan pages. In short, between the hits and the ads, between the disc jockeys and the contests, radio was community.

All you needed to join was an eight-transistor job, or maybe a hand-me-down table radio in your bedroom, its tubes glowing orange in the darkness as the magic flowed from its six-inch loudspeaker.

AT ITS BEST, radio comforted the afflicted, afflicted the comfortable, lifted downcast spirits, was a friend to the lonely and provided the soundtrack for the times of our lives. To this day, I can hear a song and immediately think "WLCS, 1975," or "WTIX, summer on the Petite Amite River, 1972."

And every early December, my mind will drift back to a late night in 1980 when I was studying for finals at Louisiana State, with my head in a book and WFMF on the stereo. Bad news through the headphones, and -- at least for my generation -- "something touched us deep inside."

It was the Day the Music Died. Again.

Tonight my mind drifts back to Aug. 31, 1984. That was the night a close friend passed into that good night of blessed memory.

That night, the Big 91, WLCS, played its last Top-40 hit and left the Baton Rouge airwaves for its new home in the youthful memories of aging teen-agers like myself. Two-and-a-half decades later, it just doesn't seem right that it's gone.

OF COURSE, lots of things don't seem right nowadays.

That WLCS isn't there anymore -- hasn't been there for more than a generation -- is just one of them in the mind of one Boomer kid from a middling city in the Deep South. You can read about why that is here.

But a couple-odd decades in retrospect, it seems to me that Aug. 31, 1984, was in a way about as profound as the deaths of Buddy Holly and John Lennon -- the intangible end of something we still haven't quite gotten our minds (or our culture) around.

It's not that the actual deaths of Holly or Lennon, or of the "Big Win 910," precipitated some sort of musical or cultural cataclysm in themselves. It's just that things were happening.

And being that things were happening that more or less coincided with each instance of "bad news on the doorstep," it's handy to use these events as markers.

For me, the demise of WLCS -- and the deaths of many stations that were nothing if not actual life forces in their own cultural rights -- signals The Great Unraveling.

The unraveling of a common culture is what I'm getting at, I guess.

Lookit. As much as we kids claimed stations like 'LCS as our own, we can't forget that many of our parents listened, too. Or that Top-40 radio of old played what was big, period -- be that Jefferson Airplane or Frank Sinatra. Because of WLCS, I think I could comprehend more than my own little world of teen-age angst and teen-age fads.

And it's why I feel just as comfortable with Andy Williams and Tony Bennett -- and, yes, Ol' Blue Eyes -- as I do with (ahem) "harder" fare. My world is bigger, richer, more diverse because of a 1,000-watt AM station in a midsized Southern state capital too often prone to calling too much in life "good enough for government work."

Thank God, that couldn't often describe the Big 91.

And because "good enough" wasn't often good enough at WLCS -- because the men and women who worked there just did what they did and did it well -- I owe its memory more than I can repay.

If, after these 25 years, somebody were to require that I pen an epitaph for my long-dead friend, I'd write just this: WLCS played the hits.

The hurricane games people play

I hate it when people wish for hurricanes because it would be "fun."

People like that are either stupid or mean. Take your pick.

When I was a student at Louisiana State, you could tell the Yankees from the natives -- apart from their accents -- by their attitudes on hurricanes. The Yankees thought hurricanes were an excuse for a party and wanted the opportunity to see one up close.

At the rest of our expense.

NATIVES LIKE ME, and Desirée from New Orleans, wanted to kill the little bastards. We were the same age, and we each had vivid memories of Hurricane Betsy in 1965, not to mention other various and sundry lesser storms.

And memories of the Category 5 monster that missed to the right -- Camille.

As a then-4-year-old from Baton Rouge, I remembered Betsy as a hellacious windstorm. I remembered the lights going out in the middle of one of my television shows -- "Flipper," maybe? -- and staying off for days.

I remembered the adventure of sleeping on a quilt in the living room, the battery radio tuned to WJBO, flashlights and kerosene "hurricane lamps." A 4-year-old isn't old enough to appreciate that hurricanes can kill you.

What I remember to this day is how the wind screamed like the satanic host somewhere outside our boarded-up windows, unleashed from the netherworld for a long night's rampage. I can still see the aftermath -- leaves plastering everything like verdant wallpaper. Limbs all over the yard. The odd shingle from someone's house.

Before Betsy hit, my old man didn't have time to take down one purple-martin house. It sat sturdily atop a 2-inch galvanized steel pipe about 25 feet high. Solid stuff.

After Betsy's wind got through with it, that mast was bent to the ground, like a miniature Gateway Arch. Over at Aunt Rose's and parrain's, a huge pecan tree had come down, splitting their old house in two.

Parrain -- otherwise known as my Uncle Joe -- had been in the bedroom just a minute or two before the tree turned it into splinters. After the weather cleared up, I remember spending the whole day there as the grown-ups in the family put the house back together again.

They never did rebuild the smashed fireplace, though.

DESIRÉE'S EXPERIENCE of Betsy -- from New Orleans -- was more dramatic than mine. Her "adventure" included having to swim, with the rest of her family, out a second-story window of their house.

I couldn't top that one, having grown up some 50 feet above sea level.

But I could contribute my memories of Hurricane Edith in 1971.

Edith, truth be told, was a pretty piss-poor hurricane. She was no Betsy, and certainly no Camille.

Up in Baton Rouge, Edith wasn't considered enough of a threat to even bother boarding up our windows. School was open, but I stayed home.

If I had gone to school, I would have missed the tornado.

My mother had just gotten off the phone with grandma.

"Mama, look!" I said. "The sky is black."

Right then, everything went white. A swirling, roaring white cloud enveloping our neighborhood and our house. I stood in the living room watching it. More precisely, I stood in the living room, watching debris fly out of the mist and bounce off our front window.

Shingles. Leaves. Fiberglass insulation. Branches.

I don't know how the windows held. Probably, they held because the actual vortex of the twister missed us by a little less than a block.

I was 10, and I'd never seen a tornado before. Didn't have sense enough to run for the hallway and hit the deck.

Then again, neither did my 48-year-old mother. She went into hysterics; I tried to calm her down. I didn't get scared till later. Being the adult in a situation like that screws with your preteen brain, you know?

BEFORE THE TORNADO, Edith's torrential rain had left the street with a good half a foot of water in it, and the flooding had made it halfway up our driveway. Afterward, the street -- and our driveway -- were dry.

As the weather returned to its normal lame-hurricane programming, the bulletin sounder started blaring over WLCS radio. Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Bulletin! Bulletin! Bulletin! Bulletin! Bulletin! Bulletin! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!

We were under a "tornado alert." Thanks for the news flash, fellas. Doppler radar was a couple of decades away still.

By all rights, I probably ought to be dead or something. I guess God really does look out for fools and little children . . . whichever category I fell into at the time.

But I was old enough for Edith, the Hurricane That Got No Respect, to teach me one thing: You don't f*** with hurricanes. Anything can happen. Thus was born my gut instinct to kill Yankee classmates who thought a hurricane disaster might be good for kicks and giggles.

Or an excuse to down a case of cheap beer or three.

ON THE OTHER HAND, I don't know what the hell "The Louisiana Conservative's" damn excuse is:

I guess you’d have to be from Louisiana to understand this, but that sadism is brewing again. I don’t want to experience Hurricane Katrina again. Once in a lifetime was enough for me. I hated that a fifteen minute drive suddenly became a two hour experience. I hated sitting inside the house the entire time without electricity as the only sound was the howling wind. I hated coming in from work as the hurricane came as an uninvited guest, drenching us with rain, the road barely visible. I hated to hear about the looting, the flooding, the mayhem that swept through New Orleans…

And though I would still hold my hand out to New Orleans residents who needed aid in that type of emergency, I could careless if the people who destroyed the river center that housed them slept on the streets. I don’t like seeing people sticking greedy hands and taking assistance away from those who genuinely need it. I don’t want to see people getting recovery money and spending it in strip joints, night clubs, and bars. Nor do I want to see them spending money on a designer purse and boom boxes.

Hurricane Katrina gave us the best and the worst of people. I’m grateful for the best of people, I loathe the worst of people, and I hope to see neither again.

But as I said, I am still into a little sadism. Part of me wants Gustav to come right up the Mississippi River and into Baton Rouge. As I said a couple of minutes ago, you have to be from Louisiana to understand this, but I want to know. Can Bobby Jindal handle a hurricane?

I AM FROM LOUISIANA. I understand that "Avman," the "sadistic" author, needs to keep his dark impulses to himself.

To one "Louisiana conservative," Katrina was annoying traffic jams. To more than 1,000 New Orleanians, for whom he has little but contempt, Katrina was the death of them. I wonder whether they hit bad traffic on the way to the afterlife?

Perhaps "Avman" could fight the evacuation traffic and head for Ohio. Then stay there until he forgot what a hurricane was like. Then, at least, he'd have some sort of excuse for his "sadism."

Still, I think I understand what he's trying to say. Maybe.

I'll confess that the run-up to a big storm can be exhilarating, in that you're rising to meet a huge challenge. It's an avenue of escape -- at least momentarily -- from our modern lives of quiet frustration and a nagging sense of futility.

It brings on the rush -- albeit disordered and somewhat deviant -- of being, at long last, part of something bigger than our own boring, solipsistic selves. Our inner 4-year-old finds that somehow exciting.

Especially when we figure it's not us who might lose every damn thing we own . . . or our life, or those of our loved ones.

Then, the non-stop hurricane coverage on TV is the ultimate "reality show." People get to lose their stuff -- die, even! -- so that we can transcend our own sucky selves.

I get that.

When you start feeling that way, it's helpful to realize what's going on. And feel bad about it. And just keep your damn mouth (or laptop) shut. Being a public sadist is unseemly, and not generally recommended.

THE EXHILARATION always crashes, eventually, into the tragedy. Soon enough, we see all too well that our "hurricane entertainment" was no game. That the reality TV show was a meteorological snuff film.

The TV images of "video game" tracking maps and radar displays give way to scenes of death and destruction. Of people who lived . . . and worked . . . and played . . . and loved yesterday but today are just bloated corpses floating in the fetid floodwaters.

Places you knew yesterday suddenly are unrecognizable in today's news footage.

The unactualized life you sought escape from in the excitement of nature's fury just might be forever changed today. And you find that's more than you bargained for in your "sadistic" quest for relevance through Götterdämmerung .

The green, young soldier who thirsts for the glory of battle soon enough is the middle-aged combat vet who wakes up screaming in the night. If he's lucky.

NORMAL PEOPLE know that . . . no matter what crazy-ass things their feelings sometimes tell them.

Almost three decades ago at LSU, I never did get the opportunity to lay down my own storm track on one of our out-of-state hurricane enthusiasts. I don't think Desirée did, either.

It's too bad The Louisiana Conservative's chief sadist wasn't at LSU with us back in the day. I would have paid money to see Desirée kick his ass.

Four Songs: Yesterday Once More

This week on Four Songs: five songs. It was necessary -- one of the songs is by John Denver, and a "make good" was in order.

IN MY DEFENSE, I didn't pick the music. That was done according to what was hot with the record-buying public . . . in April 1975. Unfortunately, John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" was big back then.

Unsurprisingly, I would have picked differently. But they don't let 14-year-old kids program Top-40 radio stations, and that's how old I was when this episode of Four Songs was done. Live. Through the facilities of the Big 91, WLCS radio in Baton Rouge, La.

In all its amplitude-modulated glory.

And glorious it was. So glorious that I was sitting at the kitchen table, early the morning of April 17, 1975, with my portable reel-to-reel tape recorder patched into the earphone jack of my clock radio to preserve a piece of WLCS forever.

It was a Thursday. Gary King was the morning man.

WLCS was one of Baton Rouge's two Top-40 blowtorches. Radio 13 -- WIBR -- was the other. 'IBR had some great jocks, and a friend of mine even was a part-timer there when I was in high school . . . but I was an 'LCS man.

No offense to WIBR.

Of course, by 1976, I was firmly in the camp of Loose Radio (WFMF during its album-oriented rock salad days). But I'll always love Double-U ELLLLLLL CEE Ess . . . even though it died in 1983, a few months 1984, a year after I married a KOIL woman from Omaha.

And if you're under, say, 30, you're not getting this conversation at all, are you?

LET ME EXPLAIN. Once upon a time, there was this thing called radio -- AM radio -- and we listened to it on "transistors," which were like iPods, only affordable. And better.

An iPod only can bring you the few hundred songs you load into it after illegally downloading them off the Internet or legally buying them on iTunes. But a transistor radio, that could bring you the world, baby.

All for free. And without the threat of a lawsuit by the music cops.

The world first came to my bedroom on a transistor radio tuned to WLCS. I also could tune in the whole wide world on WIBR, or maybe WTIX in New Orleans -- and sometimes KAAY through the ether from Little Rock at night -- but I mostly dug those rhythm and blues . . . and rock 'n' roll . . . and countrypolitan . . . and a bit of ring-a-ding-ding, too, on the Big 91.

What it was, was the breadth of American popular culture at my fingertips. And British Invasion, too.

Never was education so fun. I turned on the radio just to listen to some tunes, and I found myself under the spell of a thousand different tutors -- friendly voices from morning to overnight -- playing for me the breadth of musical expression . . . or at least the musical expression that charted well. It is because of 'LCS, 'IBR, 'TIX (and later, 'FMF) that this Catholic Boy has catholic tastes.

Your iPod is cool and all, but it can't do that.

SEE, THE DEAL IS that I can't repay the debt I owe to WLCS, for one. I can't repay the debt I owe to Gary King, that friendly morning voice on this episode of Four Songs.

For a spell there, King's was the voice I woke up to, got ready for school to and ate breakfast to. He played the hits and told me what the weather was outside, and Gene Perry gave the news at the top and bottom of the hour.

Back in the day, radio was a well-rounded affair.

King's also was the friendly voice that answered the studio line when an awkward teen-ager in junior-high hell would call to request a song. And his was the friendly voice that would take time to chat for a bit when that kid -- or his mother -- sometimes thought he had nothing better to do . . . like put on a morning show.

I didn't know it then, and Gary King (real name: Gary Cox) probably didn't know it, either, but what he was doing was being Christ, in a sense, to a lonely kid and his -- come to think of it -- lonely mother. I shudder to think what one of today's "morning zoo" shows would do with rich material like me and Mama.

That is, if the zoo crew answered the studio line at all.

Via the AM airwaves, I made a human connection with WLCS and Gary King. I needed that. We all need that. And you can't get that from your iPod, though some of us will try to give it, because you have to work with what you have.

BEFORE APRIL 1975 was done, Gary King was gone. He originally was from Kentucky, and one day the call came from WAKY, the Top-40 powerhouse in Louisville that Gary grew up listening to.

On his last show, Gary's ending bit was "convincing" Gene Perry that he could catch a bullet in his teeth if the newsman would just help him out on the gun end. It didn't work as planned . . . which means it worked perfectly in radio's "theater of the mind."

I think I shed a tear or two.

And a couple of years later, I was learning the ropes at WBRH, Baton Rouge High's student-run FM station. And 33 years later -- after various pit stops on the air and hot off the press -- here we are at Revolution 21, trying to figure out what "radio" will be in this new millennium . . . right here on the Internet.

Thanks, Gary. I can't repay you in full, but maybe this will make a nice down payment.

'Diversity' is not a cheap slogan at Revolution 21

People talk about diversity a lot, but we never see that much of it, really.

Well, this week's episode of the Revolution 21 podcast is all about diversity. We have so much musical diversity, it's gonna make your head spin.

And that's a good thing.

I've never understood folks who only like one kind of music. To me -- if it's really true that variety is the spice of life -- how lacking in savor must theirs be?

See, your Mighty Favog grew up on rock 'n' roll. But he also grew up on old-time country, and R&B, and a heapin' helping of soul and funk. That was the milieu of the Deep South in the '60s and '70s, and -- minus the old-time country -- that was Top 40 radio back in the day. That was the world of the "Big Win 9-10," WLCS in the Favog's hometown, Baton Rouge, La.

That was the earscape of "The Mighty 690," WTIX in New Orleans. And "The Rock of New Orleans," WRNO . . . mostly.

And to an even more eclectic extent, that was the freeform-radio world of the old "Loose Radio." Just a wee bit lighter on the soul and funk. And a little heavier on the "alternative country" acts.

Diversity. That word used to mean something apart from cheap political sloganeering. And that's what Revolution 21 is all about.

OH, YEAH. Back to the new podcast.

Let's just say that in the first 30 minutes, you're going to get from Echo & the Bunnymen to Billie Holiday to Diana Krall to the Ides of March. And, as they say, the fun is all in the journey from here to there. Or is it from there to here?

Also in tonight's "diverse" lineup: Nilsson, the English Beat, Criteria, My Morning Jacket, the Sex Pistols and Billy Bragg. That enough for ya', Skipper?

Be there. Aloha.