And if you liked that. . . .

Hey, if you're going gaga for old Baton Rouge TV commercials for stuff that ain't dere no more -- and you know who you are -- I think you'll really freak for this thing on the Internets, Gene Nelson's Podcast.

What's not to love about hours of vintage top-40 radio from the Big 91, WLCS. Which, of course, ain't dere no more. Hasn't been for 26 years.

I LOVED that station. And I may have written about it previously.

I wonder what's being burned into the brains of young people today -- what memories, or old sights, or old sounds will instantly take them back to this present when it's long past in some uncertain future.

What is it they take for granted today that will tomorrow become a touchstone . . . a glimpse into an increasingly murky mind's-eye vision of who they were?

I don't know. Neither do they.

Me, I have my old memories. And the sights and sounds of what helped make me who I am today -- God help us all.

Been there. Done that. And I can log onto Café Press and make the T-shirt.

'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.

3 Chords & the Truth: The hits from coast to coast

I was an American teen-ager in the 1970s, therefore American Top 40 was appointment listening.

In Baton Rouge, we got it on WIBR radio. I was a WLCS kind of guy, but Casey Kasem counting down the hits every Sunday afternoon would have me winging it down to the other side of the AM dial to see what was No. 1 on the Billboard charts this week.

Casey Kasem died a week ago today at 82, and this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is a tribute to the man and to the show he co-created in 1970 -- and which he hosted for decades.

Mine was his radio generation. Back in the day, Kasem and the late Dick Clark were America's DJs. Now they're both gone, and untold millions of the children of rock 'n' roll find ourselves slightly adrift at the loss of these pop-culture giants.

THIS WEEK on the Big Show, we're doing what we do, just doing it Casey Kasem style. Just like it was on AT40 in the show's heyday -- only in our own quirky way.

This one's for Casey. This one's also for all those American kids now of a certain age who remember radio when it was relevant. Who remember when radio was an event.

Rest in peace, sir. At long last, you have reached the stars.

Love, a grateful generation with its feet still on the ground.

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

Radio as objet d'art

How do you wake up in the AM?

This how we rise and shine à la maison de Favog. It's a 1951 Stromberg-Carlson clock radio I found on eBay.

Once upon a time, beauty in the things we use every day wasn't unusual. Televisions and radios were pieces of furniture that commanded attention, things that stood out whether they were in use at the moment or not.

Now, unless you pay a premium for the privilege, not so much. A TV is little more than a screen; a radio -- You remember those, right? -- is a plastic box with a digital display.

A CLOCK RADIO is your smartphone . . . or one of those unadorned little thingies you stick your smartphone or iPod into. And the sound quality is such that your low-bit rate MP3 file sounds the same as a high-bit rate MP3 file that sounds like a low-bit rate MP3 file.

Yecch.

No, I am a proud anachronism. I love beautiful anachronisms, and I use them whenever I can. AM radio. Vacuum tubes. Analog clock dials. Young people still can tell time on analog clock dials, right?

If the power goes out, I can reset the clock in a snap on this thing. Try that on your digital clock radio -- assuming you have one of those and not a little box into which you shove a smartwhatever. When I was a little kid, my parents used this for a clock radio.

YOU BETTER damn believe everybody woke up. WLCS PLAAAAAAAYS the hits!

If only I could get the new-old clock radio to pull in the Big Win 910 all the way from Baton Rouge, circa 1967. Or 1971 -- I'm not picky. I'd settle for Omaha's Mighty 1290 KOIL from the same time.

Unfortunately, it's just a great old AM clock radio, not a great old AM clock radio time machine. So KHUB in Fremont, Neb., it is . . . the only station on that venerable old amplitude-modulated band that has both music and news hereabouts.

Simply '70s: Stick it and win

If you grew up in Baton Rouge, La., in the 1970s, you just got goose bumps.

And, irrationally, you're hoping the guy from the radio station will see the bumper stickers on your computer screen, stop you and give you a prize.


WIBR (Radio 13), WFMF (Why, oh, why didn't they stick with progressive rock?) and WLCS (the Big Win 910) . . . we got 'em all covered. For we of a certain age, these stations -- with able assists from WAIL and WBRH (starting in '77) -- provided the soundtrack of our youth.


It was a time when school shootings were unheard of and teenagers did not live by the calendar on their smart phones, which blessedly did not yet exist. I miss those days, and I miss these radio stations.

Even the post-Loose Radio incarnation of 'FMF. But don't tell my friends; that would be so not cool.

Real radio, real gone

Don't bug me. I'm busy being 15 again.

This truly, for me, is a blast from the past -- an aircheck of a radio station that's lived only in my memory since 1979. Stumbling upon this snippet of "Real Radio" WAIL from 1976 on YouTube, I am transported. Transported to my youth, and to a time when AM daytimers -- those stations that run down at sundown -- kinda still mattered.

Still played the hits.

Still had actual humans on the air.

These were the days when, sadly, WAIL was struggling. Soon would come the brief time when WAIL was kinda cutting edge (but still struggling). Too soon came the time when WAIL's struggle was over.

WHEN I was two months from emerging from the womb, Mama won a General Electric table radio from WAIL. When I was a child, WAIL (then a full-timer at 1460 on your dial) was the station that often came from that GE table radio that lived on the kitchen counter.

Mama loved her some "Pappy" Burge. Mama also loved to bend the ear of the receptionist, Marge.

When I was a preteen and then a teenybopper, WAIL got drowned out by the Big Win 910, WLCS. When I was a teen suddenly too cool for Top-40, WAIL was the "backup" station to "Loose Radio."

When I was finally old enough to vote, WAIL was gone, replaced by middle-of-the-road WTKL -- "Tickle." Yeah . . . right.

And now, here's a slice of unexpected bliss -- a song for the September of my years on a chilly October day.

Hello, old friend,
It's really good to see you once again,

Hello, old friend,
It's really good to see you once again.
(Cue Eric Clapton guitar solo.)

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.