Radio On: A Listener's Diary

introduction

Radio is a landscape, a place inhabited by heroes and villains. And I should know. I spent a year in the broadcast badlands of 1995, which is 325 days longer than Christ suffered in the wilderness (and he didn’t have to take notes). But this book is not just a road map of radioland, but of love and hate. My love. My hate. I was twenty-five years old.

I had been living in San Francisco, working at a gallery and writing for art magazines. An assignment to review a collection of essays called Radiotext(e), edited by Neil Strauss, got me thinking. Strauss opens his introduction with these words: You will never understand radio by listening to it.

In some ways, he was right. The more I read about radio’s possibilities—theories of what it could be or do—the less I tuned in to the real-life black box, that dreary, intelligence-insulting, ugly, half-assed, audio compromise lorded over by the stultifying FCC. But if Strauss wasn’t listening, and I wasn’t listening, someone was. Someone with a vote. In those horrifying days after the 1994 congressional elections, people started pointing at conservative talk radio as the major force which fueled the so-called Republican Revolution that gave the right wing a majority for the first time in four decades. I began to understand what Bob Dylan meant when he sang, Is there a hole for me to get sick in?

Then I noticed that no one was keeping score: While American magazines and newspapers employ armies of critics to dissect the content and influence of television, movies, art, and music, radio is rarely covered. Its presence is intimated with skeletal listings that can’t begin to hint at the medium’s diversity. Glancing at the Radio Highlights section of any metropolitan daily, you’d think that all we hear is Puccini or public policy—Rush Limbaugh was never born and Kurt Cobain never died.

More than simply confronting programming, I wanted to dig deeper, to think about how one listens to the radio, or at least how I listen. Hence the diary format. Sometimes, all of America seemed to be hashing it out inside my stereo. Just as often, a song, a voice, or a throwaway remark sparked a memory or spoke to a newspaper in my hands in such a way that I felt less alone. Then again, the venom and mediocrity got to me, leaving me deeply sad. There were days that I carried around my sense of humor like a picket sign.

In order to help the reader to decipher my personal geography, a few David Copperfield facts. First, a confession: I do not know how to drive. While many people’s radio memories are bound to their automobiles, mine are not. A hick twice over, I grew up in Oklahoma and Montana, graduated from Montana State (where I did college radio, of which more later), and in the course of this book, moved from San Francisco to Chicago, where I attended a graduate program in modern art history at the School of the Art Institute. As a student/freelance writer, I kept very irregular hours. Thus, the famous drive time had little bearing on my listening. These other occupations—taking seminars with titles like Anti-art Since the ’60s, writing book and record reviews, and teaching first-year students about Roman architecture—not only saved my soul, they made the radio a part of a life, not a separation from it.

As you can imagine, I heard a lot of crap—numbing, malevolent examples of the worst kinds of filth. This why I often joked to myself that the book’s title would be Amber Waves of Pain. Eventually, however, I settled in with some friendly voices: Ian Brown and Ira Glass redeemed public radio; Reverend Ivan Stang of the Church of the SubGenius became a beloved weirdo; writers Bill Wyman and Jim DeRogatis routinely bit the evil hands that fed them; and Courtney Love, more than anyone, screamed how I felt.

But it is Cobain who haunts the wasteland most of all, which is why we begin with a ghost story.

A Note on the Paperback Edition

Lately, it seems like years take on the weight of decades, which is why 1995 feels more like twenty years ago instead of two. And if the following pages faithfully capture the mean spirit of that year, then this distance is no bad thing. When I asked a friend how to introduce this paperback edition, he said in one breath, Why don’t you just say that people still listen to Rush Limbaugh, even though they no longer talk about him, and Bill Clinton still can’t get a break. The end. The thing is, listening to the radio every day in 1995 has probably lowered my standards of public life—to the point that not reading Rush’s name in the paper every morning strikes me as a solid improvement. And two years ago, I seriously thought I’d now be living in a country with a president named Newt.

People ask me if radio has changed, but I couldn’t really say. I don’t—can’t—listen much anymore, though I still have enough faith in the idea of public radio to contribute stories to This American Life. Some of these pieces have even been replayed, to my surprise, on All Things Considered, a target herein. So I’ve decided that National Public Radio is just like capitalism: It will suck every dissenting voice into its vortex and claim it as its own.

As for Kurt Cobain, his voice sounds as present tense as ever, but his status as an oldies icon grows likelier every day. Like John Lennon and Elvis before him, he’ll always be on the radio, just like he’ll always be dead.

Sarah Vowell

Chicago, July 1997

prologue

COPPING A FEEL IN ’94

San Francisco

December 31, 1994.

11 a.m.–7 p.m. KITS-FM.

Number 23. That’s it. Decent, but not monumental. The song on the radio is Nirvana’s About a Girl. It was the loveliest, safest piece on their otherwise jagged first album, Bleach, and this year it is the sunniest cut on their dark beauty Unplugged in New York.

Packing up, looking back—December 31 is the sappiest day of the year. To stuff what’s left of my belongings into cardboard boxes, to move, is always an exercise in nostalgia; but today I have a soundtrack for it: the KITS-FM 1994 Modern Rock Countdown. Live 105, as this alternative commercial station is known, advertises itself in a deep monster voice as the modern rock revolution and is playing what it deems to be the top 105 rock ’n’ roll anthems of the past twelve months.

Trudging through a checklist with good (but not great) songs by the likes of Sonic Youth, Pavement, and R.E.M., 1994 sounds downright respectable, polished, just fine, cool. The thrilling lurch of the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage and Courtney Love’s gritty wails on Hole’s Doll Parts excepted, if this is revolution, long live the King. In this forum, even Nirvana sounds wholesome. But sometimes, as a friend always tells me when I’m going soft, nice just doesn’t cut it.

To Live 105, About a Girl is just a number, twenty-three to be exact. The DJ plays it without commentary, not even a word about the voice from the grave that sings it. The catchy-but-nothing-special pop group Weezer merits more talk time, probably because they played at the station’s listener appreciation Halloween concert at the Fillmore. It was the station I turned to on the afternoon of April 8 to confirm the hearsay of Nirvana songwriter Kurt Cobain’s suicide. I got drunk to it, singed my hair to it (as I lit up cigarettes on the gas stove), and turned up All Apologies full blast so that I didn’t have to hear the sound of my own weeping for a man I never even met. Today, though, I guess they want to keep it light.

It was a year ago today that I attended a New Year’s Eve Nirvana concert at the Oakland Coliseum. That night now seems so long ago, a distant memory of the way their music once made me feel: invincible, passionate, violent, pissed. I might have looked like a five-foot-three-inch, rosy-cheeked Nice Girl sitting harmlessly, if not ladylike, next to you on a city bus, but, Lithium on my Walkman, I was thinking, Don’t fuck with me. In the days after Cobain’s death, I felt like a parasite, one of thousands who had taken so much courage from a man who didn’t have enough left over for himself. In Nirvana’s version of Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam, Cobain sang the line don’t expect me to die for you with a true conviction. No, I didn’t expect him to die for me, but listening to his lyrics, I did expect him to die. The most terrifying aspect of his suicide was that it made so much sense.

And it was the words, as sung and screamed in Cobain’s sincere voice, that overpowered Nirvana’s furious sound on the radio April 8. Some lyrics became a sick joke—I swear that I don’t have a gun or I’m not gonna crack—but most were too-lucid declarations of despair, and to the point: A denial. It would be months before I could play a Nirvana record at home again. On April 9, the only sound I wanted to pierce my weary-eyed hangover was Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World and I played it over and over. Bleak but persistent, it was encouraging, hinting that I could still face the future with rock ’n’ roll songs, that the meanness of life at least offers an amplified painkiller. I heard Nirvana songs only on the radio or MTV, which is to say that I heard them several times a day all year long. Krist Novoselic’s primordial bass faded low and even the frightening vengeance of the gods that is Dave Grohl’s drumming ground to a whisper. I noticed only Cobain’s voice and I heard only pure pain.

But that was after.

Before April 8, to hear a Nirvana song on the radio was to feel as if I knew a secret. Of course, I was deluded. The group became no more clandestine than Elvis after the release of their breakthrough album Nevermind. By the beginning of 1992, a Nirvana fan was as common as a bike in Amsterdam, but listening to the songs alone (and they were the reason headphones were invented), you wouldn’t know it. They were that immediate, almost embarrassingly personal and so smudged with black humor that they appealed not just to the solitary adolescents who snapped up the record from day one, but to the solitary adolescent in all of us. And even though the überhip, shunning as they must what’s popular in popular music, abandoned them after they became well-liked, they were too good, too funny, and too loud to stay underground.

I was sitting in the campus cafeteria at Montana State University in October of 1991, trying to scan through some French novel before class. The book was a bore and not half as interesting as the noisy redneck roundtable discussion the next booth over. They were reading aloud the record reviews in the school paper, The Exponent, the literary pride of a university with the breathtakingly inspirational motto Education for Efficiency. All of the reviews were written by a DJ at KGLT, the campus station where I worked and one of about three reasons why I endured the cow-college educational voyage with assholes like these. They were making fun of the station as unlistenable, irrelevant, run by stoners who actually had the gall to think that anyone with half a brain would care about their depraved little purveyors of noise, if I may paraphrase. They also mocked the band names. Like this one, whined the mustachioed one in a cowboy hat, check this out. Near-vain-uh. I mean, who the hell are they? I giggled and could hardly wait to get home and tell my roommates. Klee, also a KGLT DJ, had played Smells Like Teen Spirit on his show days earlier, and Katie, listening, drove straight to the record store and bought Nevermind. She brought it home, we listened to the whole thing, she walked straight to the phone, called her brother, and left this message: Have you heard the new Nirvana? It’s really great—and hung up. It was filed under the category called Records We Like.

Weeks later, it became A Cultural Phenomenon. Gina Arnold, in her book Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana, captured what it felt like. And it felt like revolution:

Nirvana’s music—grunge music—reflects a time, my time. And my time has its own history, its own leaders, its own rules. It’s not merely that I’d rather hear good music on the radio than bad: It’s that I think people liking good music is indicative of better things.… Nirvana’s being on the radio means my own values are winning: I’m no longer in the opposition.

You could hear what she meant if you listened, but I’m guessing that most of the millions who bought Nevermind ignored the irony in In Bloom—He likes his favorite song and he likes to sing along but he knows not what it means. Even my own cafeteria dimwits, eventually noticing that the record rocked, most likely went out and bought it. It was one of the reasons Cobain put a gun to his head, writing in the liner notes to 1992’s Incesticide: Last year, a girl was raped by two wastes of sperm and eggs while they sang the lyrics to our song ‘Polly.’ I have a hard time carrying on knowing that there are plankton like that in our audience.

Despite the numbing Bush administration lip service to values, family or otherwise, Cobain’s statement illustrates Nirvana’s unpretentious example of ethics, denouncing violence against women by organizing a benefit for Bosnian rape victims and standing up to homophobia by French-kissing each other on national TV. At the Oakland concert, Cobain threw down his guitar midsong and stopped the band. He was outraged that a man up front spent the first few minutes of the new year groping a fellow female mosher. He summoned Novoselic and they stood up, pointing at the molester in ridicule, yelling, Copping a feel in ’94!

It was a relief to know that someone like that was on the radio, on television, part of American public life. And if the other actors on the national stage, such as Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes, couldn’t see beyond Cobain’s drug problem or his fans’ ripped jeans enough to catch a glimpse of the beauty of their beliefs, then I will hand over my anger and trade it in for pity.

In the fall of 1994, I published a eulogy to Kurt Cobain in High Performance magazine, disguised as a column about Joseph Lanza’s Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy Listening, and Other Moodsong, a book that I felt represented a love letter to boredom and complacency. I finally lost my temper at Lanza’s send-up of the way an easy-listening group called the Alan Copeland Singers turned a song by bluesman Leadbelly into a sweet suburban incantation. At the Oakland concert, I wrote, Singing Leadbelly’s ballad ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ Cobain started off with a gently scratchy drawl. For an instant, he sounded like the greatest country singer who ever lived. Suddenly, he was screaming through the rest of it, claiming the words as his own and spewing them out of his tortured belly with more profound passion than I have witnessed in my short life. Remembering what that moment meant to me as I read Lanza’s statement that ‘not every musician should be obligated to reassure us that we are not zombies’ made me sick.

You can hear all of that in a Nirvana song on the radio, if you care to listen. To some of the people who grieve him, Kurt Cobain was a great artist, to others he was the medicine man of their rock ’n’ roll tribe, but, finally, he was simply a friend. And in the days after his death, his most honest tribute was spoken to Arnold by Seattle’s Kurt Bloch of the Fastbacks in the San Francisco Chronicle: I just can’t stand to think of him being that sad.

JANUARY

Radio crept up on us under cover of silence. It belongs today to the inventory of a household like a fancy wardrobe and potted plants. Seemingly uninvolved, obscured by spools, wires, and hard rubber disks, the magical boxes sit in their corners. You adjust the steel ring, and charming melodies resound. A violin hums, an older gentleman sings In the Month of May, a farmer speaks of synthetic manure. The world is vast and its tones are manifold.

—Otto Alfred Palitzsch

San Francisco

January 1, 1995.

2:29 p.m. National Public Radio.

I took back the night. And it’s all mine until I get stabbed, raped, mugged, shot. I’ve walked alone the darkened streets of tough towns from Palermo to New York, but the congenial Midwest makes me tremble. I know for a fact that the steam rises from the gates of hell in downtown Fargo and the Antichrist, laying low, shovels snow off the sidewalks of Dubuque for extra cash.

Forget the Big Bad Wolf, the fear of God, the hands of time—they can’t stand up to Minnesota Nice.

The Prince of Darkness, tied up stirring the fiery cauldrons of Prairie Home Companion, has dispatched his demon helpers to do his dirty work with a good-humored twang. Michael Feldman, dark angel / host of the heartland’s Whad’Ya Know?, queries a farmer from Superior who reveals his voodoo: Usually, we have the radio on and it calms the chickens. On their way to the chopping block, that is.

January 2.

8:55 a.m. KSFO-AM.

Out: political correctness, liberal media, the Democratic party. In: KSFO Hot Talk 560. Today, this San Francisco AM station gives the people what they want, chucking its formerly liberal talk format in favor of an all-right-wing lineup, beating Congress to the flip-flop by a full two days.

I turn it on just as J. Paul Emerson, recently fired from another Bay Area station for making allegedly anti-Asian remarks, orates his sign-off with a version of the Pledge of Allegiance that’s more Try me than salute.

A few minutes later, Ray Charles’ fine version of America the Beautiful is replaced by strip-club music hailing the voice of former cop Tom Kamb. In the nine-to-noon spot, Kamb is up against his maker, trying to emphasize his hometown agenda in opposition to Rush Limbaugh’s national focus on a competing station. We like to think of it as our Contract with the Bay Area, claims an ad that winks at the Republican platform which plans to change the world.

Whatever it is that’s got you hot in the Bay Area, let’s talk about it! Kamb barks. But let’s not just talk! Let’s fight back! (He only speaks in exclamations.)

Issue number one concerns a man named Raphael Joseph, convicted for murdering eight people in the Virgin Islands and soon to be pardoned by the territory’s governor. Here’s the rub: Joseph plans to settle in Santa Cruz to study to become a counselor, of all things, at the University of California.

You should be outraged! We’ve got to scare this guy off! And by the way, Congress, our beautiful friends in the Congress [remember the Democrats are, for a few more hours, still in control], are the ones who gave the Virgin Islands governor the power to free this loser! God bless America!

The first caller, Joe from Santa Cruz, claims that the answer lies in the Santa Cruz Armed Militia, a vigilante group. Kamb likes what he hears: Is that not the power of the people coming back? If they decide to grab this guy, beat the crap out of him in an alleyway, so be it!

Impressed by this awesome display of peace-officer guidance, of problem-solving and community outreach, I turn up the volume. The callers are almost exclusively male, indulging themselves in a little locker-room bull session. When Kamb asks Brad from Campbell what he would do if Joseph came to his town, Brad responds, point-blank, "It’s called a Remington