'Won’t You Turn Your Radio Down'

Most of the surfaces in the radio station, not counting the DJs and turntables, are plastered with yellow-on-black KTRU bumper stickers. In some cases, students have cut up the stickers and rearranged the letters into the same timeless obscenities we scrawled on the walls of the radio station at my state university half a century ago. My youngest son, a junior at Rice, hosts a weekly one-hour show and I joined him on Monday. The studio walls are lined with thousands of LPs and CDs. Many of the former are originals from the sixties and seventies, and the album covers are falling apart. 

Our jointly selected play list included Johnny Otis, Muddy Waters, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Talking Heads, Charlie Parker, King Creole, the Standells, The Smiths and Sonny Rollins – typical college eclecticism. I felt at home. I’ve known the romance of radio since I was a kid listening to short wave, AM and FM late at night in bed. If a station’s signal drifted, I knew to trust the fickle atmosphere and not mess with the dial. No art form has ever seemed so intimate since, which makes today’s radio so disappointing. I even listened to early talk radio in Cleveland, shows hosted by guys I felt were smart, friendly neighbors, Bill Randle and Alan Douglas, among others.

 

Plenty of musicians have written songs about radio, including one we played on Monday: Van Morrison’s “Caravan.” My favorite is Donald Fagen’s “The Nightfly,” about a late-night disc jockey playing “jazz and conversation,” from the 1982 album of the same title. A sample of the lyrics:

 

“I'm Lester the Nightfly

Hello, Baton Rouge.

Won’t you turn your radio down,

Respect the seven-second delay we use.

So you say there’s a race

Of men in the trees.

You’re for tough legislation.

Thanks for calling,

I wait all night for calls like these.”