Confessions of a Late-Night Radio Addict
Music IS Louder at Night. Especially When Your Bedroom Is Next to Your Parents.
Her name was Jackie MacGuffin, and my eighth-grade hormones went into overdrive from the first moment I saw her. Even now, I remember how the halogen lights of the parking lot reflected from her braces, illuminating her grey, off-one-shoulder sweatshirt and rainbow-striped leg warmers. I hadn’t met her before, but as I approached the group she was chatting with, their conversation suggested she was popular and pretty. My brain worked overtime to connect the arbitrary dots of adolescent fantasy logic, honing my plan to a fine strategic edge. Jackie was the woman who’d welcome me when I arrived at high school, save a seat for me at the cafeteria lunch table, and rescue me from the darkness of the gym locker I’d inevitably get stuffed into. I’d carry her books to class. We’d go to prom together. And in the several seconds it took for this vision to coalesce, I concluded that I was looking at the future, Mrs. Syd Schwartz. That was a giant leap, considering my father had just dropped me off at the opposite end of the parking lot so I could avoid the embarrassment of looking like a little kid whose parents had to drive him everywhere. And I probably don’t need to issue a spoiler alert to tell you that Jackie and I never married.
In fact, Jackie and I never dated, held hands, or even exchanged more than a few dozen words. With all due respect to Jackie, she’s an extra in the story—there are other reasons that night became one of my life's most memorable, impactful, and influential experiences. But first, I had to shake off the indignity of getting dropped off by my Dad. The southern fried tones of the Oak Ridge Boys were playing too loudly from the 8-track player in his Buick, risking damage to my non-existent social credibility. It was clear my Dad knew little about being cool, and we had different ideas about making a first impression. His priority was making sure I’d be safe. My priority was looking more grown up than I was or I felt. After all, my Bar Mitzvah was six weeks earlier; by Jewish law, I was a man! However, centuries of irony and fortune cookie wisdom challenge that notion. I’m reminded of a haiku:
Today, I am a man.
Tomorrow, I will return.
To the seventh grade.
Still, membership in the “I don’t have to sit at the kid’s table anymore” club had its privileges. Since Bar Mitzvah lessons were in the rearview mirror and my attentions were focused elsewhere, I made a deal with my folks. After my Bar Mitzvah, I’d remain for one more year of Hebrew School and continue my volunteer admin job at the Temple Beth El office. Then, any further participation in synagogue life was up to me. But there was one more catch.
USY—United Synagogue Youth—was a social club for the post-Hebrew School crowd who’d decided (or whose parents had decided for them) that keeping one foot in the realm of non-secular extracurricular activities was a good idea. Whether this was for social reasons (I wasn’t especially outgoing) or keeping me around folks who’d be a good influence, it was a (semi) supervised, (semi) organized collective where I couldn’t possibly get into TOO much trouble. After all, if I were going to a USY event, I probably wouldn’t join a gang, knock over a liquor store, or otherwise make a life-ruining decision by getting involved with “the wrong crowd.” Not that one had to worry a lot about that in suburban Connecticut in the early 80s. Still, my folks were down with OPP (Over Protective Parents), as the means of ending or ruining one’s life circulating in rumor mills during the pre-Internet era were shockingly effective. Completely fabricated examples:
Did you hear about Lena’s therapist’s daughter? She auditioned for the high school drama club. Now she’s playing the part of a shellfish in ‘The Little Mermaid’ on the first night of Passover! It’s a Schande!
That’s nothing! I heard Ethan’s lawyer’s dentist’s brother’s veterinarian’s assistant’s optometrist’s third cousin (twice removed, then put back) joined one of those travel sports teams! To bulk up before a big match, he eats pastrami sandwiches on white bread with cheddar and mayonnaise—it’s enough to give you tsuris in the genechtagazoink!
Since the Schwartz Council of Elders agreed that keeping one of my feet in the realm of synagogue-related social activities was a good call, the matter was settled. And it wasn’t like I had a prior engagement on Saturday night anyway—if the worst case was having to play a few hands of Go (Gefilte) Fish in the synagogue lounge with other social outcasts, so be it.
That night was pretty freakin’ far from a game of cards, though, at the time, I’d never admit that my parents might have been right about USY! I was delighted to learn we were going to the Hayden Planetarium—not for a science lesson, but to see Laserium. I was about to make my maiden voyage into the world of Pink Floyd and laser rock shows. As one of the new members of our USY chapter, it fell upon Mrs. Syd Schwartz Jackie to introduce me to the others as we boarded the bus to make our way from suburban Connecticut into Manhattan. All was proceeding according to plan.
It was the most educational bus ride ever. Big takeaways include:
My stranger-to-girlfriend-to-wife fantasy disappeared instantly due to incompatible operating systems of 8th-grade boys and 12th-grade women are incompatible.
Mrs. Syd SchwartzJackie was all smiles and welcoming when the USY director introduced us. However, once we boarded the bus, she wanted nothing to do with me—she was all about Gary Moussehair, a graduating senior. I don’t blame her for ignoring my advances (which I believe amounted to my answering “no” when asked if it was me who farted after the bus drove over a pile of wet garbage on the way out of the parking lot). Besides, what would I do if she said “yes” to a date—pedal over to her house to pick her up? So to Jackie Moussehair (now, I presume)—wherever you are—thank you for saving me the embarrassment. Or, more accurately, the ADDITIONAL embarrassment.
The "No Smoking" signs on the school bus are merely suggestions when you’re en route to a Pink Floyd laser show. And whoever thought in advance about stocking the bus with potato chips and Oreos for the trip home was a GENIUS.
I was unaware of how big a part listening to the radio played in Gary and his pals' lives. They knew the names of the DJs, what shows they hosted, and when they aired. They knew what their schticks and specialties were. They swapped war stories about when they tried calling in to score concert tickets and how they’d find out when new records were being released when the DJs announced them. All prior notions and feeble attempts about finding cool music were tossed out the bus window and flattened under its wheels—I wanted to be like these guys. If that meant risking parental ire or disapproval, so be it. After all, I was a man now!
I heard about a radio program for the very first time that captured my imagination more than anything else discussed that evening. Something that continues to resonate throughout my lifelong passion for collecting live music recordings. It had a wacky name, but I was taken by how much everyone talked about which bands would be featured on the program. That got me curious enough to speak up for the first time on that bus trip. I wanted to know all about the King Biscuit Flower Hour.
The entire history of the King Biscuit Flour Hour (KBFH) is a rabbit hole worth exploring at another juncture, but for the purposes of this tale, it was a weekly live radio broadcast on Sunday nights that ran past my bedtime on WNEW-FM. Initially, I listened in stealth by snaking a mono earpiece from my clock radio under my pillow and keeping the volume low. While this fooled my parents for a time, it was uncomfortable and sounded terrible.
I needed a better solution as I had a new incentive. The older boys who lived across the street—far cooler than I was and whom I looked up to—had been listening to the latest from Ozzy Osbourne. As I’d just heard a radio commercial advertising a forthcoming King Biscuit Ozzy broadcast, this was my big opportunity to score cool points—I would figure out how to record this Ozzy concert. Strategy time!
I had access to a tape recorder—a journalist’s style Zenith C-608C model with an attached condenser microphone and a coiled cable for about a foot of play.
I had a Radio Shack “Realistic” C-60 tape from a school project I could use.
But I had one major roadblock. My bedroom was adjacent to that of my parents (the pain was bidirectional, I assure you), and as you know, EVERYTHING seems louder at night.
Additionally, there was NO WAY I’d be allowed to stay up after midnight ON A SCHOOL NIGHT to record an Ozzy Osbourne concert. Trying to do it in my bedroom without getting caught was risky—letting my adolescent attitude play conductor aboard the Crazy Train and the resulting hijinks rousing my parents from slumber would be a socially-limiting move. So, like any sound recording engineer who doesn’t know what he’s doing, I sought innovation. And found it.
I’ll give myself an ‘A’ for effort and a ‘C+’ for execution, given the era and available resources. I took my trusty Zenith clock radio to the guest bedroom—far away and behind enough closed doors to play music at night at a reasonable volume without waking anyone. On the night of the Ozzy broadcast, I set the dial for WNEW-FM, 102.7. I ran the extra antenna out the window slats and up the gutter. It was September and warm enough that it wouldn’t be noticed. I fiddled with the dial until the sound was optimal. Then I turned it off and set the alarm for KBFH's start time.
I swiped a tabletop lamp timer from the living room. I placed the blank cassette into the Zenith tape deck, pressed record, and plugged it into the lamp timer. I lashed the condenser mic with twist ties and masking tape to the clock radio speaker. Then, I ran a test to check the lag between the radio and the timer as I wanted to synchronize the start time as best possible. Perhaps “synchronize” is a slightly more technical term than necessary for describing my counting with the word “Mississippi” in between the numbers. Still, while I wasn’t working with precision gear, there was little margin for error!
I didn’t hear a peep all night. Neither did my parents. I woke up a few times, wondering if it worked, but unwilling to risk walking into the guest room and having a door creak or inadvertently make some other noise that would mar my otherwise genius recording plan. To my surprise and delight, the following day, I had 30 minutes—one side of a 60-minute tape, complete with commercials and distortion—of Ozzy Osbourne recorded live on King Biscuit. It sounded like crap, and that very same Zenith recorder chewed it up a few weeks later. But for a minute, it smelled like victory. And I liked that smell.
I described this timeshifting audio contraption to my wife at dinner this evening. Spoiler alert: we’re still married. Also, my wife thinks Jackie is a Ho and that she and Gary deserve each other. But besides that, she asked if I took a photo of this Live Music MacGuvery. We then remembered that doing so (at the time) would have catalyzed a whole other set of steps—finding a camera with film in it, getting it developed at a Fotomat, and paying WAY more than we’d want to after waiting for DAYS to see if the photos were even any good…things have changed. But this also sparked a conversation about radio and music discovery that gets to the heart of the matter regarding music.
My ongoing quest for great live concert recordings—now decades-long and 16 terabytes deep—is one outgrowth of my connection with radio as I entered my teen years. I’d just started to become meaningfully aware of music beyond the residue of being a passenger in a car, a passive listener in a public place, or whatever records my parents might have had around the house. Among my Bar Mitzvah gifts from my classmates were albums like Led Zeppelin IV, The Beatles Red and Blue compilations, and The Doors Greatest Hits—your basic classic rock menu (no disrespect intended—just reporting). But I didn’t REALLY know what I liked yet. Hell, I didn’t even know what there WAS to like other than what the other kids around me were listening to, but even then, I had questions. What made a fellow eighth-grader an arbiter of taste? Or at least, an arbiter of MY taste? I push back when I feel I’m being pressured into believing that I’m supposed to like something or believe something is cool. But I greatly appreciate curation, which is its own art form.
And that’s what I began to discover through radio. My weekly live show fix was already in through King Biscuit. While that became a growing obsession, radio personalities and their approach to curation began to transcend the medium, deepening my connection with music even further. These magicians seemed to pull incredible music out of their hats day after day. The legendary New York DJ Scott Muni played music I still listen to now that I heard on his shows for the first time, as did Vin Scelsa on his weekly Idiot’s Delight program. Scott Muni’s warm, crisp timbre was a powerful and welcome presence for many years. He could introduce the might and mystique of music from Led Zeppelin, Yes, and Pink Floyd in a way that would get you excited to listen, even if it was a song you’d just played from your own record collection. I had no idea what he looked like—this was long before the Internet or other straightforward ways of looking up such information. I eventually met him in person at the WNEW 1987 Christmas show, and he looked NOTHING like what I expected. But it didn’t matter. I was happy to shake his hand and thank him. When I told him I felt like I was meeting someone for the first time who’d already known me for years, his smile was genuine and infectious—it seemed like perhaps it wasn’t the first time somebody had said something similar to him.
Don’t even get me started on how many times in the small hours of the morning, I felt like Alison Steele (The Nightbird) was playing songs just for me. She wasn’t working from an algorithm, playlist, or corporate mandate. She played music from the heart, putting personal, fascinating, and occasionally mystical context around it in a way that made you want to get INSIDE the music. To seek it out. To drink it in. To know it, understand it, and see if it’s your true north, a guidepost, or a waypoint you might remember at some point down the road. I never met Ms. Steele, but it’s clear from this quote, which goes back decades, that she understood the assignment—one she chose to embrace as a calling:
"I thought there must be a lot of people ... that need something to relate to in the middle of the night, and if I could create some kind of camaraderie, a relationship between myself and the rest of the night people, then it would be more than just music". —The Nightbird, Alison Steele
I enjoy the efficiency and tech magic of algorithmic playlists. They’re hard to beat when it comes to hearing exactly what you want, improving over time, and like 103.5 WAPP-FM when it launched in the summer of 1982, playlists are commercial-free. But sometimes, I prefer the curated experience and recommendations from trusted sources with context and storytelling that bring more life and soul to the party. It never mattered if Dennis Elsas or Tony Pigg played precisely what song I wanted to hear. Because sometimes their lead in/out story or factoid about that song (or artist) was enough to draw me in. Sometimes, it was enough to make me cast aside prejudice, re-evaluate a deeply held opinion, or get curious enough about something to give it another day in court. That’s powerful mojo.
You didn’t really think I’d sign off without including a few select favorites from my KBFH live archive, did you?
The first-ever KBFH broadcast featured a triple bill that included Blood, Sweat, & Tears, a relatively unknown Bruce Springsteen, and one of my all-time favorites: The Mahavishnu Orchestra. Here’s a track from the M.O. set, “One Word,” recorded live at the Century Theatre, Buffalo, NY, on Jan 27, 1973:
The album I’ve listened to more than any other, in any genre, is a bootleg vinyl LP by Yes called In the Round. It’s a mislabeled, mistitled recording of a famous Yes concert from Oct 28, 1978, at Wembley Arena, London. My mom (bless her heart) drove to Johnny’s Records in Darien, CT, to pick it up for me (I still wasn’t old enough to drive) and replace the crappy Radio Shack tape that held the 30 minutes of the show I’d recorded several weeks(?) after the Ozzy Osbourne success/debacle. It remains a cherished recording, and I hope for an official release someday—it’s one of the finest concert performances from Yes, and I’ve heard HUNDREDS of live Yes shows. Here’s “Starship Trooper”:
A deluxe, expanded edition of Robin Trower’s Bridge of Sighs will drop shortly. So let’s warm things up with this cracking version of “Day of the Eagle,” initially recorded for the BBC and broadcast in the US via King Biscuit:
This next one is a direct transfer from my audio cassette, so prepare yourself for a slight reduction in sound quality. I’ve played this tape to death. That’s because I’ve never found another copy that sounds better. While mine is overmodulated and pitchy in places due to stretching, all the others I’ve heard are several generations down the line, so they’re hissy and muffled. I hope a better recording emerges someday, as there are few officially released quality recordings of the (Dixie) Dregs in their 80s prime. Here’s a 1982 recording of the final edition of the band that featured Mark O’Connor on violin performing “The Odyssey” from their What If LP:
Finally, yes—music IS louder at night. Because #science
Brilliant, as usual Syd.....and fookin' funny!