Pirate Radio: Not nearly enough ‘yo-ho-ho,’ or ‘gabba-gabba-hey’

At the conclusion of the new British movie, Pirate Radio, a bit of text appears on the screen that informs you of what a splendid four decades rock & roll has enjoyed, since 1966. Proof of the contention is provided in the form of quick glimpses of 40 years worth of LP and CD covers, from Sergeant Pepper to Jay-Z. The images of album-cover art keep piling up, until there are too many of them, and each becomes indistinct and cog-like: small bits of a collage, not individually discernible.

If this was the message the filmmaker was trying to impart — that the soul of rock & roll was obscured somewhere along the runaway assembly line — Pirate Radio might have been taken as a subversive commentary on a society obsessed with leisure and amusements. That’s not the message.

Once, when entertainment was something you needed to seek out, you’d pay a dime — previously a nickel, later a quarter — to listen to your favorite pop music tune through a juke box. If you got to hear your favorite song for free, on the radio, which might happen no more than five or six times each day, it was a two-minute interval of pure pleasure. Actually owning a record was a rare luxury. They were sold in limited quantities in tiny nooks of Woolworth’s, and in the back of some neighborhood drug stores, where children were discouraged from congregating.

Go, cat, go: Bill Haley's Comets rocking around the clock

That was the tail-end of the era depicted in Pirate Radio, which attempts to tell the story of the how the emergent teenage music overcame the rabid opposition of corporatist squares, an inevitable victory attained because joy is much better than gloom. Hundreds of screenplays have previously worked this theme, from “Rock Around the Clock” in 1956, past the “T.A.M.I. Show” of 1964, to the best of the genre, “American Hot Wax,” the 1978 biopic of DJ Alan Freed (which features a brief role for the unpleasant upstart comedian Jay Leno.)

It looked as though Pirate Radio had the potential to surpass the lot, with the advantages of a skilled writer-director, Richard Curtis, a decent budget, an engaging cast, and an under-worked subject in the short, happy life of unlicensed offshore broadcasters, who for a short while beamed their signals from the North Atlantic into Swinging London.

The movie works best when Curtis is left to do his miniaturist thing, and there are a couple of small, understated scenes that are at least as good as his earlier work in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and the “Vicar of Dibley” TV series.

In one moment representative of the best of British cinema, a disconsolate newlywed DJ, just cuckolded on his wedding night by a colleague, takes silent solace from sitting on a coach with two chums, wordlessly dipping his bourbon-cream biscuit in a mate’s mug of tea. In another standout segment, a shy, middle-aged DJ, inarticulate and socially dysfunctional when not introducing records, can’t think of a single thing to say after meeting the son he abandoned at birth. The son becomes equally mute and panic-stricken — and an audience’s impulse is to look away from something so realistically intimate and touching.

Director Curtis: too much music, man

The film’s problem is that there aren’t enough of these inspired quiet moments of character study. Unexpectedly, in a rock & roll movie, there’s far too much rock & roll, and most of it is the wrong sort entirely. The historical pirate radio stations, such as Radio Caroline and Radio London, filled a need by broadcasting hit parade music interspersed with rapid-fire chatter from American-influenced DJs. The repertoire of Number One hits in the UK in 1966, spun from 45 RPM platters, included essential rock classics such as The Spencer Davis Group’s Keep On Running, The Walker Brothers’ The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, and Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames’ Get Away — none of which is heard in the movie soundtrack. (But you lot can listen to them at Mog.com, by clicking the preceding links.)

The ‘66 British chart-toppers also included a fair bit of what we would now call unlistenable schlock: Tom Jones’ maudlin “Green Grass Of Home,” Frank Sinatra’s cloying “Strangers In The Night,” and Gentleman Jim Reeves’ just-plain-awful “Distant Drums.” Incredibly, those three chestnuts held the Number One position for a combined 15 weeks.

Recognizing that no contemporary CD soundtrack-buyer is going to pay for such schmaltz, even if it was what Pirate Radio listeners were accustomed to back in the day, the filmmakers elected to pull the old switcheroo, substituting how it should have been, for how it was. And so, director Curtis (who would have been sipping his Ribena as a seven-year-old when Radio Caroline was in its heyday) contrives to depict a Top 40 station as featuring an Album Rock format, when they are two entirely different beasts.

This blatant misrepresentation is further confounded by having his DJs play tunes that wouldn’t be recorded for another 12 months or more after ‘66, such as Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” John Fred & the Playboy Band’s “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses),” and Leonard Cohen’s “So Long Marianne.” While it’s true enough that Noel Harrison had a minor hit with Cohen’s “Suzanne” in 1968, it’s absurd to think that any Top 40 radio station might ever have subjected its listeners to Lenny’s idiosyncratic moaning.

Do we split hairs? I think not. Evidently the budget of Pirate Radio exceeded $50 million, owing to the director’s penchant for recreating period details with painstaking accuracy. To spend a fortune trying to accurately depict obscure gauges, meters, and broadcasting instruments, and then take an inauthentic approach to the music selection, is to reveal the director’s priorities. No Beatles. No Lovin’ Spoonful. However, there are two tunes by the Turtles, including “Eleanor,” which the pirate DJs seem to have been prescient enough to play two years before it was even written. (Top that trick if you can, Jimmy Savile.)

Sir Jimmy: Gifted, but not clairvoyant

Not that you’d blame poor Curtis for being disinterested in the music. Who wouldn’t be? When you’ve spent your entire life submerged in the Baby Boomer rhythm, as we all have, it’s hard to imagine that it ever might have been fresh, interesting, or anything you’d ever go to effort of tuning in. Rock & roll is just too readily available a commodity to command any attention these days.

There’s a bit of dialogue in an earlier rock movie, the Monkees’ 1968 release, “Head,” where one of the bad guys taunts our heroes, regarding their obsession with the usual caprices such as sex, drugs and rock & roll: “Be careful of what you wish for, fellows. One day you just might get it.”

I would say that adage applies to a force-fed diet of endlessly recycled tunes, most particularly when they are so obviously being used to accompany someone’s desperate attempt to sell you something. The makers of Pirate Radio want to sell you a glimpse of how much fun  broadcasting used to be, but you’ll find it more satisfying to stay home and catch a re-run of WKRP in Cincinnati.

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• 11/22/09: Anyone with any degree of interest in the real pirate radio should visit http://radiolondon.co.uk/, a comprehensive, addictive site run for more than 10 years by Chris and Mary Payne.

Jay Leno and the Golden Age of Mediocrity

Excuse me, but didn't you used to be Jay Leno?

You’d probably question the motives of an architect who forever groused about the high cost of building materials, and be suspicious of a surgeon who constantly worries out loud about the expense of all those darned gauze pads. Therefore, you need to wonder why NBC, the television network, has taken to carping about the exorbitant investment incurred in order to broadcast quality television programs.

Let me disclose, before we go any further, that I own shares in the General Electric Company, which operates NBC — although this is nothing to brag about, believe me. As a stakeholder, whose stake is currently worth quite a few drachmas less than I originally paid, I naturally support management’s efforts to improve shareholder value, if that is the appropriate phrase to use when you actually mean, “Give me back my god-damned money, you imbeciles.”

The network’s programing gurus determined that the guru-like move was to stop trying to fill the 10 p.m. slot with shows that no one wants to watch, and, by the way, cost an arm and a leg to produce. They wondered: Why not just show a test-pattern? Why not sell the hour to the Hair Club for Men?

Then some better-grounded executive ejaculated, no, no, we can’t do that, but why not move Jay Leno’s Tonight Show up to 10, and put that Conan guy in Leno’s old spot? Brilliant, the management team exclaimed.

Bud Collier: Never ashamed to pay you to watch his TV program

Apprised of these developments, and determined to keep an eye on my investment, I tuned to the Leno program during its first week in the new time, and found it encouraging in its flagrant mediocrity. It was so dreary, I deduced, that it’s going to drive viewers to other, more compelling, entertainment options: nightly re-runs of Beat the Clock shown on the Bud Collier Channel, or viewing pornography on the Internet, or staring at a dripping faucet, or perhaps reading a library book of modern poetry published in the original Italian. Well, forget the last one.

Faced with this outcome, GE would be bound to sell NBC to Rupert Murdoch, or some other pigeon, and perhaps several of the many billions that will change hands may trickle down in the form of a shareholder dividend. (Yes, I know: highly unlikely that GE’s Jeffrey Immelt would let loose of any portion of the mazuma, but a fellow can dream, right?)

Moving Leno to ten-oh is one of those classically dumb corporate decisions that will rank up there with Ford’s exploding Pinto and Schlitz’s additive-enhanced beer. I can’t remember how your charming host used to come across when he was regularly seen around midnight — but, to paraphrase the old Mickey Gilley song, he don’t get any prettier when you’re fully aware that closing time has been extended by an hour-and-a-half.

In truth, it’s just plain unsettling to watch Leno anxiously pitching his repertoire of lame topical jokes, effusively greeting the predictable queue of has-been actors promoting their tired old projects, and basking in the over-rehearsed adoration of his studio audience of casually-turned-out mongoloids. There are some zany stunts larded in, as well, but it’s best to pretend these didn’t occur.

To say something positive, however, the spectacle shows every sign of having been put together on the cheap — which, after all, was the founding premise.

Having grown up watching a fair bit of Canadian television, I’m familiar with the visual symptoms of this rigid adherence to budget, as well as the underlying logic, which is: (1) “Why use two cameras, if you can get away with one?”; and (2) “Where does it say you need three musicians for a trio? Fire that sax player.”

If you’re accustomed to the usual showbiz aggrandisement, this will seem unorthodox. We’re used to generations of promoters inflating the value of their attractions in order to impress the yokels, from Sam Phillips introducing Elvis, Jerry Lee, Johnny and Carl Lee as his Million Dollar Quartet, or George Hamid calling his Atlantic City amusement joint the Million Dollar Pier. But even adjusting for decades of hyper-inflation, NBC’s Leno hour seems like The Seven Hundred Dollar Talk Show, and that would probably include the budget for the store-brand cookies and fruit punch served nightly in the Green Room.

Since NBC seems determined to emulate a Canadian standard of mediocrity in its daily schedule, the broadcasting colossus may want to import another tactic from their media colleagues north of the border. Canadians, much like citizens of other nations, haven’t been spending as much time as previously watching the listless nonsense on commercial television. This resulted in lower ad revenues — an obvious problem for Canada’s TV networks — so the station owners did what they’ve always done, and went to the national capital and demanded that suckers’ money be used to support their failing for-profit ventures. The federal broadcasting regulator obligingly sent a platoon of mid-level bureaucrats outdoors to help load bags of funds into the trunks of waiting limousines.

I’m reasonably certain that the Obama administration would respond similarly, if asked politely. Think this through: When, inevitably, NBC is driven out of business through the Leno misstep, and forced to hand over the keys to the studio to Rupert Murdoch, what will follow? Roger Ailes will run the NBC News department, Glenn Beck will take over the Leno slot, and President Obama will see his war against Fox television being fought on two fronts. Who needs that? Better to simply provide a generous federal subsidy to the TV networks, same as to the banks and auto industry.

That would be my suggestion, which I offer not as a GE shareholder who may stand to turn a buck from a bail-out, but as a concerned television viewer and supporter of the President.

Oh, well. Why pretend? It’s my suggestion only because I want GE stock to remain in double digits, at least until such time as I can unload it. If you were seeking altruism, I’m afraid that you may have been inadvertently reading the wrong blog.

There’s no business like show business, except maybe the business of misery

Apparently a singer just died, there was a big memorial event in L.A., and it’s all over the news.

While we’re dispatching entertainers to play to capacity audiences in the Biggest Room of All, it behooves us to bid adieu, too, to Vancouver’s Serf-of-Pop, Terry Black.

Very Terry: The Japanese pressing

Mr. Black seemed to have the chops, but he couldn’t catch the breaks.  The parallels with this other dead entertainer, one Michael Jackson, are minimal, except that back in the 1960s, they were both tapped to become the next big thing in teenage music. One rose; one fell.

Mr. Black came out of British Columbia with a hit record, and moved to Hollywood, where there was talk of putting him in the next Elvis movie, as Presley’s brother. It never panned out. Mr. Jackson emerged from Gary, Indiana — a less-likely point of origin than B.C., if such is possible — with four of his brothers and a hit record, and moved to Hollywood, where he married Elvis’s daughter. That didn’t completely work out, either.

Mr. Black’s record revolved at 45 rpms, precisely the same rotation rate as Mr. Jackson’s hit singles, and both recording artist’s recordings had big holes in the middle, where you placed an adapter before putting the record on a spindle. Mr. Black’s “Unless You Care” was played frequently on Canadian radio stations for decades, at least in part because the law required broadcasters to play music by Canadians. He sang the peppy lead vocal on “Try a Little Harder,” a memorable 1972 track by the Toronto band Dr. Music, and warbled on the soundtrack of Ivan Reitman’s 1979 motion picture “Meatballs” (listen here.) When he died last week, he’d been working as a disc jockey in Kelowna, a small city in B.C. populated by retirees.

It has not been a good week for Canadian disc jockeys and other entertainment industry figures.

Two more sorry specimens are the theatrical impresarios, and just-convicted fraudsters, Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb.

The Livent Lads, on the move

If you followed their courtroom occurrences, the former principals of Livent could tend to get a little fuzzy regarding certain details of their business dealings. They are crystal-clear on one point, however: They don’t want to go to jail.

This is understandable. After all, Drab has at least one close friend named Black — not Terry Black — who is serving time right now in a Florida slammer, and most likely there isn’t much good to say about the experience.

Drab and his locked-up pal (you know the name; he writes books) share another friend, who is the lawyer, Eddie Greenspan. Ed defended them both — unsuccessfully, as it turns out. Having not achieved his desired outcome, which would be his clients absolved of all charges, and left to clink champagne flutes with their attorney while they all cackle like hyenas, Eddie has seized the opportunity to fabricate lemonade from lemons.

Don’t send my boy to jail for 10 years, judge, your worship, he has suggested to Madam Justice Mary Lou Benotto; please, please don’t put this good man behind bars.

Ed’s offering up a whale of an alternative concept. Why not just let Drab and Myron, those luverly Livent Lads, put on a show?

Ed says the boys are prepared to set off on a cross-country lecture tour, if it means they can bypass a cell in the stony lonesome. Drab and Myron will star in “Community Service: Tonight!”, with performances at universities, community colleges, and technical institutes from coast-to-coast. Drumming up interest in the idea, Ed says Drab “would teach students the discipline of the craft, the enormous role that integrity and honesty play in the theatre, the importance of fulfilling contractual responsibilities [and] the avoidance of unethical conduct.” Throw in some recycled Gallagher-and-Sheen patter, along with a good set of PowerPoint slides, and you just might have box office magic.

The inspiration for Fast Eddie's lecture series?

The fellow who wants to put the producers behind bars, Crown Attorney Alex Hrybinsky, seems to think Ed-the-lawyer’s follies will bomb in New Haven. Yes, there are precedents for the type of staged entertainment Ed envisions, but they have never been imposed as a legal remedy in a criminal case. The lawyer seems to have been inspired by the exhibits of human curiosities and oddities described by author Gregory Gibson in his recent book “Hubert’s Freaks,” which is about the long-running Times Square peep-show of the same name. If what Ed has in mind is to place his clients into some kind of travelling carnival, where onlookers can gawk, and the attractions can make a bit of money answering yokels’ questions and selling souvenir postcards, that constitutes a macabre revenge-scenario worthy of fellow-showman Tod Browning.

On with the Drab 'n' Myron Show: A Tod Browning revenge fantasy?

Our layman’s prediction: The Drab ‘n’ Myron Road Show will never happen. Ed’s courtroom string of bad luck appears to be not yet over, and as much as the impresarios must long for the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd, this final act has Bialystock & Bloom written all over it, if you happen to recall the ending of Mel Brooks’ “The Producers.”

Plaudits to the other legal Greenspan sibling, Brian, who is representing Myron. Brian has come up with a wonderful reason why Myron shouldn’t have to go directly to jail: It seems the former Livent CFO is really kind of reluctant to mingle, and doesn’t get all out much. According to Brian, that’s equivalent to being under house arrest, and should be calculated as time served. Madam Justice Benotto must be stroking her chin over that one, in a stagy form of contemplation, or else doing a slow-burn pantomime, as perfected by the late actor Edgar Kennedy.

++++++

What is more tragic than a pair of impresarios who may find themselves incapable of producing a theatrical extravaganza, for the next eight-to-10 years? How about a broadcaster whose mike has been abruptly shut off, following a 25-year career serving one media outlet? Martin Streek, a D.J. with radio station CFNY-FM in Toronto, reportedly parted ways with his employer in May. He committed suicide this week, reports say.

Mr. Streek entered the radio business out of high school, right around the time stations were switching to an automated voice-tracked format. All the talk, in the 1980s, was that the day of the disc jockey was through. Indeed, when the early-’90s recession hit, the entire medium of commercial radio was considered to be in jeopardy, with some licensees walking away from their equity, unable to pay their whopping power bills through advertising revenues. In other words, it was very much like the situation that daily newspapers find themselves in today.

The role of the disc jockey endured, nonetheless, and it’s said Mr. Streek was crackerjack at his work, and a decent bloke, to boot. Especially disturbing is the news that he left a suicide note on his Facebook page. There are already web sites that make light of celebrity deaths, and the popularity of so-called social networking sites can’t be disputed. I fear that the posting of suicide notes to the Internet may already be a trend, and that some web entrepreneur not unlike Rupert Murdoch will quickly move in to exploit this as a niche opportunity. The round-the-clock coverage of Mr. Jackson’s death leaves little room for doubt that there is any human misery either too large or too small for someone to avoid capitalizing upon.

Dylan v. Elvis? Stop the fight, referee. It’s no contest

Theatre of the imagination. That phrase sums up the reason why Bob Dylan’s weekly show works so well on radio, and why Elvis Costello’s new program is such a dreary flop on TV. (Those unfamiliar with the Dylan audio extravaganza can check out a pirated MP3 version here, providing they have no scruples concerning intellectual property protection.)

Without pictures, the listener is left to imagine Dyl, sitting in a darkened broadcasting studio, illuminated only by a scattering of red and green LEDs, wearing Ray-Bans, in front of a pair of well-used turntables, puffing Old Golds and chuckling to himself while he spins 45s and 78s from his own collection.

A bad habit, and not to mention, one that could stunt your growth

We know that’s not at all how his Theme Time Radio Hour comes together on XM Radio, and that it’s more a matter of ISDN lines and digitized voice-tracks. Well, of course we know that. But the point is that we can’t actually see old Bob in reality, being handed his script by a flunky and then straightening his reading specs and patting down his toupee, and muffing one line after another, sputtering while he tries to pronounce Hawkshaw Hawkins. So we visualize him the way he should be: as a reincarnated Al “Jazzbeaux” Collins, sharing intimate knowledge and magical tunes with a secret fraternity of those wide-awake at four in the morning in the Bay Area and beyond. Or as a latter-day Herb Jepko, a bemused, calming presence in the middle of the Salt Lake City night, as in the days when Herb would offer solace to brother and sister Nightcaps in 38 states and Canada. Dyl deserves to be mentioned in the same paragraph as those radio legends. He’s that fine a disc jockey, no less impressive for having all the while maintained and sharpened his songwriting and performing talents. And, yes, you’re listening to a fan talking.

Herb, now as always, on the night shift

I’m also an admirer of Mr. Costello’s music and lyrics, but his new chat-show offering on the cable network Bravo is — let me put this delicately — not good. Part of the problem is that Elvis has placed himself on visual display, and you kind of wish he hadn’t. A decade younger than Dylan, Elvis is missing the ironic fashion sense of the man from Hibbing, but, sadly, that doesn’t stop him from experimenting. He covers his bloat and pudge with an Edwardian frock coat and tablecloth-sized cravat, and tilts his trademark porkpie hat at a rakish angle over his unshaved, swollen punim. The effect is more than a bit tragic. You have yesterday’s angry young man coming across like J. Wellington Wimpy, about to cadge a hamburger today, promising re-payment tomorrow. As the familiar saying goes, his is a face designed for radio.

The Elvis show, called “Spectacle,” is a reminder of those small-market syndicated gabfests of two generations back, hosted by third-tier TV curios such as Al Capp, and sceened on the uppermost part of the UHF dial. These programs, seen by the few in the small hours, attracted oddball guests who started out removed from the mainstream, and mostly stayed that way. On the other hand, here were venues where performers of the level of Sir Monti Rock III could show up and let their hair down.

Mr. Costello, sans spectacles

Mr. Costello’s stilted formality provides no such promise, in Norm Crosby’s words, that Everything Goes. He comes across like a man channelling David Frost, and not the acceptable version you saw in the Frost/Nixon movie. He’s the creepy Frost you remember the Westinghouse network distributing from the Little Theatre Off Times Square: an insecure, distracted Englishman in New York, fervently wishing he had somewhere else to be, and someone more interesting to talk to. (In Elvis’s case, he at least appears grateful that he has a studio to hang around, and that he doesn’t have to spend any additional time listening to his wife, Canada’s own Diana “Makes Your Skin” Krall, punish their children by murmuring show tunes to them.)

Elvis’s guests are either big-shot megastars who leave the impression that they’re humoring the host by appearing on his wee program, or non-entities who get the full-out Costello fawn. One such talent-free visitor recently was Bob Dylan’s kid, who made fifteen minutes seem like an all-day telethon. Jakob Dylan has supported himself in the business-of-show for a decade now, and seems to think of himself as a revered fixture on the entertainment scene. He told Elvis a pointless and petulant story about how his mother once threw out one of his articles of clothing without his permission. Okay, the vest was a gift from Joe Strummer of the Clash, but that still doesn’t elevate this thin gripe to a story worth re-telling. Yet, the interviewer, Mr. C., seemed captivated by Jakob’s yarn, in the fashion of Art Linkletter marvelling over how kids say the darnest things.

It must be pointed out to Elvis and his producer that, for certain, Bob Dylan wouldn’t dream of having his son as a guest on his own radio show. So, what is this? A feeble effort to butter up Papa, hoping Dyl will reciprocate by playing one of Ms. Krall’s cornball sides on Theme Time Radio Hour? Won’t happen, Jackson.

The promise of “Spectacle” is that it has nowhere to go from here, except further down — and that’s when things might get interesting. Elvis presiding over an old-timey Al Capp-style TV freak show sounds like a more promising concept than whatever it was they originally had in mind. When Sting and James Taylor refuse the invitation to drop back for second appearances, Elvis will turn to the C-list of bygone days. I, for one, would love to see, and not just hear, Elvis interview Sir Monti Rock III, and the Capp parade of put-on artists, along with the genuinely deranged, damaged, and deluded. Now, that would be something worth imagining.

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• Now meet one of the New Dylans who might be ready to stage a comeback, 40 years after her not-so-smash debut

Death comes to Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey and wife Angel, astride Paul Harvey: Good day!

On the very day Rush Limbaugh was waddling to the podium to incite all those angry folks attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (Rush: “Did the Democrats want the war on Iraq to fail!” Crowd: “Yes!” Rush: “They certainly did.”), death came to Paul Harvey. That’s the kind of cheap juxtaposed symbolism that Harvey, the perennial radio gasbag, turned into cash each day in his three-quarters-of-a-century on the airwaves. In his heyday, which was the Nixon era, Harvey was quite the noisy right-wing crank, verbally beating up on hippies, and Ruskies, and what-not, on hundreds of ABC radio affiliates. Later he relocated his golden microphone from the Windy City to Phoenix, and learned to relax a little. By the time Harvey reached the ripe old age of four-score-and-ten, he had mellowed into a beloved antiquity of the wireless, celebrated as a great enduring American showman, like Bob Barker or the Rev. B. Graham. Closer to the rev.

Displaying fashion creds, CCR and Fogerty (bottom right)

Harvey came to Toronto one year during the Nixon era, and threw a sermon out at the People’s Church, an evangelical palace on Sheppard Avenue, not that far from my childhood neighborhood. He was a pal of the local pastor, Oswald J. Smith, who was an acclaimed radio preacher and, like Harvey, not one to make excuses for the godless. I called Wex, and he agreed that we simply couldn’t afford to miss this extraordinary moment in theological history. We found our way to the house of worship, dressed in the manner of the day, the way John Fogerty dressed. We must have been 16 years old.

Every pew in the church was occupied, but the helpful parishioners fought all over each other to clear space for us. Kindly hands reached out, extending hymnals.

Harvey strode to the dais. He boomed a variation of his traditional greeting: “Hello, Toronto-Canadians!” He was a captivating speaker. His cadence and enunciation were broadcast-quality. He’d toned down his use of the pregnant pause, along with exultant sentence ending… which was known far and wide… as his trade-mark! The congregation was in thrall, even the swinger with the rock-star hair and white suit seated a few sections away, who kept turning from facing the speaker to shoot stares at me and Wex. I guessed he was some kind of churchly special ambassador to disaffected youth. We kept our distance.

The performance was not what we’d hoped for. We’d come to mock Harvey, assuredly not to praise anyone. He was a meaningful figure to us high-school wiseguys, right up there with a galaxy of adults we found wondrous/ridiculous. Ward Cornell and Ron Martinez from the world of sport, Spiro J. Agnew and Everett Dirksen from the political sphere, Stan and Jan Berenstain from the world of beaux arts, everyone who ever appeared on the Al Capp TV talk show, and local broadcasting legend Gordon Sinclair, although Sinclair wouldn’t scale the heights of true absurdity until much later, when he recorded his smash-hit prose-poem, “The Americans.” There were only a couple of individuals we considered too hep not to ridicule: the Firesign Theater comedy act, Captain Beefheart, the writer-bookstore clerk Juan Butler, and some guy whose music criticism in Rolling Stone never deigned to describe the contents of the record and conveyed nothing of the subject of his review, but who told evocative short stories featuring fictional characters of his invention. The name used by this reviewer was J.R. Young. I wonder now who he really was, and whatever became of him.

One thing I could never possibly believe is that J.R. Young was actually a teen-aged Rush Limbaugh writing under an early pseudonym, although it is a possibility not ruled out by chronology, but by common sense. As I said, these Rolling Stone pieces were pretty good, and Limbaugh’s published writing is uniformly not-good, although it would be wrong to regard him as an entirely talentless repository of illegally obtained prescription painkillers and last month’s rancid suet. Yes, he has been a malignant force on society, and, yes, for the past 15 years or so, listening to him has been an impossibility for anyone with a bare trace-amount of self-respect. However, the Limbaugh of yesterday was not always what you currently see and hear — and hear, again and again.

Before he surrendered his independent spirit for a gazillion-dollar payoff, Limbaugh was a polished radio yapper who took unexpected positions just to confound his audience, as the great broadcasters have always done. Greatness, however, was something for which Limbaugh just wasn’t cut out. I recall during the late ’80s listening to a few weeks of programs where the host refused to come out as strongly anti-abortion. Caller after caller screamed abuse and threats at their guy. He stood his ground, maintaining that he hadn’t fully formed an opinion consistent with the orthodoxy of the right, and that he was mindful of the opinions of the women in his family, whose judgment he prized. He maintained this position for several days, as the listeners cajoled and pleaded with him to proclaim his rejection of the pro-choice argument. And then he abruptly backed down, and became an anti-abortion zealot like all the rest. He never again looked forward or sideways, for even a second.

He had another great stunt around this time, doing a spoof show where he claimed he’d just started dating a liberal woman and was falling in love, and beginning to reassess his hard-line right-wing positions. Again, his audience turned on him, and became an angry mob set to first denounce their leader and then string him up in the public square. All a big joke, he predictably explained at the end of the program; no libs, no lady, and no love for Limbaugh. In fairness, it was a pretty good joke, albeit a bleakly revealing joke, and one he would never repeat. What I gathered from this was that Limbaugh wasn’t necessarily born to pander to the lowest common denominator, a status that makes him no different from his media enemies at MSNBC, the New York Times or Air America radio. They’re all slobs waiting for a paycheck and a pat on the head from the boss. It’s just that he’s a better panderer than most, and more commercially potent when propped upright in his studio.

 

Follow that robusto: Limbaugh, fearless champion of the nickel cigar

He was still sentient enough earlier in this decade to suffer revulsion at what he’d become, requiring round-the-clock self-administered anesthesia and pastries. That possibly speaks to both his latent humanity, as well as his disfigured character and damaged judgment. Think of Rush as Hunter S. Thompson’s rusticated, half-bright, more insecure baby brother, and recall Thompson’s fondness for quoting Dr. Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

 

Seeing him on television this weekend, egging on the rabid right, turning away from the possible consequences of inflaming his followers during a precarious time in the nation’s history, you’d be wasting your time trying to imagine what it is Limbaugh thinks he’s become. Whatever that may be, it’s clear that he’s more to be pitied than mocked. In that regard, and others, Limbaugh is no Paul Harvey.