As it was told to my sister and I, when my dad was young he and his family used to gather around the radio in the evenings and listen to the shows. With the city landscape outside loud and busy with hustlers and maniacs and craftsman and immigrant dreamers and post war optimism, the radio was the communal connector.
With great hometown pride my dad would marvel that up and down his street in summer, with all the neighbour’s doors and windows open to beat the heat, you could hear the same radio shows emanating from all the homes. New York City summers they come for you. The 1950’s on Arthur Avenue. Sleeping four to a room, climbing over mattresses on the floor to exit the apartment. These radio sessions were some of my father’s fondest memories of childhood. He would relay these stories to us with romantic nostalgia. These evening scenes of immigrant jews crowded around a small living room in the Bronx, parents and siblings and cousins, all with giddy anticipation, to hear the voices coming out of this wooded box filled with wires. These were the glory days of radio. Early social media.
It is almost impossible to imagine now. A single, screen less, bulk technology in a central location demanding enraptured attention by multiple members of a household. Collectively a whole neighbourhood and nation listening to a singular radio show. All at the same time! Waiting all day, or all week, to hear those faceless voices carried across unfathomable airwaves. Ed Sullivan suddenly in your home. The New York Yankees suddenly in your home. Joe Louis suddenly in your home. Astounding.
In his day the radio took up a fair amount of space in the living room. An elegantly curved cube at the head of a constricted living room, that doubled as social space and bedroom for my cousins or uncles or whomever else was visiting them in the Bronx that summer. Day time was spent at school or on the streets, ambling between books and stick ball games. But the evenings were reserved for the radio. The purveyor of music and fantasy and advertising. A dialogue on far away lands and ridiculously exotic people. Hollywood. Talk shows. Sketch comedies from the giants of mid town Manhattan. Miracle soap and cigarette commercials. The heroics of The Brooklyn Dodgers and the trusted news of Walter Cronkite.
We are in a different time now, obviously. It is almost impossible for anyone under twenty years old to even conceive of this singular connection. To be corralled in a single room to listen (only listen!?!) to a singular, screen less device, must for sure seem like some cautionary science fiction tale in reverse to our younger generations. The original concept of radio, in its glaring simplicity, is a kitsch item now. Like a rotary phone, or a walkman.
Yet, as someone who is disgusted with himself a little more every time I open up Instagram, I am so happy to see a slight resurgence in this form of communication and community. The radio truly was an original form of social media. People socially gathered to consume media. Like minded, curious, addicted to that masterly trick of radio: the anticipation and surprise of what the next song will be.
For centuries we humans verbally told each other stories. Strictly IRL. Traditions and warnings were passed down in this manner. Instructions from one generation to the next. Don’t go here, don’t eat this, don’t upset him. Life guidance creatively inserted into entertaining stories and spread with speech. Survival as priority.
Technology amplified everything. The advent of the printing press meant a physical storyteller was no longer required. An idea or instruction could now go viral. Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in 1517, and off we go.
On Christmas Eve, 1906, Reginald Fessenden opened up his Bible and began reading scripture into a feral device and out went the first radio broadcast. This unique technology ushered in a new age of communication that could be global and deeply personal. In 1920 KDKA in Pittsburg began the first scheduled commercially broadcast radio show. It was on, and now you could receive news or music from far flung locations while seated in the Bronx, crowded into a box with your gambling uncle and snoring cousins.
This act of people listening live at the same time is provocative. We are berated and exhausted in this current age of information tsunamis. Modern, local radio, to me, feels like a loverly little dry perch upon which to ride out the storms. A civilised place within the big and bumpy media landscape to connect and enjoy, even if just for a moment.
People like those behind Nosara Pirate Radio are locally doing an excellent job to connect people around a radio station concept. We all just want to be a part of something. We all just want to be in on it with our friends. We all just want to love and appreciate an original idea. Locally based radio supplies that reprieve from the madness of modern social media and the nihilism of the news. The absolute massiveness of the internet, this digital universe that seems to have no beginning and no end, is exhausting. Local radio stations, with their actual human selectors, their store fronts, their local community building agendas, their inevitable economic impact, their organic qualities and tactile resonance, can potentially leave a very positive impact on our towns and regions.
As a kid growing up in New York City the radio was super cool. Kiss FM sponsored a festival at my elementary school one year, giving away stickers and patches, and to this day that was the coolest event I ever went to. I became a fan of WPLJ because my best friend told me it was the best radio station. On the occasional trip out of the city and into the country I would listen to Woodstock Radio in the car and think they were just the coolest, hippest, most in the know group of DJ’s and music makers. Their finely crafted, hand painted wood sign hung outside a small house on main street, and I always wondered ‘what is going on in there?’
In high school, listening to The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito show on the terrace of my dad’s apartment (he was never home) with my closest friends was as near to ritual as we had. Late Sunday nights, broadcasting from the Columbia University campus, we sat around the box and listened to and recorded their radio shows with ravage devotion. First time I heard The Pharcyde. First time I heard Jay Z. Gang Star is God. Radio That Changed Lives is the apt tittle of their radio show documentary. My friends and I nurture a bond born from that time and that radio show that forever moulded us.
Yes the music was great and the show perfectly charged for delinquent teenagers in New York City in the early 90’s, but beyond the genre stereotypes and age appropriate tropes, our crew had a definitive place to be during those radio hours. Huddled around a Sony smoking blunts and drinking 40’s, believing that we were connected to a culture larger then ourselves. If you listened then you knew what was up. A badge of tribe and resistance. We were in on to something.
Looking back now I suspect what was most important about those listening sessions is that we were together. The music was great, for sure. That iconic intro and first verse of Passing Me By heard there for the first time. The Q Tip verse from Get It Together dropped onto the planet, all of us heavily anticipating the new Beastie Boys album. Cypress Hill. That moment. While the broadcasted music of that time created a bold soundtrack, it was really about being with my friends, experiencing these radio sounds together, that left an enduring impression on me. That IRL connection proved so valuable to me during the hard years of being a teenager. A tight group of misfits gathered around a radio. In a world with fallen idols and burning cultures we had a graffiti drawn north star on the radio once a week.
It is a generational thing for sure. My generation is the last to grow up with landlines and audio cables. The last to depend solely on radio and television for media entertainment. The last generation to plan their weekly schedule around broadcasting timetables. My father’s generation was the last to gather around the radio for Gunsmoke and The Jack Benny Program. The trends of ages get crushed under the unstoppable force of time. All we can do is take note.
Having a current moment with radio inspires a definite nostalgia in me. Mortality. Time. All the crushing accessories of age. But I love what some people are doing now. I love to see the small, local radio stations bringing people together around a singular broadcast. I love how these radio streams can transcend monetary barriers and bring people closer. Especially here.
As I write this I am listening to KMHD out of Portland, Oregon. “Celebrating jazz without boundaries” is their tagline. At 330Pm Eva is broadcasting a duets show on Radio Nosara. Here we are in the jungle, distanced from so much, yet so tuned in.
