Turn the radio on

Dad mixing holiday drinks in the kitchen. Not our kitchen, but that didn’t matter. Dad was nothing if not versatile.

Some memories don’t arrive as scenes. They arrive as sound.

A voice in another room. A song you don’t yet understand. A radio left on when no one is really listening.

This piece takes place on New Year’s Day, 1969, when I was almost eleven, and the radio was already doing more work on me than I knew.

“The only truth is music.”

—Jack Kerouac

“68, WRKO!” sang the jingle from the AM radio in the kitchen.

It was early New Year’s Day, 1969, and I was almost eleven years old. 

“Why don’t they say ‘69, WRKO’? How come they still say 68?” I asked my sister Lee, who, at thirteen, going on fourteen, seemed quite worldly to me. After all, Lee knew things.

“Because it’s not the year they’re talking about,” she said. “It’s the station number.”

That did not help. At all.

“What’s a station number?”

“It’s the call letters for the station.”

Nope. Still not helpful.

Sensing my confusion, she tried once more. “It tells you where the station is on the dial.”

My blank expression ended the conversation.

She turned and walked away.

The radio played on.

Music was everywhere in our house back then. The AM radio in the kitchen was almost always on. Ma played Roger Miller and Herb Alpert records on the hi-fi. Lois and Dotti had the early Beatles albums and British invasion bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers. Later, Judy and Lee brought in rock, soul, funk, and folk.

But AM radio?

Meh.

AM radio in the 1960s and 1970s was Top 40: hit songs on rotation, DJs with big personalities, endless commercials, contests, time checks, and weather updates. It could be loud and relentless, but if you waited long enough, your favorite song would eventually come on.

Now, FM radio was something else entirely.

Influenced early on by college stations, FM programming was loose, exploratory, and unpredictable. DJs played whatever they wanted. You never knew what was coming next.

You might hear the seventeen-minute version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, by Iron Butterfly. Or maybe the entire uninterrupted second side of Abbey Road. Or King Crimson’s manic 21st Century Schizoid Man.

Or possibly something you’d never heard before.

For me, that song was Witchi Tai To by Everything Is Everything, a haunting blend of jazz and Native American chant, adapted by saxophonist Jim Pepper. The lyrics toggled between English and an indigenous language. I didn’t understand it, but I felt it.

It was hypnotic. Mesmerizing. Calming.

You would never hear that on mainstream radio. You could only hear it on FM.

Whether it came from vinyl, cassette, an AM transistor radio, or the FM dial, music mattered. A lot. Along with my family, the Red Sox, and the Bruins, it was in the top five of the most important things in my life.

I won’t rank them. Ma might be listening.

Years later, when I finally got my own room, up the ladder in the closet, tucked under the roof, it became my sanctuary. An A+ stereo, headphones, stacks of albums. I’d lie on the floor, eyes closed, letting music wash over me for hours on end.

I played some records until the grooves wore thin. Others only got half a listen. A few stayed sealed, unopened. Why? No clue. But it seemed that even silence had a soundtrack then.

I remember an old Perry Mason rerun where a client asked him, “What puts a man out of step with the people around him?”

Perry answered, “Perhaps he hears a different music.”

That line has always stayed with me. Perry also knew things.

My friend Bob once told me, “Music-wise, you’re prone to melancholy.”

This was true. He didn’t mean it as a criticism. Coming from such an avid blues fan as Bob, it felt more like an observation. Or maybe a diagnosis.

And it’s true. I do hear something a little slower, a little quieter, sometimes a little sadder. A tune that comes and goes and doesn’t always announce itself. I’ve followed it for years now, down the road, over the hill, sometimes just out of reach.

I still can’t quite identify it.

But I keep listening. Still leaning in, one ear bent toward the sound. Still trying to catch the shape of it as it drifts ahead of me.

Maybe this year I’ll figure it out.

And if not, well, at least I know I’m tuned to the right station.