Baltimore Diary

Telling Tales

Brian: [mistaking a police scanner for a normal radio, during a crime report] Is it just me, or is rap music getting lazier?

—Family Guy, "A Hero Sits Next Door" (5/2/99)

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There have been a bunch of changes up and down the radio dial lately, and I'm not sure I get all of them.

The thing about Mark Steiner everyone knows about already. A bunch of listeners are upset, WYPR has managed to entrench themselves on this issue, so Steiner has moved up the dial to 88.9 FM. Last I heard he doesn't have a regular gig yet but they're working on that. Dan Rodericks, in the meantime, is terrible. Soooo, I'm sitting on my membership money. I'd be curious to see if anyone else did as well; at least enough to make a dent in the station's income.

What really confuses me is the changes made over at Live 105 FM. They've actually made matters worse for themselves, as far as I can tell.

It doesn't seem to me that anyone currently in Baltimore radio has heard of the idea of counter-programming. All this means is that, when someone else with a similar format is in a stop set (commercial block), you do your best to ensure that you're not. So many times a station I'm listening to goes to commercials, so I scan through my presets, only to discover that they're ALL in stop sets. The only station that managed to avoid this trap was Live 105. Now, they've become remarkably predictable in that they've got a network news break at the top of the hour, then a local news break, then they have the traffic with its attendant stop set every 15 minutes. So if a station I'm listening to goes to a commerical, I actually know whether or not to bother listening to them as I zip through presets, because nine times out of ten I'll know whether they'll be in a break or a stop set.

Plus, as it happens, I got to listen to a LOT more Ed Norris when he was on middays. However, now that it's Troy Johnson or Brian Wilson, I don't hear nearly as much of that station as I used to. Of course, this is all snippets heard when traveling from one school to another, but still.

The other thing that got to me this week was learning that Bob Waugh on WRNR isn't necessarily in the studio when he's on-air. His show appears to be voicetracked. "Voicetracking" is when a DJ pre-records all the intros and outros to the songs he's playing, and then someone else in the studio plays the DJ's chatter and the attendant records. A couple of days ago, WRNR was playing a song, then Waugh said a few words, then they went to a stop set. During the stop set, we suddenly heard Waugh doing the exact same outro for the song he'd just played. Therefore, Waugh's voice was recorded and his show is likely to be voicetracked. I've liked Bob Waugh since I was younger, listening to him on WBAB on Long Island, so this was a bit of a disappointment.

I've also heard that the Smooth Jazz station at 104.3 is now gone, with a format change to a kind of Adult Alternative. Since their definition of "Jazz" was kind of loose, this isn't a huge loss. But cities should have jazz stations, and not just the Andy Bienstock option.  

This post was kind of a ramble, so feel free to add your own thoughts.

Ooh-ooh-ooh-wee, Bad Jokes For Me

Guy Noir: She had a Mount Rushmore t-shirt on, and those guys never looked so good. Especially Jefferson and Lincoln. Kind of bloated but happy.

—A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

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The worst thing about this past Friday night is that I was taking the Weapons-Grade Antibiotics and therefore drinking alcohol was not advisable.

The best part is that it was a gorgeous night to be on the lawn at Wolf Trap.

GF and I went down there with S&B, our next-door neighbors, to see the Friday performance of "A Prairie Home Companion." The Saturday show, which is the one that gets broadcast, was sold out, but we saw that there was a Friday show and got tickets for that instead.

I had a feeling that we might get some interesting stuff, since it stood to reason that the Friday show might be used as a kind of dress/tech rehearsal where they work some of the kinks out and maybe decide what bits to leave in and what to take out for the broadcast. It turns out that I was partially right and partially wrong. For instance, the show was MUCH longer than the two hours it runs on-air; it started promptly at 8:00, there was an intermission at 9:15 and I think we left around 10:30. The guests were all the same, but the broadcast version had an episode of "Lives of the Cowboys" that we didn't get. And so on.

But it didn't take away from the fact that we were there, and we did have fun. Garrison Keillor opened the show alone on the stage and had everyone sing all of "America the Beautiful". Betcha didn't know there was more than one verse, did you? As he led the audience, he began to walk off the stage and up the side aisle. When he reached the end of the seats, he began to cross over and walk up the center aisle, among the lawn seats. So for a little while at least, the people in the $48 seats were in the "crappy seats" section. As Keillor started all this, GF was in the rest room. She heard him singing and rushed back to where we were. Consequently she nearly collided with him in the aisle, because she didn't realize where he was as he sang. If you were there, too? Yes, she was the one who almost ran him down, then stopped short and did the "pitty pat" applause when I pointed him out to her.

From "America the Beautiful" we went to "The Star-Spangled Banner" and he worked his way back down to the stage. At that point the show proper began and he launched into the show's usual theme song.

I won't go into a full rundown of the show, because that isn't a lot of fun. But I will make mention of the guests. Rhonda Vincent and The Rage is a bluegrass group that's been at the forefront of that style of music for a few years. I know that people who know me think that I don't like country music very much, but the truth is that I don't like modern country very much. The old-school stuff, and the rootsy stuff, I rather enjoy. And bluegrass would be in that category. That doesn't mean that you should run out and buy me a Rhonda Vincent CD or anything. But I'd listen to that before, say, Trace Adkins (although Trace is on my "doesn't suck" list).

The other guest is one of the newest up-and-coming tenors, a fellow named Raul Melo. He's got a fine sense of humor (as evidenced by his performance in the Rhubarb ad and perhaps his costume in the first half of the show), and a great voice (as evidenced by bazillions of opera fans). Again, opera is something that I definitely enjoy. DEFINITELY don't buy me an opera CD though, since I get nothing from that. I enjoy the whole experience. So buy me tickets to a show instead. Italian preferred.

I've done the radio thing, back when I was in college, so it wasn't too weird to me to see Fred Newman doing the various sound effects and all. I didn't realize that he did more voices on the show than I thought he did. And it's fun to watch Tim Russell switch from one voice to another as rapidly as he does. Sue Scott is the type of radio actor who drops all her script pages to the floor as she finishes reading them, but then she scoops them all up again at the end of each bit.

The only real disappointment to the evening was that the stuff in the souvenir stand was actually more expensive in there than it was if I'd purchased it online (shipping notwithstanding). And--AND! No Powdermilk Biscuits, nor rhubarb pie at the concession stand.

Blast From the Past (Now With More Radio!)

Bill McNeal: Why, back in the old days of radio, they had nothing but jungle drums beating the morning weather and traffic reports. But did they complain?

—Newsradio, "Twins" (3/12/97)

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During the move to Parkville, just over a year ago, I came across a plastic box. It was squarish, with rounded corners, about 12 inches by 12 inches by maybe 2 inches deep. Inside were two reels of audio tape. The box was a mailer, so that tape could be transported safely through the US Mail.

Now, I'd been carrying these reels around for nearly twenty years without knowing what was on them, since I no longer had access to a reel-to-reel tape deck. But it's a chunk of my past, and you know how we hang on to these things.

When I was in college I was a Communications major, and I therefore spent a lot of time at the school's radio station, WBAU. I mean, a LOT of time. (If you read the Wikipedia article, you'll understand why I don't contribute to the Alumni Association.) I figured, but wasn't sure, that these tapes were some work I'd done. I wasn't positive, however. I could have been toting around anything. I really had no idea.

So last year, I realized that I had a friend who could check out the tapes for me, since she works at the Broadcasting Institute of Maryland, which coincidentally is practically around the corner from my house, now. She agreed to help me out and took the tapes, commenting that she'd never seen something like the mailer before.

It took several months, but she finally came through. Lo and behold, one of the tapes still had viable audio on it. It's about 14 minutes of me, and my co-host at the time, cutting promos for an oldies show we did together. There are a few odd music clips which I think I was going to put together into a montage, then several takes of three different promos. The last thing on the tape is the opening "bed" that we used at the beginning of the show. I did a new opening about every six to eight months; this was one of the last I made. So it's about 30 seconds of montage, followed by another 30 seconds during which we'd do our "Hello"s, and a stinger ending. For editing that I did with a razor blade and what was basically scotch tape--involving the actual cutting of tape--it wasn't bad.

If you actually take the time to listen, you'll see that I was a bit of a nut about doing multiple takes. There were some bits that I recorded (not on this) where I did maybe thirty takes and then used Number 17 as the one that was "good enough". Sometimes it took me hours to do a 60-second piece.

If you comment, be kind. Remember this was around 1985 or so. My voice isn't so reedy nowadays. Oh, and there's one small F-bomb that gets dropped. Enjoy, if you dare. (Note: it starts very quietly; you'll have to wait for a bit before you hear anything.)

I have to admit that I'm especially proud of writing the phrase "the music that made the Sixties what they are today." Talk about your semantically null phrases.

A Little Grinchy

Rachel Phelps: [As "Wild Thing" starts to play and the crowd reacts] I hate this fucking song.

—Major League (1989)
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Now that Thanksgiving is over and we're moving into high gear on Christmas, of course it means that we're going to be hearing a lot of Christmas music.

What that means is that we'll hear about nineteen million permutations of about twenty different songs. The fact is, when you put on the "All Christmas All the Time" radio station (and there's at least one in every town; some of them started with that format weeks ago), the song catalogue just isn't that deep.

Many years ago, there was an AM station in New York City, WNEW-AM. They stood at 1130 on your dial and their format was old standards. It wasn't the "Music of Your Life", which was beamed by satellite to all the affiliates; they had DJs who programmed the shows and you got a lot of the Big Band sound, with Jazz vocalists and American standards, that sort of thing. (In fact, WNEW was the station that invented the DJ.) And every day at noon, the DJ, a fellow named William B. Williams, who had a show called "The Make-Believe Ballroom", would play the song Stardust.

Every day. Without repeating a recording unless he felt like it. For years.

This is what it's like listening to an All-Christmas station. The same few songs by all kinds of different artists. But there are a few songs that just plain irritate me:

• The Chipmunks Christmas song is one of the worst offenders. This song just makes my teeth hurt, and its popularity, which goes back to before I was born, is inexplicable. It's basically a one-joke novelty song, and the same joke gets repeated later on, in case you didn't catch the hilarity the first time around. We get it, Dave: Alvin doesn't pay attention. Give the little rodent some Ritalin and be done with it, already. The only bright note to all this is that nobody bothers to cover it because A) nobody is going to do the Chipmunk schtick, and B) there's really only one verse to the song without the schtick. Although that didn't stop Eurythmics from cutting "Sweet Dreams", did it?

   

• "My Favorite Things", the song from The Sound of Music, somehow turned into a Christmas song when this 1965 album by The Supremes came out (this is the CD cover, hence the "bonus tracks"). It's not a bad rendition of the song; in fact many of the tracks on this album are pretty good. But then again, all of the other songs on the album are Christmas songs. Not so much this one. And it might not be so bad if they stuck to the Supremes' rendition, but no. Other artists are starting to creep into the Christmas pantheon of "My Favorite Things." Just step away from the Rodgers & Hammerstein, please. And remember where you heard it first.

     

Damn right.

 









 

• Speaking of music that's been shoehorned into Christmas, someone's taken Pachelbel's Canon in D and added a children's choir with some Christmas lyrics to it. So you get the Canon plus the kids, then the Canon by itself, then the Canon and the kids again. None of which gets around the fact that it wasn't a Christmas song in the first place, so just cut it out. If you want to do something new, then do something new. If you want to re-do an existing Christmas song, nobody's stopping you. But don't do bogus mashups like this. Not on my watch, boy.

• Before you jump too ugly on me about "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer", let me start by saying that I rather like this song. What I object to is the specific recording that we hear over and over again. When the song first started to break, in 1982, it was on a 45-rpm record, on a label called "Oink". By 1984 it was a nationwide novelty hit and CBS signed Elmo & Patsy Shropshire (that's their last name; don't say you don't learn stuff here) to a contract, and they re-recorded the song that year. The 1982 recording, to my ear, was MUCH funnier, because it was done in such a deadpan style. They basically trusted you to get the joke. The 1984 CBS recording, which is what we are now "treated" to, is a much "wackier" recording, where Elmo will punch up certain lines (note the heavy emphasis on the "You can say" part of the chorus and the overpronunciation of "incriminating Claus marks"), which is the verbal equivalent of an elbow to the ribs. The hell of it is, I had a copy of the Oink 45 and I can't find it.
• 

  I'm sure everyone and his brother has seen this video, which is a set of about 16,000 Christmas lights synchronized to "Wizards of Winter" by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I don't actually have much problem with this one either, although I'll mention that I heard it today on the radio and it's not as cool a tune without seeing the synchronized lights at the same time. They really complement each other well. 

And here's where I borrow a page from Yellojkt's playbook and get into some Blatant Comment Whoring^TM: Agree? Disagree? Anything you'd like to see banished?

Music Under the Stars

Ned Flanders: I'm going to a Christian rock concert.
[holds up two tickets reading "Chris Rock in Concert"]
Ned Flanders: It's gonna be one wholesome evening!

--The Simpsons, "Children of a Lesser Clod" (5/13/01)

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Last Sunday, GF and I traveled down to Wolf Trap to see Lucinda Williams' show. It was my first trip to that particular venue, although I've been to a couple like it: A few years back I got to see Radiohead at Merriweather Post Pavilion, and the summer before I moved down here I was at the Phish show at what was then the Garden State Arts Center, now the PNC Bank Arts Center.

(Looking at that list alone, I'm thinking that I've got some eclectic taste in my concerts. I've also been to the Allman Brothers at Jones Beach (twice), Foreigner at Jones Beach, Billy Joel and Rod Stewart at Nassau Coliseum, Paul McCartney at RFK Stadium, Tool at the Verizon Center, and I've also seen Taylor Dayne, Jane Wiedlin, the Subdudes, 24-7 Spyz and a few others at private events. Hm. This is rather boosting the argument rather than refuting it...)

The show was slated for 8:00, but we presumed that that time was reserved for the opening act, Charlie Louvin. Charlie is real old-school country music; in fact he and his brother toured as the Louvin Brothers until, career-wise, they parted ways the year I was born. Now, that's old-school.

Louvin just released an album a few months ago, with some pretty interesting guests on it, so I ordered a copy of the CD to see what it was about. It's not bad but it's not really my speed, either. At least I had some idea of what I'd be hearing.

We got to the venue at almost exactly 8:00, parked the car and made our way in. Sure enough, Charlie Louvin had just started. There was something not quite right about the sound coming from him and his band but it didn't occur to me until later on that it was because I was hearing a lot of the sounds that the audience made coming through the amps, almost as though the crowd was miked. GF and I staked out a patch of grass on the slope above the walkway, where we had a decent view. Not having been there before, I decided to wander around and see if there were any fun souvenirs to be had.

There are two souvenir stands at Wolf Trap (that I saw). One was devoted entirely to Wolf Trap stuff. (It is a national park, after all; government needs their cut.) The other one held the artist-type materials. There wasn't any Louvin stuff except for the CD. For Lucinda Williams, there were CDs, assorted T-shirts and some keychains. At that point I didn't buy anything. I got some beverages and re-joined GF.

Louvin finished at almost 9:00 and I took another walk around. As I got closer to the artist souvenir stand I noticed that several of the T-shirt sizes were out of stock. I figured I'd better move. That's when I realized that there what were seemingly identical shirts (designated #1 and #4) were, in fact, different: each shirt represented a different leg from the tour. The #4 shirt was from the previous leg, which is why it was only $15. However, the shirts in my size from the current tour were gone. I confirmed this with the woman behind the counter, and she noted that I was correct. As I ordered a #4 in my size, she suddenly realized that she had a #1 that was just returned by a customer. It was the one draped over her shoulder. Kismet! So I got a shirt from the current tour.

Lucinda Williams is a fantastic performer. The arrangements change only a little bit from the CDs, but always for the better. She's truly a perfectionist: at one point she stopped a song about a minute in because there was something she didn't like about the mix. Then they simply started over again. There must have been a technical glitch we didn't know about because, early on, there were several between-song consultations with band members and with some of the crew, and she told us that "we had a set list, but set lists are made to be broken."

Lucinda (see how we're pals, now?) had a little story in between each song, which gave us a little of the backstory involved, and she seemed to be genuinely touched and impressed by the reception that the audience gave her. Maybe it's a put-on, but I kind of liked it.

In the end, I had a great time and would certainly return for another show. I'm thinking about going to see the live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" in the spring.

National Joke

Jon Stewart: ...Washington DC is violent, but they're not finding 30-50 corpses in the street every day!
Field Reporter: Well, of course not; it's not Baltimore.

—The Daily Show (5/10/07)

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I'm not usually one to jump on bandwagons, but the above quotation seems to have gotten very little attention, with the exception of the Ed Norris Show on WHFS yesterday. So either I'm at the start of the groundswell, or I'm actually ahead of the curve, or I'm full of crap. None of these options are mutually exclusive, by the way.

But the fact is that Baltimore is still close to the top of the list in terms of the murder rate. In 2006, New York City had 597 murders, according to that city's report. Baltimore had 275, per the Murder Ink column in the City Paper. Now, you could be all outraged and say "Yo, it's not so bad here! They've got twice as many murders!"...

...Except that New York City has 8.1 million residents. And nearly twice that many inhabitants during the day. Baltimore has somewhere in the neighborhood of 650 thousand people. So they have roughly twelve times the permanent population and only twice the number of murders. Oh, and we're actually ahead of last year with the murders. That is, there are more murders in Baltimore City this year than there were on the same date last year.

It's not surprising that the police force is horribly understaffed—would you want to work in a city that can't get its shit together? How are they going to staff these beat patrols? and GunStat? and whatever else? The cops who are out there don't get nearly the support they need. How can anyone successfully recruit officers?

At least the City Council members get another $8000 in their paychecks starting next year, and the mayor gets a $23K bump. And all they had to do for it was take no action whatsoever. Which appears to be exactly what they're doing about the crime rate.

It's no wonder this city has become a nationwide punchline.

WYPO'ed

One of the things I believe is that if you've got a job where you have to represent the face of your employer, you need to do it well. It doesn't matter to me if you're Bill Gates or a greeter at Wal-Mart. There's no such thing as a crappy job in that respect. If that's your job, just do it well or do something else; something that doesn't represent the company. You know?

So yesterday morning at about 8:45, I'm heading east on the 28th Street Bridge. It's busy but it's moving along. I'm in that left lane that's about to turn into the middle lane because of the ramp coming up from I-83, and I'm minding my own business, just heading to work and listening to NPR. Shortly after that merge, a car from the new left lane does one of those Pop On the Signal After the Maneuver Has Started routines and cuts me off. With the signal still on, he taps the brakes just long enough to force me to hit mine, then dodges over to the right lane. Then he gives me the "yeah, I did that" look and makes the right-on-red down Sisson Street.

As it happened, because of him hitting the brakes in front of me, I got a good look at his license plate. It read "WYPR".

Son of a bitch.

I'm sitting here listening to HIS station, and he treats me like this? Lemme tell you something, bub. I pay your salary. Not only do I pay it through the taxes that go into your federal subsidies, I pay it a SECOND time because I'm one of the people who's foolish enough to send you money each year. Who knows, maybe the city gives them money so I'm paying him a third time.

All I'm saying is, if you're going to represent yourself as one of the public faces of a radio station, you should maybe treat the people around you a little more politely. You never know who you're cutting off. They could wind up cutting you off in the end, if you get my drift.

And I know it didn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but I changed stations immediately. Asshat.  

Explanation, Please

Here's the thing I'd like to know:

Why is it that, whenever you're in traffic and there's some person in another car nearby and they're playing their music so loudly that cracks are appearing in the blacktop underneath the car, the music they're playing almost invariably SUCKS?

I have never, ever, EVER been caught in traffic next to one of these guys and hoped that the light would stay red a little longer because the song I was hearing was so good. I have never asked another driver, "Hey, what station are you listening to? 'Cause I wanna listen to that too!" I've never found myself bopping along with the car next to me.

I'm thinking that some morning I'm just going to roll down my windows and blast Carl Kasell. That'll show them.

This Bird Has Flown

The morning of December 9, 1980 was much like any other at first. I was a Senior in high school. I woke up early for some reason. The first thing I did every morning was turn on my radio, which was tuned to WABC. It was still a music station then. The morning DJ at the time was Dan Ingram. For those of you who remember New York radio in those days, this was a brief experiment on WABC's part, and it wasn't too much longer before he was back at the afternoon drive shift.

If you don't know him, Dan Ingram is probably one of the best disk jockeys ever. He's funny, he's clever, he's sincere. If Bruce Morrow was everyone's cousin, Dan Ingram was the uncle with the bizarre sense of humor. When Chairman Mao visited New York City, Dan suggested that the Chairman looked a little like the guy who did his laundry. Many time he'd talk back to the records or the commercials, usually taking them out of context: "No sir, I would NEVER 'void where prohibited'." Dan's shift usually flew by because you had so much fun listening to him.

This morning, however, he was rather somber. Something had happened and it took several minutes for me to piece it together because of the time that I came in. There were references to "he" and "him" and it was only very slowly that I realized that John Lennon was dead. Not only that he was dead, but that somebody who was known perhaps worldwide for his efforts at peace had died a violent death. A lone gunman, someone described by a local police officer as "a wack job", had ambushed Lennon late the night before, as he returned home from a recording session, the one that would ultimately become the Milk and Honey album.

In retrospect, even though police were there in a heartbeat, and even though they didn't bother waiting for an ambulance (they piled him into a cruiser and drove him to the hospital), he arrived at the hospital alive but it was too late; there was too much damage done. He had no pulse, no blood pressure. He wasn't breathing. They worked on him for maybe twenty minutes before they gave up.

I got to school early every day because I was the guy who did the morning announcements on the PA system. I remember taking notes on all of this because I wanted to share some of this information. When I got to school I realized that there were people who still didn't know everything that had happened. For many of the people in Kings Park High School that morning, I was the person who broke the news that Lennon had died.

Twenty-five years ago today, John Lennon was killed outside his apartment house. I still remember some parts of that day vividly.

We all shine on.

Old Joke vs. New Technology

I attended Adephi University, on Long Island, in the early 1980's. I was a Communications student then, which meant that I was taking courses in TV, Radio and Film production. It was radio with which I had the most fun, which pretty much made me a pariah in that department. The radio students were definitely on the low end of the totem pole. By the time I attended, the school radio station, WBAU, was a "club" rather than a department-sponsored activity, meaning that anyone on campus could join.

That wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

Anyway: when I took film production classes, one of the things we had to do was title cards for the films we made. This included a copyright card and a production company card. Since, by this time, I was a radio geek and was taking film production because I had to (as opposed to the Art of Film-type courses that I genuinely enjoyed), I wanted to come up with a production name that reflected my interest.

A few days later, King Kong was on TV. And the first thing you see on that screen is this (click on the picture to embiggen it):

RKO Radio Pictures! OF COURSE! This was a revelation. This was my inspiration! Why not make Radio Pictures?

And so, ccradio (I always wrote it that way) Productions was born.

So a few years later, when the Internet started to grow in popularity and people needed user names for forums and such, I started to use "ccradio" as my handle. Hey, I needed something and it was easier than actually thinking. So I started with that and I use it pretty much whenever I can. If you're on a discussion board somewhere and you see that name, it's likely to be me. (Oddly enough, I've never used that handle in the IRC.)

Around the same time, a company called C. Crane was starting to blossom. Among the products that it offered to customers was something called the CCRadio. I think it was originally designed to be the best AM radio ever (which, even if they'd started that in 1975, would be akin to making the best vinyl record album today). The radio itself has broadened its definition and now does FM and NOAA signals, along with TV audio and a few other bands. So when they got a web presence, of COURSE they took ccradio.com. I don't hold it against them, it's not as though I want the domain. But I do get the occasional email from people who see my nickname here and there and wonder if there's any relation.

I'm here to say: No.

I'm sure it's a fine product, but I'm not spending a hundred and fifty bucks to find out. Now, if they're willing to send me one gratis to review here, I'd be more than happy to talk about it in positively glowing terms. Because when you get down to it, I'm willing to whore myself out.

And that last sentence, it occurs to me, will gather a whole new batch of hits to this site from people looking for something else altogether. Heh.