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“Workin' on a love letter,

Listenin' to a love song,

I'm writing you a love letter, love letter,

Got my radio on...radio, radio”

Bonnie Raitt

 

Tonight’s tagline is Love is the Answer. But it’s also the question, right? The harder question. The darker half. As in, where is the? and where did ours go? and how deep is it?

 

Yep. Those are all song lyrics. Songs about love: seeking it, finding it, having it, losing it, but most of all, living in it and through it and sometimes after it.

 

One of the places I found it was on the radio. I was probably six or seven when I first tuned in to Kasey Kasem and his weekend top 40. And being 7, they were my top 40 as well. Sugar Pie Honey Bunch, Rockin’ Robin, Crimson and Clover, Tracks of my Tears. All that.

And then I grew up and there were records albums and FM was being born, first aired only in the dark hours with hipster stations way down on the left end of the dial that would play entire hallucinatory albums throughout the night. And then ROck n Roll jumped off of vinyl and onto air waves that were not owned by the big stations. And my mind, as we might have said back then, was blown.

 

As I wandered through the country in my 20s, I got to know that dial. Left end: classical, or the nascent public radio, maybe some jazz, and the infant rock stations. Then at the middle right starting with 101,102,103.5 the hit grinders with six song playlists and further down another jackpot: Black stations: disco, r and b, soul, hiphop. If you wanted to get high and couch slouch you stayed down in the 90s. But if you wanted to dance, you moved over to 106.1 or 107.5. I forgot what was in the middle. Something my mom listened to while drinking scotch and making dinner. A classical station with a DJ who introduced Mozart and Bach like he was trying to talk you into bed. And in a way, he was, right? That was, is, the job of the DJ, or the good ones. Saying c’mere, get comfortable, or get up and move closer, dance with me. Whatever you do, don’t touch that dial.

 

We moved to Chicago in June of 1983, at one of those crucibles where we often find ourselves in our twenties. What are we gonna do with that liberal arts degree that translates to minimum wage? How are we gonna navigate the city when our bike got stolen the week we arrived?  Where’s the rent coming from? You know big and little questions,  but the biggest one was, is this city going to be our home? 

Like many of our generation, we had lugged our stereo across the country and then back again. Along with two milk crates of records. Because whatever else you left behind you carried your music with you and never mind how heavy, it was the first thing to be set up in any new place.

There was a tuner in that stereo and we taped the lame ass antenna to the living room wall and started spinning the dial.

And right down there in the mid to low 90s, we found WXRT.

Or maybe it found us. You never know with love right? Did you search for it and find it? Or was it up there in the ether somewhere, waiting for you to ripen enough to be able to receive it, hold it, not waste it. We had lived in other cities with other, alt-rock, or folk-rock or whatever they were classified as stations, but although we had tuned in, they had never quite fit right. Too much orchestral arena music, too poppy, too repetitive. There was one in Tucson that could not, would not stop playing Bowie and Queen. 

 

But here in Chicago, at 93.1 was this hip smart bunch of disc jockeys playing music I loved. Some of it I knew already, a good daily dose of Stones, Dire Straits, Pretenders even Richard Thompson and Traffic. They played Layla all the way through. They played Alice’s Restaurant on our first lonely Thanskgiving. And. They played Bonnie. My beloved Bonnie who I had found on a friend’s turntable back in Boston in 1971. And here was a station playing her  before she hit the yellow brick Grammy road. Cry Like a Rainstorm indeed. And I also howled like the wind.

In those first lost days and months while we got our great lakes legs, it felt like radio and XRT in particular was giving me a road map to this new territory called the midwest. It wasn’t just a place I had landed, it was a whole new world and it was filled with music and people who loved it. Chicago was, had always been, I soon learned, since the first great migration, and before, churning out music, some of it deep and old with African roots and southern despair. Some of it new brash and raucous and punk. Hip and defiant in its rejection of either coast. Call us the third coast or the second city and fuck off while you’re at it. We had the Insiders and the Replacements and The Mekons and the Smashing Pumpkins and The Cowboy Junkies and the Jayhawks. We had Chess Records and the Checkerboard Lounge and the Hideout and the Empty Bottle. And Martyr’s.

 

The best radio turns you on to new artists, new music. XRT was  all over that.  It was like a Spotify for my soul but the word algorithm was still, thankfully, tucked away in math books and the playlists on FM radio were human made. 

One morning, I was dressing after a shower, the radio still on in the bathroom when I heard a song that caught my ear, something about bangin on an old guitar and singin what he had to say. Country. Rock. Nashville-y, but cool. I dropped the underwear I was trying to step into and went back into the bathroom just in time to  to catch the third verse which began,

Now I’m in the car

Got the radio on:

I was hooked.

I headed to the phone. Or rather the phone book. Remember those?

And I went to W. temporarily stymied by how acronyms are alphabetized, but the next letter was X right?

And there it was. And I called, expecting to get an answering machine. Remember those?

But a human answered. 

“Johnny Mars, XRT.”

I describe the song and he says

“Oh that guy? That’s John Hiatt.”

And another love affair began.

John Hiatt changed my life in all kinds of ways I won’t go into here but I do believe he wrote what may be the best lyric ever about being shitfaced: “I was gonna get up from that barstool just as soon as I could figure it out.”

 

Radio showered me with gifts: Lucinda Williams, The Replacements who taught this east coast folkie how to really rock, Wilco. WILCO. I heard them one afternoon on my way home from work and even though I had kids to pick up and dinner to make I stopped at a record store to buy “Being There.”

 

But let’s be clear, I was not totally monogamous: people grow up; they discover public radio and listen to it; they grow into understanding jazz and tune it in. They have kids in the backseat who just have to hear Taylor Swift or Nickleback, and so the dial turns: BEZ, DCB, GCI, V103, The Drive.

 

Here are just a few shots of my wandering away from my devotion to XRT: during the Monica Lewinsky hearings I could not, could not, stand the news and rock n roll didn’t take me far enough away cuz you know: sex&rocknroll. I moved left on dial and found WDCB, the beloved Jazz station created and nurtured by the College of Du Page. It soothed me and helped me to see the smallness of that disgusting imbroglio.  And I’m regularly awestruck by The Moth which airs on BEZ and originated back in Woods Hole Massachusetts. And the Drive at 97.1, in its early years, rivaled XRT in its playlists and for a while there I was a bonafide two timer. 

 

But it was first and always remained XRT. And this is why:

I finally grew up for real and landed in a career. I taught high school in the suburbs and lived in the city and that meant a commute and a commute meant radio.

Now, teaching is a really really hard job if you decide youre gonna be good at it

And if youre gonna be good at it, espeically in the early years, you think about it all the time.

So on Monday and Tuesday commutes, I had to turn the radio off to lesson plan or re lesson plan or whatever it was I thought I was doing before it started to come naturally.

But by Wednesday the radio was back on and Friday mornings, wow, XRT loved a Friday morning, the last leg of the work week and they spun records to make sure we knew the end was in sight and here’s a magic carpet ride to get you there. I would crank the volume up, crank the window down and sing. I was rocking.

 

Much of my love affair with radio has happened in the car. It is a ritual with us, even now, that leaving town we listen to Chicago radio till the signals fade and coming home we start trying to pick them again as soon as we can. We don’t stream our radio stations. We turn, or now punch the dial. We’re not purists; we have Spotify, but there’s nothing like radio, humans, playlists. If the price I have to pay to hear the sound of home is to listen to ads, well, that’s what the mute button is for.

 

So, to return to the beginning as it were, back in the 80s, you could wear jeans to work only on Fridays and as I said, on those burnt out mornings listening to The Pretenders helping me rock the traffic and kill the exhaustion with Terri or Frank E or Lin telling me it was a great day to be alive, I felt well, I felt like I could do it. Get through the day, students, admin, parents, whatever. I was good. I had suited up with the radio on.

 

All DJs, but for me especially the XRT DJs, loved music and through it they seemed to be loving me too. call it Nirvana or Transcendence or just a Band of Horses cantering through my brain. These humans, coming through my car’s speakers were apostles of the church of rock n roll radio and they were spinning that particular song at that particular moment to let me know that beyond being a struggling teacher, or a bewildered mother I was still just a blue jeaned baby, following the music, up onto the Skyway. 

 

Brass in Pocket.

 

To paraphrase another great love song here’s a PS: 

 

As I was driving to a meeting on Sunday having just finished revising this piece, I turned on the radio: Led Zeppelin. A band my husband had tried in vain to get me to love and which, OK I now have tremendous respect for. The song was “All of My Love.” And the DJ was Johnny Mars: telling us we could all use more of that right? And because both of us, Mars and me, we’re 40 years older, he added and oh by the way, be careful out there on those icy sidewalks. You don’t want to be falling.