By Jim Hagarty
1994
Another radio station in a city near me has caught the golden oldie bug. This week, the station turfed four of its long-time deejays as it prepares to move to a whole “new” format, spinning all “classic rock” tunes for our eternal enjoyment.
Or, as in my case, eternal annoyance.
Now, all the FM radio stations in this area will be cranking out “favourites” from the ’60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. John Lennon’s heirs will get a little richer and “fogies”, old and otherwise, will have to dig through their Frank Sinatra records if they ever want to hear him do it his way again.
As a child of the ’60s – I was 13 when the Beatles appeared for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show – I should be tickled, that yet another business interest has gotten down on its knees for us domineering “baby boomers” who apparently have no interest in living today but merely want to sit around watching instant replays of our past life. But I’m not happy at all because to be utterly frank with you (and is there any other way to be frank?), I’m sick and tired of Jim Croce singing about Bad Bad Leroy Brown and Don McLean wailing away at Bye Bye Miss American Pie. And shouldn’t that be Ms. Amercian Pie?
This, in a nutshell, is why I’m fed up. In my younger days, like a lot of teenagers back then and I suppose now, I took a radio with me wherever I went. I sang along with all the songs and knew a lot of them by heart. I had my favourite deejays and I liked everything about radio. I even went out and bought records of the songs I heard over the airwaves so I could listen to them whenever I wanted.
Back then, a popular song had a lifespan of anywhere from one to three months before it was replaced with a newer, fresher song either by the same group or some other one. There used to be great excitement when it was announced a band like the Beatles would release their newest single on a Monday. A lot of us would be talking about it at school on Tuesday. But even Beatles records had a best-before date and after you’d heard Hey Jude for the 400th time, you were ready to move on. And that was the great thing. We always knew the songs we hated, and there were lots of them, would eventually disappear, never to be heard again.
Little did we know that 30 years later, they would all be back, along with the remakes made of them which themselves are now golden oldies too, or that they’d be playing 24 hours a day on almost every station around, like “muzak” on the overhead speakers at the mall.
So, now I wake in the morning to, “We had it all. Just Like Bogey and Bacall,” which are lines from one of my all-time, most-despised songs. I hate it mostly because the singer refers repeatedly to his “layday”, a reference, I suppose, to the word, lady.
I know, I know. I’m just too darned prickly. But how else would you expect a curmudgeon in the making to be? I just wish I could turn on my radio and hear a new song now and then. They’re still being recorded and some of them I have had a chance to hear on television and elsewhere are pretty good. Without them, where will the golden oldies of tomorrow come from?
Please don’t tell me when I’m sitting in the lounge of the nursing home 40 years from now, I’ll still be listening to, “We had it all. Just like Bogey and Bacall.” And blowing another artery every time that guy gets to the part about his “layday.”
Jim Croce. John Lennon. Eivis Presley. Mama Cass. Janis Joplin. Buddy Holly. Jim Morrison. Otis Redding. All great singers. Some of them great writers.
And all of them dead.
Jim Croce used to sing about how he wished he could save time in a bottle. Well, he couldn’t but he has managed to save it on vinyl records and compact discs and radio stations have turned themselves into giant time machines.
Maybe that explains the surging popularity of country music which seems to be the only area of popular music which still gets support for new creations from radio stations. So far, they’ve pretty well resisted the mouldy oldies rage.
What’s happening with radio, both FM and AM, is eerie, almost bizzare. Imagine coming home to your TV every day to nothing but reruns of I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver and Bonanza. Might drive you a little buggy after a while. Or going to the library to find nothing there that’s been published since 1972.
Life is today. In the name of Graceland, Woodstock and Abbey Road, let’s get on with it. And give that poor guy and his “layday” a well-deserved rest.
