I grew up on southern California with the radio on. My family moved to Laguna Beach in 1960 from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for crying out loud. I was nine, and the Pirates were beating the Yankees in the World Series the night we flew, far from non-stop, across the country on TWA. My young ears were open as we left Boston’s Logan Airport, over the considerable hum of the engines from our Lockheed Super Constellation, the most beautiful transport plane ever made. By the time we had reached LaGuardia, Mazeroski had faced Ralph Terry and it was all over for the Yankees.
Once we’d settled in Laguna Beach and adjusted to the idea that a Catholic like us could be President of the United States and that the November did not necessarily mean adjusting to snowfall. One of the first adjustments I made to the rarified atmosphere of early sixties southern California was the voice of Chuck Niles, delivered through the radio, through KNOB (“The Jazz Knob”) in Long Beach.
From that day forward, I’d be follow Chuck to various stations around the dial. Radio changed formats, but not Chuck. His bass/baritone, impeccable timing, and unquestionable musical taste dragged me into some swinging places, with some very swinging and ultra-hip musical forces. Chuck never let me down, even he ended up at KLON, a public station in Long Beach that had inherited the library of KBCA and a low-watt transmitter. Chuck’s greatest moments were when he was drolly commenting on the traffic reports at KLON. (I remember a truckload of sheep loose on the Pomona Freeway . . . )
Then, there was KMPC.
As soon as I heard Gary Owens, my goose was cooked. He was the zany afternoon guy at the station that was owned by Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, who also owned the Anaheim Angels or whatever they’re now called. Before the gig with Laugh-In, he was there every afternoon being silly and playing some stuff a little to the right and a little more corporate than Chuck was playing.
They jointly set up the Teenage Underground just in time for me to join as a teenager.
In an amazing stroke of luck I won tickets to see, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a TAU concert with Miss Ella Fitzgerald backed by Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, and Ed Thigpen. That afternoon was a real ear-opener for me. In fact, I thought I’d be hearing things like Ella and Oscar for the rest of my life. As if!
Later high-flyers on the singing cowboy’s station included Bob Arbogast and Jack Margolis, who admitted over the air that they smoked pot and were against the war. It WAS a great time to be young, after all.
The thing that all these gentlemen had going for him is the dark and deep resonance of their voices, which added to the appeal of the music they were playing. Their voices were instruments which managed to grab me through the static of AM and the relative dearth of FM, sit my ass down, and play some music for me, along with associated hi-jinks.
By the time I’d become a disaffected teenager with a learner’s permit, I’d run into KPFK, the permanently-embattled Pacifica station in Cahuenga Pass. Blessed with a massive signal, the station was at the time home to Lowell Ponte, who led The Party of the Right and went on to obscurity as a minor talk show host. Then there was Elliot Mintz, who at the time was using the Youth Culture (whatever the hell THAT was) to break into the business of being a press agent to the impossibly glamorous.
Then there was Radio Free Oz, where the Firesign Theatre was born. If you’re asking who the FST was, you’re too young to understand who they were, but you could look it up in Wikipedia. Basically a freeform show hosted by Peter Bergman (another great LA radio voice) RF Oz hit me right between the eyes when I was most vulnerable, and I even started credible variations on the FST voices so I could memorize their records, which soon followed.
About this time, KRLA was playing during the news an incredible skit team called the Credibility Gap, and that’s where my radio dial was every day at least once. I had next to no interest in the music that was playing, but oh the satire of it all!
The best known of the Gap, and one of the great voices of our age, was Harry Shearer, who’s been doing voices on the Simpsons, as well as the bass player in the various incarnations of Spinal Tap, for a very, very long time.
The Gap was edgy in a way that satire could only be that was written the day it was performed, and these guys knocked me out. (Harry’s still doing great things, including a documentary about the levees breaking in his adopted home, New Orleans.)
Then I moved to Santa Cruz, where there were a lot fewer radio stations.
