Newsday (Long Island, New York)

BY DAVID KIRBY
Special to Newsday

Before there was radio, there was, well, who remembers? As Marc Fisher reminds readers of a certain age in the marvelous nostalgia-fest that is “Something in the Air,” in the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and even ‘80s, “nobody talked about radio much then; it was just there,” and it wasn’t until radio splintered into the hydra-headed mutant that it is today that listeners realized it provided
“a sense of belonging” that “molded our expectations in politics, work, home and school,” and that “this shared pop culture was a meeting ground for our nation, a commons that we only years later realized we had lost.”

It’s hard not to overquote Fisher, a first-rate historian (his previous book is “After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History”) but also a master stylist on a subject he sees through amber layers of memory: “Radio lends itself to nostalgia … to a pining for the innocence of a summer’s night listening to baseball from a far-off city, the signal fading in and out, the crack of the bat sometimes lost in the sizzle of static from a distant lightning bolt.”

These are moments from the time when radio was the nation’s soundtrack. Or its clock, to use Fisher’s metaphor: “waking us in the morning, accompanying us to work and back home again, baby-sitting the kids after school, lulling us to sleep at night.”

Before television, radio was the primary source of entertainment, offering a rich mix of news, drama, classical and pop music, comedy and variety revues; the large networks had their own symphony orchestras and gave work to serious playwrights and accomplished actors. When TV took over, radio morphed: It became more uniform and, by doing so, even more pervasive.

This shift is in large part because of a man named Todd Storz. Like most of the largely forgotten pioneers in early radio culture, Storz was a gawky addict from childhood forward. “Something in the Air” teems with photos of chinless wonders in eye-scorching plaid jackets, their hair plastered with stickum and their faces with game smiles as they moved from crystal sets and ham radios to their first gigs as teenaged DJs. Storz’s great revelation came during his days in the Army Signal Corps (where else?) when he watched customers in diners and nightspots toss their nickels into the jukebox and play the same song over and over again.

His not to reason why, his but to cue and play: Storz bought his first station in Omaha in 1949 and quickly expanded his holdings into a stable of stations playing staples: the same songs, over and over again.

But the shift to a Top 40 format didn’t mark simply a shift in consumer preferences. The breakthrough point that “Something in the Air” makes is that the radio revolution brought together the black and white worlds that had co-existed separately for decades, and it organized the youngsters as well. While the songs of Elvis Presley and Bill Haley don’t sound especially black today, in the mid-’50s, those blue suede shoes were not only rocking around the clock but also jumping from one side of the color line to the other so fast that parents, principals and nervous public officials saw nothing but a rich shade of chocolate.

Thanks to the English, America didn’t go to hell in a handcart: Dire predictions aside, The Beatles put an end to fears of a juvenile delinquency pandemic with their boy-next-door cheek. In fact, that’s when radio’s terminal headache began; in the early ‘60s, just when radio reached its peak as a rebellious new medium, it began to die the slow death that overtakes every pop phenomenon. Once Top 40 took over the AM airwaves, FM radio came along to play the albums that might not fit on a 45 single, though once listeners began requesting the same songs by the same artists, FM, too, began to go down the road to standardization.

Today, of course, it’s the opposite: virtually every FM station aims its message at a specific niche. Thus a radio station is “something akin to a fragrance or a style of furniture,” Fisher says, and “an advertiser looking for single white women in their late 20s and early 30s could buy time on a soft rock station; if their products were aimed at 18-to-25-year-old men, they might look toward the hard rocker.”

Thanks to iPods and music downloads, radio is more and more irrelevant to its original mass audience, the young. But even in its revolutionary days, radio was a business, and businesses evolve. Now there is satellite radio (an even more niche-driven enterprise) as well as such hybrids as Skyblog, for instance, a blog service operating in conjunction with Skyrock, a French station whose song choices are made by DJs facing a giant screen onto which are posted the roughly 25,000 e-mails and phone text messages that pour in daily; Skyblog gained notoriety in 2005 when some of its users urged others to riot during the disturbances that wracked Parisian suburbs that year.

Maybe the kids in Paris were onto something: For a new medium to have legs, first there has to be a new revolution.

David Kirby’s essay collection, “Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, the Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila, And 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation” will appear in 2007.

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