RADIO ON!! My favorite rock songs about radio

“Do you remember rock ‘n ‘roll radio?” asked The Ramones in their 1980 album, End of the Century. “Do you remember Murray the K, Alan Freed, and high energy?” How about “lying in bed, With your covers pulled up over your head? Radio playin’ so no one can see.”

Yes, I remember all that. But but what sticks with me most about that Ramones tune was that it got sort fatalistic and weird at the conclusion. “We need change, we need it fast,” the band warned. “Before rock’s just part of the past / ‘Cause lately it all sounds the same to me.” The last stanza declared that “It’s the end, the end of the 70s. It’s the end, the end of the century.”

In retrospect, Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio was a prophetic song. It foresaw the decline and fall of the rock/commercial radio alliance—a marriage so intimate it made both genres feel identical. When the album came out, Free Form FM was slowly being tamed by Format, a milquetoast substitute that to this day plays second fiddle to Talk Radio. The Rap to Hip Hop explosion was just beginning. And two years earlier Walkmans, stooped ancestor to the iPod, hit the market, allowing everyone to become their own DJ. The end of the century was still twenty years off. The last days of the rock and radio duopoly, however, were just off  the horizon.

But not quite yet. Back then the Rock Gods screamed their passion for AM and FM. They wrote songs that were literally shrines for the medium, none more so than Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner, released in 1976 and reinvented by Joan Jett a decade later. Rolling Stone ranks it the 269th greatest rock song of all time. It beautifully droned the experience of driving around soon to be post-industrial America with the “radio on” in your car.

“Radio On!
I got the AM
Radio On!
Got the car, got the AM
Radio On!
Got the AM sound, got the
Radio On!
Got the rockin’ modern neon sound
Radio On!
I got the car from Massachusetts, got the
Radio On!
I got the power of Massachusetts when it’s late at night
Radio On!
I got the modern sounds of modern Massachusetts
I’ve got the world, got the turnpike, got the
I’ve got the, got the power of the AM
Got the, late at night, rock & roll late at night
The factories and the auto signs got the power of modern sounds
All right!”

In his own exquisitely air headed way, Richman got radio exactly right: a combination movie soundtrack for your own personal landscape, and a half-human/half electronic device to keep you company.

“I’m in love with modern moonlight
128 when it’s dark outside
I’m in love with Massachusetts
I’m in love with the radio on
It helps me from being alone late at night
It helps me from being lonely late at night
I don’t feel so bad now in the car
Don’t feel so alone, got the radio on
Like the roadrunner
That’s right!”

No surprise that Jett grabbed the tune and moved it about 200 miles down the east coast. “Can’t you hear it here in Jersey now?” she meditated between stanzas. “New York City when it’s late at night. I’m on the West Side Highway heading up to the GW Bridge down by the power line. I see all the neon and it’s cold at night. I got my radio on!!”

There was no sad New England guy in Jett’s version. “It’s so exciting here with the skyscrapers and the dark,” she ecstatically continued. “I feel in touch with the modern world. I feel in touch, I feel alive, I feel in touch with 50,000 watts of POWER!” Still, the loneliness/radio thing wasn’t going to be squelched by one tough rocker gal’s cover. Donna Summer kept it going with her 1979 masterpiece, On the Radio, one of my favorite disco songs.

“Someone found a letter you wrote me, on the radio
And they told the world just how you felt
It must have fallen out of a hole in your old brown overcoat
They never said your name
But I knew just who they meant. . . .”

The notion, of course, that some DJ might find a lost romantic missive intended for you, then actually read it over the airwaves, is almost entirely foreign to our time (much less that somebody else might recognize it as referring to them). But Summer’s piece opened with a beautiful, slow piano accompaniment that made it clear that she really believed in her miracle story.

“If you think that love isn’t found on the radio,” the Queen of Disco insisted, “Well, tune right in. You may find the love you lost. ‘Cause now I’m sitting here with the man I sent away long ago. It sounded really loud, they said it really loud, on the radio.”

Not as loudly as The Clash shouted their anthem for the medium two years later. This is Radio Clash (1981) was the band’s nod to the urban/reggae funk scene exploding in the United States. A demonic Halloween laugh introduced porno-flick guitar riffs and saxophone grunts thumping in the background, then came some kind of declaration of independence from something or other. Forget being lonely or ecstatic, Radio Clash was about Being Bad on the Air.

“This is radio clash from pirate satellite
Orbiting your living room,
Cashing in the bill of rights
Cuban army surplus or refusing all third lights
This is radio clash on pirate satellite”

It was the transatlantic Thatcher/Reagan empire that the Clash boys were railing against here—they soon to locate their alternate reality in Nicaragua’s Sandinista experiment. What Radio Clash got at was both pirate radio’s potential for poking at authority from the margins, and its inability to be anything but marginal.

“Hands of law have sorted through My identity,” the song protested. “But now this sound is brave. And wants to be free.” At the same time, the tune nervously wondered who, if anybody, comprised the audience. “This is radio clash, using aural ammunition. This is radio clash, can we get that world to listen?”

I was listening. Back then, I thought that I was in pop radio heaven. It was the golden age of “modern rock”—an urbanized reinvention of the genre that rescued it from the bland, Woodstocky ditch into which it had sunk, and made rock competitive with disco again. New radio stations played a huge role in that Renaissance. Prominent among them was San Francisco’s Live 105. Not the shadow of its former self that you hear today, but the creative, experimental, and endlessly local version that broadcast in the 1980s.

But I should have known that nothing lasts forever. Elvis Costello was trying to tell us so with his brilliantly contradictory song, Radio Radio, which can read as a reaction to the diametrically opposite directions that the industry seemed to be heading in 1978. “Radio is a sound salvation! Radio is cleaning up the nation!” Costello cried as Free Form slid down the tubes and Format/Talk Radio began taking its place.

So which was it? Salvation or cleanup? In Radio Radio, Costello never figures it out. First he’s in love.

“I was tuning in the shine on the light night dial
doing anything my radio advised
with every one of those late night stations
playing songs bringing tears to me eyes
I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver
when the switch broke ’cause it’s old
They’re saying things that I can hardly believe.
They really think we’re getting out of control.”

Then he’s in hate:

“Some of my friends sit around every evening
and they worry about the times ahead
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
and the promise of an early bed
You either shut up or get cut out;
they don’t wanna hear about it.
It’s only inches on the reel-to-reel.
And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
tryin’ to anaesthetize the way that you feel.”

In the end, all Costello could do was snarl. “I wanna bite the hand that feeds me,” he confessed. “I wanna bite that hand so badly. I want to make them wish they’d never seen me.”

Thirty years later it’s hard to find any strong feelings about radio in the lyrics of pop performers. It’s not like nobody’s still cheering. Beyoncé included a rather metallic sounding tribute in her 2008 album, My Name is Sasha Fierce. But in the age of Clear Channel, most artists and fans would probably agree with the Future of Music’s recent study of terrestrial radio playlists in New York City. FOM concluded that, despite New York state and the FCC’s recent crackdown on payola, the majority of big apple stations stick to a core playlist of songs that are over five years old.

“Radio tends to play it safe;” the survey notes. “Programmers sandwich new material in between recognizable hits from the past to keep core audiences from changing the dial when content becomes too unfamiliar.” As for independent labels, which represent almost a third of the U.S. music market, they’re “left to vie for mere slivers of airtime, despite negotiated attempts to address this programming imbalance.”

And so this reminiscence concludes with what appears to be the last honest word about the subject, Tom Petty’s The Last DJ—a song that confirms what The Ramones and Elvis Costello intuited decades ago would happen to over-the-air commercial radio. The whole album is, in fact, a cry of rage against corruption in the music industry. But more importantly, the lead tune reminds us of what we would really like broadcast DJs to be: themselves.

“The top brass don’t like him talking so much,” Petty says of his archetypal announcer. “And he won’t play what they say to play,” and so:

“There goes the last DJ
Who plays what he wants to play
And says what he wants to say
Hey, hey, hey
And there goes your freedom of choice
There goes the last human voice
There goes the last DJ”

Is it really as bleak as Petty’s song suggests? Today I listen to Pandora on my Blackberry, but it’s hard to imagine anyone producing a hit tune about doing that. Perhaps when our passage through this present cauldron of streaming 4G wireless Web 2.0 change comes to some kind of resting place, there will be room again for the kind of radio for which Elvis, Jonathan, Joan, and Donna wrote songs of endearment. Radio, that is, guided by actual human voices who make you feel connected to the places that you live, who play songs that bring tears to your eyes, and who even read discarded love letters over the air that listeners realize were written for them. Hope springs eternal.