I think the toughest thing about starting this blog will probably be the amount of freedom I've been given. When you're exploring a subject as horrendously huge as mass media, it's somewhat daunting to just be set free to do whatever you want. But that's how people do it in real life, don't they? Out of millions and millions of ways to get their information - television, newspapers, blogs, word of mouth, you name it - we somehow make our decisions and set up our filters to listen to just a few.
I'm already rambling. I have no idea how to start this.
I think I will get into why I am specifically interested in radio in the next post. To kick this whole blog thing off, I think I will discuss one of my favorite songs ever. I could probably write a paper on this song, and the way I have grown up with it, and the things that I have discovered and continue to discover about it with every listen, but this isn't a music blog, it's a radio blog. So I will try not to digress too much.
Here is what I remember about "Roadrunner" by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. It is one of the first songs I ever heard that gave me a "driveway moment" - those times when you arrive at your destination but find yourself unable to go inside, enthralled by whatever is on. I had heard the song before - my younger brother had played it for me before on a tape, but I dismissed it as "dumb", beginning a long-standing and agonizing tradition of my younger brother being clued in to stuff before I was. Anyway. I heard the song again when I was sixteen and going home from something, maybe school or work or a friend's house, but that isn't really important. What is is that I was going home, listening to the college station, when "Roadrunner" came on. I pulled into the driveway, but I didn't want to leave the car. After the song ended, I went inside and played my dad's Story of the Clash Volume 1. It sounded better. Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville sounded better too. I put on Moby's Play. It sounded worse. I thought about "Roadrunner" the whole time these albums were playing, and I turned it around in my head. I distinctly remember at this point thinking, "All I know is that something very, very important just happened to me."
Here is what the Wikipedia entry tells me about "Roadrunner" by the Modern Lovers. It is derived directly from the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray", except for "Roadrunner" only uses two chords, D and A, as opposed to the VU's three. The first version of the song was recorded with John Cale; the next two with Kim Fowley, and the final version (the most commercially successful) with Beserkley Records head Matthew King Kaufman. Kaufman stated that "Roadrunner took 3 minutes-35 seconds for the performance, about another 30 minutes to dump the background vocals on, and another 90 minutes to mix it." That brings us to a running total of approximately two hours, three minutes and thirty-five seconds. That's all it took to create song #269 in Rolling Stone's the 500 Greatest Rock Songs of All Time; the song that inspired Cornershop's #1 single "Brimful of Asha"; the song that Greil Marcus said was "the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest."
Here is what I can tell you about the Wikipedia entry for "Roadrunner" by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. The best part of the article is the third paragraph of the "Origins of the song" section:
"Former bandmate John Felice recalled that as teenagers he and Richman 'used to get in the car and just drive up and down Route 128 and the Massachusetts turnpike. We'd come up over a hill and he'd see the radio towers, the beacons flashing, and he would get almost teary-eyed. He'd see all this beauty in things where other people just wouldn't see it.'"
At its best, radio does exactly what Jonathan Richman does with this song - it explores and seeks truth in situations where it isn't readily apparent or neglected, and then it shares that truth. It turns us into wide-eyed, breathless believers. Like Richman himself sings, "don't feel so alone now/got the radio on".
