With the possible exception of home shopping channels, infomercials and those popcorn-and-soda trailers they run between coming attractions and the main feature, there is simply no blander, more homogenized, or just plain dull form of entertainment than modern radio. Formatted, segmented and demographed to within an inch of its life, mainstream radio often reaches beyond the Lowest Common Denominator to create a whole new species of inert mass audience, programmed to believe that freedom of choice is the ability to pick between Classic Rock and Quiet Storm.
But even in the sonic Sahara of the airwaves, there still lurks the occasional oasis of perverse personality, lunatic dynamism and sheer broadcast bravura that's always been the hallmark of real radio. While it's pointless to spin the dial looking for FM's formerly free-freaking extravagances or the manic word salads of yesterday's AM screamers, the dedicated seeker may still find thrills to the far right, and left, of the radio band.
Those are, we hasten to add, political points of reference. Nowadays, the weirdest, most frenzied and fullest court loonies on radio are being heard at the far ends of the body politic. True believers, left and right, routinely use, and abuse, the airwaves in a manner ruled verboten by the vast middle's dogged insistence on the inoffensive. Put aside your own political persuasions for the moment, and come along for a wild ride on the far sides of radio.
Support the Troops And Shrimp Louie
Notwithstanding the recent popularity of rotund gadfly Rush Limbaugh (broadcasting on the ominously named Excellence in Broadcasting network), the most enduring examples of radio's right-thinking crypto-fascists can be found on innumerable local broadcasts, sandwiched in between the Farm Report and the Hour of Power. And first among fractured equals has to be Los Angeles' own George Putnam, heard daily over KIEV AM. Broadcasting from a glass booth deep in the basement of a downtown L.A. shopping mall, Putnam and his sonorous, booming baritone have been Southern California institutions for going on 40 years.
A good portion of that time is given over to an unrequited nostalgia for yesterday, specifically the reign of Mayor Sam Yorty (1961-73), who once threatened to erect scaffolds at the airport to hang incoming drug offenders on the spot. It's just the sort of brass-balled approach to social ills favored by Putnam and his myriad of gun-toting geriatric listeners, who regularly call in to voice hearty approval of George's hardheaded, no-nonsense agenda.
in one recent flurry of frenetic chest-pounding, listeners--most of whom sounded like veterans of the Spanish American War--beseeched George to explain why, in God's name, couldn't the Neutron Bomb just be dropped on evil Iraq, thereby saving invaluable oil drilling equipment and the lives of American boys. An anguished George was at a loss to explain this shocking lapse of horse sense.
On another occasion, a moribund eatery named the Smokehouse, another Southland institution and one of Putnam's longest running sponsors, came under attack from a local upstart food critic. Jowls aquiver, George spent the better part of a week spewing invective at those who, from ignorance or sheer malevolence, could not appreciate the sumptuous virtues of the Smokehouse's special garlic bread and Shrimp Louie.
Backward Masking & Birkenstocks
While George Putnam may speak, in basso absurdo tones, for an entire legion of crackpot extremists, the left has no such monolithic radio voice spreading political rectitiude.
Quite the opposite: the liberal insistence on equal time for each and every bore-sighted clique, klatch and coven under the sun has resulted in programming so bifurcated as to give harrowing new meaning to the term special interest.
The best example of this post-logical evenhandedness can be heard on any one of the listener-sponsored Pacifica radio stations currently begging for money across the nation. Earnest gays and lesbians promoting equity-waiver musicals about AIDS; rheumatic Wobblies evoking the ghost of Joe Hill; Birkenstock-shod folkies interviewing the interpreter for a visiting Abyssinian lute player; strident prison activists advocating statehood for San Quentin; utopian eco-feminists waxing eloquent on the virtues of life without electricity... all jostle for their paper-thin piece of the programming pie.
All this political correctness might well prove mind-numbing were it not for the rank amateur status of most listener-sponsored radio regulars. Tapes played backwards or at the wrong speed, coughing fits, deafening paper shuffles, unbroken stretches of dead air, impromptu conversations with the engineer or pizza delivery boy, and voices that alternate between nails-on-a-chalkboard nasality and phlegm-choked death rattles bring welcome relief from the litany of doctrinaire diatribes.
The next time a glistening spokesmodel invites you to a lifetime of easy listening or some smarmy yup extolls the pleasures of your local New Age outlet... remember, there's real radio to be had on the fringe. Better make that the lunatic fringe.