I'll Try To Find You: A Letter to Radio and Community

by Howard Cressi-Stallworth

Driving down the highway at night, over the bridge, into the city I lived in some time ago, I was struck with the amount of nights I’d been in nearly the same position as a child, but one seat behind—watching the lights drift by metronomically to whatever bygone song was lilting over the radio, always at night coming home from a relatives house at the end of a holiday. Some music was always playing and it always came from the radio. Rather it was controlled by the radio, even well into the era of the iPod and even the streaming era. Oftentimes, we relied on the old static embroidered stations as a relief from the boredom of an overloaded iPhone, it’s  almost annoyingly looming, sober consistency, waiting for you to click the dial on. The idea of consistency and reliability that radio delivered throughout our lives is always present. 

It was always the same stations, classic rock, npr, and the one or two local independent stations that came further and more clearly into view out of the jungle of static, into a somewhat high definition signal, reminders of landmarks and regionalization: the idea of finality—you’re home. It's the ever present compressed voice of a male or female deep into their monologue, providing that much needed information about the ever changing weather and traffic; occasionally they’d mention concerts, events about town, and, if you were lucky, you’d find out just who that last artist was. The last an inconvenience I remember encountering, a frustrating confusion as to who the artist was for a Beatles-esque song that has just played. As it was independent radio, it wasn’t one of those immediately identifiable twenty or so songs permanently chiseled in rock playlist tunes; As I later figured out, by remembering the specific phrasing and style of the vocal sounds—of Robin Zander’s ever so slight British lilt and his similarities in delivery to one McCartney—it was Cheap Trick’s fantastic He’s A Whore. These things stay with you when you come to love a moment, intensified and equally worn away with each listen. Regional radio almost delivers, but in their near misses it adds to their overall characteristic defining not only your travels and experiences but where you’re from. 

But as I drive away from one of the few childhood memories of encountering a tune without an announcement of its title (and an absent DJ), it's the ever present radio bumper, in the case of my childhood, a direct from the late ‘80s bottom of the hour MIDI jingle that plays, as you meet the event horizon of the bridge meeting with the land as you enter the city and stare at the buildings your parents work in, and you’re reminded of a culture and application that maybe, just maybe for that brief moment everyone else is tuned in and turned onto the sounds and feelings you’re experiencing. The idea of connection with others via regional identity, maybe they know the title of the song that played. Sometimes I would stare deep into the lighted rooms of those we passed by in high buildings, some of them offices and some of them bedrooms with people decompressing and winding down, possibly in silence, possibly to the warm tones of a DJs voice. Do they want the information or do they want a sense of continuation in their lives? Are they finding solace in the speaker box? Is there something you, a child on a road trip at night, shouldn’t be seeing in the lower half of the window view? These people, potentially all tuned in, connected and collected bound by radio waves. I wondered if they cared about a consistent connection to where they were from and how it tied to their upbringing as well coming from said speaker.

An image formed in my mind from endless childhood experiences now turned into a reality as late night radio accompanies my solo traverses across the highway, it brought to my attention to the very idea of the radio and its purpose as a regional identifier. As a child, the previously mentioned and ever present classic rock and pop stations played early ‘70s stews of acoustic guitars, sultry vocals, and drums as dry as the air. Songs eternal and as long lasting as radio waves bouncing off satellites forever entering people's minds, whether they want to revisit that space, or whether they enter a Marshalls at two in the afternoon, shopping in the discount section at Christmas time for their siblings as juniors in college, not sure if they’ve grown as young teenagers in the time you’ve been away from home. These memories formed by music at these tender and sometimes unremembered moments, shaped increasingly by both regional radio, and increasing pressure to funnel mainstream radio playlists into a similar style often losing that sense of uniqueness in one's upbringing. 

Specifically Hall and Oates came to mind on this drive, a group whose very existence suspended itself upon the drive and passion of local fans, radio support, and DJs who kept them alive in the regional scene market of the 1970s. These fans realized their importance to hometown pride and supported them no matter what. While Hall and Oates came to rule the 1980s, they continued to carry with them their audience of rabid radio and concert bred fans via their collected singles oeuvre, which was enough to make Richard Gotterer salivate as the collected materials generated (and most likely continues to generate) enough revenue to power WXPN yearly. The acronym may change but the signals power stays the same. 

This was further impressed upon me when I watched Questlove's introduction of them into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame in 2004, when he mentioned hearing them for the first time as a child in Philadelphia, the eternal burning flame She’s Gone. In the speech Amir says he remembers hearing She’s Gone at age four back in 1973, specifically the high pitched near falsettoed warble “gooooonneeee,” coming at the peak after a near endless shepherd tone inducing rising half step key change, scaring him as a child. As a child, specific memories, tones, and sounds manifest themselves into our mind in such a way that they are only bested by smells and vision. The way we reinterpret memory as a consistent revisitation (every time you think of a memory it shifts in its existence upon each remembering) it becomes intensified to the point you could bottle and sell it as a bullion cube for the mind, a distillation of pure memory based out of a distinct moment in time, a time when your childhood mind was completely enraptured in something so pure and intense you just had to take notice and remember it—remember it at an age when something as simple as eating a hanger steak or breaking a toe might go completely unnoticed. This is intensified by where you are in your town, or perhaps on the road, hearing another hometowns radio music choices. That this young music loving Amir Thompson just so happened to remember one of the great soul singles of the ‘70s is nothing short of wonderful. 

But something stuck out to me, how and why did Amir hear this? The album the single was pulled from, Abandoned Luncheonette—the first really promising and great Hall and Oats album was released in 1973—wasn’t a bonafide hit on release. She’s Gone wasn’t a success until re-release in 1976. Amir heard it on the radio, cooped up in his parents house scared, the tune ended up releasing something akin to cold sweat and a inducing gut wrenching fear similar to hiding from the potential end of a scary story from a neighbor, or an incoming ass whooping from a parent for skimming the cream and drinking milk out of the glass jar at night. You never forget it.

She’s Gone was a big local hit in the hometown of Philadelphia for Hall and Oates, something not lost on the band. As a band you need any support you can get, and luckily for them their hometown was behind them from the beginning. While history has written that Minneapolis helped the LP become a hit before the 1976 re-release, the idea that it wasn’t a hit elsewhere is a bit of a misnomer. The idea of regional identity is born out of this very concept. Take for instance, the idea of music borne out of a single town/city in a period of time. The idea of Go-Go outside of any place aside from Washington DC is almost laughable. It could only exist out of musicians who either got stuck in the city and didn’t continue onto Detroit or Chicago or couldn’t hack it in larger cities, giving it a certain amateur charm brought on by angrily bitter semi-professionals who only work hard because they “could’ve made it”—disciplinarian types who felt they knew better than their successful counterparts. Stubbornness breeds difference. Go-Go’s funk-soul based grooves imbedded themselves into the DNA of dance parties throughout the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, spitting in the face of disco that was taking away it's thunder, and finding itself existing in the most unlikely of places, away from rehearsed dance choreography of James Brown, and in one Ian MacKaye as he was forming the genesis of Fugazi. A man whose career happens to be so tied to regional identity (Washington DC) it would be strange not to think of him as being supported by the entire community around their hometown favorite. 

Imagining hip hop not exploding out of the newly created portable devices of the boombox and Walkman, it makes no sense as it was the defining way to get your regional identity and pride over to the greater hip hop communities of The Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. These boroughs were all defined by a means of neighborhood incest and commingling, the idea of each borough being stronger and greater than yours, the incessant idea of an identity to have and to hold, who had the biggest fuck you of all embedded in the worship of the machismo and braggadocios pride of the young Kangol and Adidas wearing rappers. This is my turf and fight me with yours. I can almost hear the words now, sliding over a screamingly mid range ghetto blaster speaker barking the 808 cowbell in all its ear piercing glory. All of this only happens once communities are formed out of groups of people who believe they truly have something born out of their own world learned from local radio, record stores or television and brought to life via music. 

You can’t imagine Mr. Bungle existing outside of the college radio heyday of northern California, can’t conceptualize them without their being exposed to the twin poles shooting upwards and downwards in equal amounts from Los Angeles and Seattle/Portland, meeting high and low pressure systems in the San Francisco area, and giving them the greatness that is The Wipers, The Germs, and Camper Van Beethoven all at the same time (and in addition to being a major city receiving broadcast information from London) transmitting British Ska in the form of The Specials and Madness. Without this Mr. Bungle simply wouldn’t be the same. This of course is all in addition to Thrash Metal they were acquiring a taste for. Regional identity via the radio and its tapped vein of communication forming the minds and identities of those who come from there is an indispensable and beautiful idea that needs to never vanish. 

The idea of a larger growing regional identity spurred on by intense personalities and audiences was something that grew out of an ever expanding technological ideology and music business. The FM radio format bloomed in the late 60s as albums became the dominant medium for the growing rock, jazz, and progressive audiences tendencies. Music business and radio goes boom and in turn generates celebrities to show these young minds the way. Springsteen, meet David Dye, a Philadelphia DJ who was one of many in the ‘70s to take a chance and play Springsteen's LPs before anyone had even heard the opening snare hits to Born To Run. Yes and Pink Floyd, meet Alison Steele, The Nightbird who spoke in hushed tones over weed scented bedrooms across the five boroughs and scattered its sounds over gatefolded progressive rock albums, like a fog over a field late at night for impressionable young minds to fall asleep to. 

Entire albums of this ever building progressive rock audience were played at night to hundreds of thousands of listeners. B-52’s and Kraftwerk, meet The Electrifying Mojo, the legendary Detroit DJ who played the newest in New Wave, nascent Electro, and Disco; who introduced the Belleville Three to the strains of DNA that formed into Techno and Dance Music at large, and importantly informed younger listeners that no genre forms out of one specific sound, that dance music and hip hop came from its love of jazz, rock, and disco. Every post-punk band ever, meet John Peel, who needs no introduction, the list can continue until the Led Zeppelin LP hits the run out groove and the weed smoke becomes stale. 

Now these personalities were simply greater than a figurehead for an internet radio station, they were personalities, larger than life, but most importantly they did it on their own because they were allowed the freedom to do so in a market that benefited off of the audiences insatiable hunger for the music they were promoting because it sold. We mustn't forget that all of this was allowed to happen because money existed within the industry, that these people, often late at night, were allowed to flourish out of harm's way from a wagging business man’s finger, or the fear of a dollar bill waving its worn out welcome in front of your nose with a Bay City Rollers LP out of focus behind it. Not everyone was immune to this, as Howard Stern demonstrated when he famously quit a station as a DJ because they forced him to play country music and be christened Hop Along Howie. 

However, those that willed themselves to put their necks on the lines granted themselves the daring ability to play whatever they wanted (guaranteed that they earned it and made money and publicity for the station by earning an untapped audience of money spending potheads), and those same pot smoking teenagers and young adults (often in the suburbs and outside of a cities reach) would turn on their radios late at night while staring out of windows, far out of a televisions sight (remember this is the age when television signed off after 1am to the tune of the very un-progressive National Anthem), creating images left up to nothing more than the sounds of synthesizers, gatefold sleeves of Genesis, and a haze of smoke. 

You were often alone with the music for an entire side of an album, lending itself credence to the same thing others like yourself did alone along with the DJ, you were listening to these albums uninterrupted, watching the wax spin, transfixed at the music falling out of the speakers. A teenage fantasy of night stars and guitar solos, the dreams of millions, a reality cast across the sky, impressioning itself into the bedrooms through roller blinds, before rising to the ceiling and drifting through the vents into the wind to another listeners bedroom; a fantasy that created memories of a youth filled not yet with the optimism or fear of the future, but with what came next on the other side of the vinyl. This was something that happened in your neck of the woods, it was unique to your evenings no matter how boring your suburb was. If the city was cool so were the next 30 miles by proxy via signal. 

This wonderland of independent thought brought upon by a massive business was the first height of communal regional identification in an era when people never thought we’d be listening to music owned and codified by Clear Channel (and now algorithm-ed to hell and back by programs via IHeartRadio and now Spotify). Not all was pure in dreamland. Radio stations were ruled with iron fists and payola was just another way of giving a firm handshake: normal and part of the process. Stations run by older impresarios were afraid to run away from the money, controlling every little thing you said and did on the air, creating the forerunner to playlisted boring and trite “middle American stations”. Nothing says the spirit of radio like Bad Company and Juice Newton playing every hour on the hour. 

In retaliation to this, college radio in the wake of punk drove itself away from this braindead mainstream and played what it wanted whenever it wanted, granted that it was on low-wattage radio stations far out of reach by most commercial cars, barely reachable even by your 1st generation faded yellow (now orange) Walkman on campus, struggling to discern “is this the end of the song or one of those groups using tape loops?”, but you take the vehicle you are given to deliver your desires. It was a dizzying annoyance coupled by ever present radio silence and irritatingly amateur performances, but occasionally, you could capture a glimmer of a tune, a kernel away from the regular routine radio, a song by a new favorite even magazines in America weren’t touching be it Bauhaus or The The. American college radio was the new (yet scruffy, pridefully and woefully unprofessional) frontier. However, just as much as it was breaking in its orthopedic brown shoes, it was also conforming to the rules of its older muscle-brained brother. 

As the music business found itself in the corner of a new market run by independence, college radio being a new musical market, was bought and sold faster than a Minor Threat tune played at 45 rpm. By 1986 college radio was becoming more codified in money and reach just as quickly as The Del Fuegos said “another Budweiser please”. A world almost completely untouched by money (and, in most cases, student and listener funded via grants and tuition on college radio) found itself struggling to compete with larger stations and get access to artists and tour information and albums as easily as the bigger, badder stations. It was no shock when Fugazi, the royalty of independent groups took payola for college radio airplay (as if anyone wasn’t playing Waiting Room every hour across the nation from 1989-2002, truly the Bad Company of their day, how consistent). Infamously, college radio became the ire of a famous Spin magazine article in the late ‘80s regarding payola; control by record labels and the increasing grip metrics and money had over supposed independent stations, as college radio became a new market plowed out for various jangle and goth groups to thrive within, it wasn’t all cassette mixtapes scented with dollar signs. College radio, for all its imperfections with personalities, did hold onto a certain audience willing to play demo tapes, interview bands unheard of, and allowed and gave the inert and insecure audience something to mumble to and, in some cases, speak to. For the first time the curly haired and pimpled record store buyer who can’t even look into the eyes of the girl on the Dream Syndicate and Bengals album covers finally got a chance...at midnight on Tuesdays playing Husker Du loudly on WTJU to nothing but rolling cattle. The increasing rise of conformity of independence into a uniform market of college radio stations meant the idea of regionalism and uniqueness slowly drifted away into the glory days of CMJ Top Albums being mentioned every hour: aka “this is what all of us are supposed to listen to” and not “this is what's coming from your neck of the woods and my personal choice”. Suddenly, sticking your neck out and turning people on started seeming like a risk rather than a reward. 

Regardless of college radios eventual failure to stay truly independent, it unsurprisingly grew into the realm of professionalism akin to the Z100s of the world, and, despite it dwindling, the idea of college and independent radio being a beacon of alternate information, something far away from the codified world of the daily similarities we all heard and faced from NBC and your sisters transistor radio blaring Bananrama remained: the internet reared its shiny face. Herein there also lies a problem: the ease of automation, streaming, and algorithm makes one wonder, do personalities in an increasingly codified medium run by so few companies reaching the largest audience create new and greater personalities with those who are willing to play new and daring music for a young and impressionable audience? Is there anybody out there? 

Assuming that anyone turns on the radio to hear the weather let alone hear factoids about music they listen to (or even have most likely read in an interview published online earlier that day that the more seasoned of music obsessives have already read at 7:30 am) is a fallacy and folly. No one tunes into the radio for information in the same way because the speed, ease of access , and use of the internet and social media in our daily lives has changed that in the same way that no one turns into late night television to see everyone’s takes on current events (barring certain exceptions as the case always is), but on a larger level radio was begat by television which was begat by the internet and its various channels. Content on radio and television by way of the “take” was begat by first the blog, and then Twitter. 

The greatest of careers in any medium that affect change with their viewpoint and information are those with the greatest and most impactful personality we see or hear. The Tonight Show in its prime benefited from the entire national audience tuning in to see a beaming Johnny Carson nightly skewer the news’ headlines (granted there were three national television stations at this time), but it was Johnny's pure natural talent and ability to connect and provide high level (and smart) entertainment for a wide audience that created his lasting appeal. To this day I think about his laugh alone being a standard for something truly being funny. John Peel succeeded because his warm voice and dry humor allowed itself to feel like he was chumming along with you and other disaffected youths and music obsessives, at willing to tune in nightly to a radio show that not only played great and new music (both on wax and live), but to someone who acted as someone with a finger on the pulse and the personality of the cool somewhat humorous despondent older brother who vacationed in Europe and read a bit too much Camus and Douglas Adams. 

Every faceless and nameless college DJ spinning Animal Collective, Guadalcanal Diary, and Elliott Smith cassette demos that stuttered their way through faulty transmission wire via static and haze on less than stellar microphones reached you because you looked to them for the newest and greatest music in a world you dedicated yourself to, acknowledging (and in some cases) looking past its failures in favor of the music and potential tour information, fundraises, club gigs, and content provided to you for free at your local college. Most importantly it reminded itself of you, the listener. You were a direct representation of these DJs and this culture, a nameless faceless untapped world of bumbling young men and women willing to take the plunge into faulty communication, and sometimes, into a sound that was so comforting it was almost a friend; it oftentimes was a friend for these lonely people: where do they all belong exactly? It was a world untapped by greater monies because and in most cases due to its lack of professionalism and personality, but this is exactly why you tuned in. It wasn’t trying and put on, it was exactly the opposite. This in turn forms its own identity. 

In a classic thesis for the defense and wistful love of regional identity came Donald Fagan’s The Nightfly. A direct engulfment of emotion behind this, the idea that someone somewhere out there, past the suburban tree lines of home was transmitting to you a new optimistic (yet sarcastically coated) present existence of music not heard elsewhere. The idea that a DJ sounds like he’s from Manhattan yet because of his accent you know he’s from your neighborhood, maybe you could be like him too. The Nightfly came out at the perfect time, addressing the then aging boomer rock audience that they too were aging along with its creator and slowly starting to reflect (and possibly become soft in their middle age) about the lives they were promised, the music they grew to love and reference daily with others (or alone), the personalities they based themselves off of (some Chesterfields and java for the late night shift?), and ultimately the music that provided them an escape into the culture born out of hipsterdom, by way of a muted trumpet reflecting off of payned suburban glass, muting itself again on a worn cotton pillowcase stained with cigarette ash snuck through the gap in the window sill. These were the memories, nights, and moments you reflected forever, the evenings of pure theater, the person who rocked you to sleep, where are they now, these five o’clock heroes? Sometimes they fade away and sometimes they keep transmitting on new mediums, you just have to find them. 

The idea of not finding a central personality to rally behind in the age of the internet isn’t something lost forever, more than ever the personality driven by word of mouth via the internet is stronger than it ever was. It sure isn’t helped by the infinite avenues opened up by the internet, but that doesn’t mean people can’t find common ground and love of a person based on what (and more importantly how) they deliver. The overall idea of everyone tuning in together is stronger than ever, from YouTube and Twitch streaming of content to fan base and led communities of Discord allowing people with unique and personal tastes define themselves by what they play or hear in the voice channel, giving itself back to the days of college radio, a community meeting together over a central personality moderating discussion or content. This ideology was broken up by the non-linear structure of the internet, but ultimately in the smallest corners was not completely ruined by it (you just had to know where to look). While the idea behind being from a place is broken up due to the internet, the idea of being so unique you find others like you forms its own style of regionalism albeit on the internet. 

Social media created an ability to replace and expand the audience and group of peers. It ultimately altered the feeling of collective experience, not eradicating it (despite what bummer-ladened older siblings tell you at Thanksgiving.) As much as one would love to return to the days of the Fireside Chat, all staring at the radio near the darkened evening window waiting for someone to deliver them the promises and truths of tomorrow, let's be real, you’d never go back to dealing with static, wrapping aluminum foil around the bunny ears, and banging the ever living daylights out of your grandfather's Telco radio set that you still haven’t thrown out. However, in a fit of Luddite-induced groaning, the car radio is the last bastion of the situation that meets the memory inducing experience we have. There must be a purpose in the future personalities and material for it to thrive behind to give reason and existence to a new audience similar to radio. We cannot lose this collective social subjugation. The idea of being from somewhere combined with the idea of transmitting your experiences in the towns you grew up in with others halfway across the world is what keeps curiosity and excitement growing. 

A dream of mine is to reintroduce the bygone ‘70s era relic of the nightly live FM show. While it's been replaced with video streaming that doesn’t mean it still can’t be done. It's easier than ever to bring wireless gear into local clubs via consoles, computers, cameras and cables and air it live, tonight, on 93.1 KARP. No longer do you have to rent and back up The Rolling Stones’ mobile truck to a venue and haul hundreds of feet of fifty pound feeder cable into a venue in hopes that some drunk coke dealer moron doesn’t spill his overpriced gin and tonic on it while flirting with the venue manager (hint: she’s so not interested in you). The ability to get the towns independent radio station to align itself with local colleges (spurring on careers and potential social networks), to get camera people and audio engineers working together in every venue nightly to bring the townsfolk of radio/streaming audiences (and hopefully the country/world) a view into what makes a city so special. See mom, we’re networking and building careers. 

Nightly performances from rap showcases will bring young kids out from every neighborhood into clubs getting their first tastes of nightlife (and taste of overpriced french fries and free water in plastic recyclable cups no doubt) brings in a new audience to create a network around. Larger theaters can produce performances of local jam bands and metal groups to the young musos and potheads, in the way that FM progressive radio catered to young Zappa fans across the Manhattan area in the 70s. Gone are the days of JBTV and We Have Signal and the endless yapping about state funding for public access, only for tens of people to watch once a month drunk at night at their grandmothers house on a weekend in college because she only gets PBS on her old Magnavox television, and has old grape wine that has somehow generated more alcohol. So far the idea of a new age of public access, social networking, and consistent nightly events is the future of the burgeoning and nascent city life, opening itself to younger people and newer residents willing and able to see the city and its events from ballparks, to restaurants and live music. Remember dear reader, nothing beats a live music show. If it helps the city and its publicity, it helps the funding, which means better concerts and bigger draws (take that angry music fans who live in smaller cities who wanted to see Black Dice in 2005 but lived in Bozeman Montana!) Form your identity and share it with the world. There are so many scattered forms of streaming and downloadable media and culture that it drives a music fan crazy that there isn’t one central place to absorb it all. The record store may be gone but coffee houses with internet still exist. The meeting place. 

Going forward, radio stations (and other available mediums similar) should rally behind the idea of a regional identity. Music is about social connection and experience, whether you isolate yourself from others in a room tied to a radio (remember, you’re still listening to regional independent radio), or your need to dance in a club and stay up until 3 A.M., talking about fretting positions on a stand up bass after hearing Sting play confusingly and confoundingly; after a Botch track makes the musos perk their ears up sleepily after downing multiple Miller High Lifes. The community fostered around a collective love of music should be heeded with the advancements of social media in our current age. It should be a point that the majority of holed up internet music types should venture out into the unknown, away from their bedrooms, into the scary and evil...the outside...with other people! 

Think about what can be done if you worked for it. The fundraisers, the meeting with other college stations if you’re a college radio DJ, the concerts, the bar bashes, the record store/book store/comic stores, the endless opportunities for people like you to meet is something that should never be lost. The consistent complaint of “there is no one out there like me” is one of immature ignorance and should be quelled just as soon as you meet other unshowered gregarious dorks who also like XTC. They may not look pretty but they sure have pure souls. The endless social interactions, the meeting of the minds, the ideas that hold themselves forever in the court of ball bustings; of late night hang outs next to the nicest stereo in the apartment complex in a post-grad life as future critics, comic artists, and musicians all yet again begin to argue about the latest industry pin-up and singer songwriter, to complain about and discuss the consistent lack of enjoyable new music. Never change...or should we change? 

If we don’t change now we end up an unruly type, a lonely grizzled persona constantly moving from car to radio booth, hauling the same attitude we did years before, starting up the console with the puff of a sigh ready to shoot out signal to who may possibly be the only radio listener of the evening. 

As I start to enter back towards my old house, now firmly out of the city and into the suburbs where I had grown, each tree line, power line, and white line laid out across the road remind me of a different moment in my childhood, never changing but repeatedly opening up tiny fragments of memories unremembered, or perhaps untapped. They remind me of the children we were when we tuned into tacky loud talk radio that discussed loud rock and roll and whether Nas was really going to name his album the N Word. The trees, evergreen almost to an annoying fault, remind me of the aggravatingly unchanging world both inside my mind and outside my house that reaches into my memories as I see them across the neighborhoods I once walked, now only taller much like me. I remember how early it was when I first heard The Beatles’ music and how often I returned to it, often gazing at the same trees or skyline as you pine for the song to repeat or perhaps the moment. The annoyance of it pushed out by more of a desire to grow than to reflect, maybe soothed by the lighting of a cigarette, something you think you’d never turn to but occurs with more and more frequency, the smoke and initial light giving you instant reminders of moments past and present recurring in your mind, thank you for not smoking, smoking or not smoking, I light another cigarette, learn to forget, learn to forget. 

Fittingly the DJ, elder in his presence and grace of speech lays out the final track of his evening, yet another potential bid in finding common attraction via love of music, pulls out of the worn yet trusty vinyl sleeve, the FM post ‘70s era classic Discipline by King Crimson its career defining rocker Indiscipline off of the album Discipline. The song is introduced by the DJ with the slightest hint of dry humor in the ridiculousness that is based around an album that its title track is ever so slightly different than the album itself, is oh so subtly picked up by the music listener but is unsure enough whether the seasoned vet means what he says, he contemplates calling in but is stopped for some reason. 

The DJs show has been based around playing his favorites over the years, the blaringly loud and a blinkering warning sign of someone out of ideas yet returning to the same well of youth musically, coming back to those same feelings felt at a young age. It was this child who was too scared by the sound of the symphony of A Day in The Life who now treasures it, cherishing the memory that was once based around fear is now something to laugh at, realizing that the younger man saw the dawn of music in his life was brought on by a rising dissonance. The emotions once processed by dreaming (whether asleep or awake) set to music as means of an escape was the only option in a youth filled with chosen dissonance leading to pleasure. His dreams now exist firmly as a sobering reality, this is what happens when you dream too much as he suddenly snaps back into focus, realizing that by the 2nd verse he is staring at his own reflection yet past it at the same time, as another bid at recaptured happiness through nostalgia consistently relieved via playing the same song again and again isn’t working. He wondered if someone had potentially called in earnestly saying “I love them too, let's grab lunch sometime” or “who is this I love this” losing the chance that maybe, just maybe he would hand them the 1st edition copy of the vinyl. 

Another uneventful evening in hoping you could change someone's life or maybe yours, potentially, is gone. He forgets you cannot smoke in the studio, but lights up a cigarette defiantly, yet pointed at no one but a lingering dissent in his mind—possibly invented—which by now is so automatic it's sickening. He hasn’t flicked it in over two minutes, the ash slowly building up as he stares into space. The smoke glides up past his fingertips, grazing his starch white shirt up towards his ever thinning eyebrows, above his pin black eyes. The track arrives at the point in the song where Adrian Belew declares repetitively “it remains consistent” as the track hits the inevitable vinyl skip. It repeats but the needle isn’t lifted as the DJ is too lost in his eternal loneliness brought on by a lifelong loss of emotional discipline as it passes through the airwaves, “it remains consistent..it remains consistent..it remains consistent..it remains consistent..it remains consistent..it remains consistent..” 

Let's not end up sad and alone like the DJ above. We have new ways of communication. If we don't fight against this, stagnation happens and we fade away. In the age of the internet and in real life, as long as we band together, utilizing all of the aforementioned ideals is what will make a music loving community stronger regardless of the format. The connection of a greater collective community and distribution of information is incredibly important for our future.