One of the
things I got when I leased a new Ford Fusion a little over a year ago was
Sirius Radio. It wasn’t something I asked for specifically, but it was part of
the package that came with the car and I said why not. It’s turned out to be a welcome
addition.
For the
last 30 years or so, I’ve barely used the radio in any of my cars. About the
only occasion, really, has been to listen to a baseball or football game during
a long drive, and situationally to see if I could get news about a traffic
snarl from KCBS in San Francisco.
The rest of
the time I’ve pretty much listened to tapes, or, increasingly, nothing at all,
preferring to use my drive time for thinking. It’s a measure of my estrangement
from vehicular sound systems that the car before this one was a 2001 model that
was the last of its kind to have a tape deck rather than a CD player. And it
mattered so little that I didn’t feel cheated.
The Rat Pack Will Never Die
Sirius has
brought me back to radio and the joy of accidental discovery. There are so many
channels and so many pleasant surprises that it’s hard to decide what to listen
to. Backstage at the Met with Metropolitan Opera radio, or getting the latest
Broadway dish from Seth Rudetsky and Christine Pedi on the Broadway channel?
Wade Jessen’s look at the week in country music history on Classic Country or
the World News on BBC?
Not
surprisingly for an older guy, I find myself gravitating to the music of my
youth. The Sixties and Seventies music channels are the first two
pre-programmed on the radio, and I listen to them a lot — great road music and
I know most of the songs.
But lately
I’ve found myself spending a lot of time with another blast from the past. That
would be Channel 71, the Sinatra/American Songbook station. It is, in one
sense, the music I grew up on, but it wasn’t my music at the time. It was my
parents’ music, and I mostly tuned it out back then. But now I’m surprised at
how it speaks to me, and how hearing some of those performers I grew up with
gives me a fresh appreciation for their talent.
Getting Over Past Prejudices
Coming of
age in the Sixties, I soaked up the conventional wisdom of my peers, which
included such arrant nonsense as, “Dean Martin was just a bum doing a bad drunk
act,” and “Nat King Cole was just an Uncle Tom who wasn’t true to where he came
from.”
Listening
to them sing, decades after they’re gone and on a good sound system, their
virtues become obvious. Martin was a great singer, whose words came from his
mouth like a great whiskey, slowly poured. He took Bing Crosby’s crooning to
the next level. And how could I not have noticed at the time how wonderful and
distinctive Cole’s voice was — clear and pure like a mountain stream. Jim
Morrison had a similar clarity and purity, but in an altogether different
style.
Then there
were the women. Rosemary Clooney and Peggy Lee were dames, in the best sense of
the word. Billie Holliday had a voice whose cracks mirrored the cracks in her
heart. And Julie London almost seemed to be exhaling cigarette smoke with every
word. I’d forgotten all that, but now I remember — and just because my old car
broke down badly and I had to get a new one.
