THE PRIMORDIAL SOUP
When I was a kid I had a couple of friends. I connected to them in the way you connect when mutual interests align but you haven't yet cultivated the skillset that enables real intimacy.
Sure we could get excited about spending time together, exploring the mysteries of combustion with a magnifying glass , or combustion using various chemicals appropriated from my brothers chemistry set. Mmm, combustion.
We could enact imaginative military operations that played out in the spaces between houses or in the ravine at the park using old beat up hockey sticks as machine guns.
We could set up our little plastic toy soldier sets and wage a rubber band assault on the enemy armies, even though the real battle was the decision over who had to be the Nazis that day.
When we weren't “playing war”, or riding around on bicycles with baseball cards taped to the forks to emulate the sound of a motorcycle , we conducted expeditions into the record collections of our older siblings and finding colourful, freaky treasures therein, like Frank Zappa's “Titties and Beer” or The Sex Pistols “God Save the Queen." Or Queen's “Get Down Make Love” from News of the World, alongside the staples that formed the concrete foundations of our musical brains, like the Beatles, The Kinks, The Pretenders, The Stones and on and on. All on a Sunday afternoon in a suburban living room (with furniture covered in plastic noone was really allowed to use unless it was a special occasion)
But of all these experiences there was one which stands out in my memory above all.
I had this friend, A friend who came whenever I summoned them, and always with a bounty of surprise and magic along with them. A friend that never slept and would travel great distances, sometimes thousands of miles to show up with something new. A friend who could serendipitously key into my emotional state and speak to it profoundly and privately in a way that left no doubt, no doubt whatsoever that I was not alone in the world.
No I am not talking about a drug dealer. Well sort of, if music is a drug.And the first time was free. So was second, third and all the rest. I am of course speaking of the radio.
Before I got a record player, before I started hanging out at the Mall getting up to no good, which either involved going to Little Critters and trying to get the parrot to swear or endless flipping through bins of LPs and 45's and deciding which would win the contest to blow whatever little bit of money I had saved up working for my dad on weekends , before all that was radio.
Radio, the primordial soup of musical imagination.
My first sustained experience with pure magic. The experience that hits you in the deepest part of your consciousness and arrives fully formed without any rational explanation, serendipity. Miracles. For me these all came in the form of any number of different songs coming out of the tiny universe that lived inside my radio.
Not a multi thousand dollar Macintosh amplifier pumping a high quality pressing of a classic recording played on a super sexy turntable with a stylus that cost more than all the shoes I have ever owned playing through Tannoy speakers that looked like they were from the future.
A transistor radio, powered by a disposable 9 volt battery picking up invisible transmissions that were always in the air and playing them through a speaker that was about the same size as the one in a telephone earpiece.
I took it everywhere. On the long family car trips all over the US we took every summer, to the corner store to buy baseball cards, comic books, bubble gum, and sodas from the pop shoppe. Out into the marshy expanse behind the church to go look for frogs and guppies amongst the cat tails and weeds. And to the most critical point of convergence of all, under the blankets in bed at night. Lights out meant it was all up to the ears now. The ears and the imagination.
There is a phenomenon that occurs at night known as ionospheric propagation. There are these layers of high density electrons in the ionosphere, about 1000 miles above the earth's surface. I won't get too deep into the science but during the day the sun's radiation makes it so that the radio waves below 40 MHz , which are the ones affected by the ionosphere, are limited in their ability to travel significant distance. At night, when the sun stops exerting it's influence, one of the denser layers of the ionosphere disappears and another two merge, and these sub 40 MHz radio waves begin to skip off the ionosphere and reflect between the ionosphere and the ground, and suddenly they are travelling vast distances, unpredictably and intermittently. This primarily affects shortwave signals, but also AM radio.
This means that instead of just being able to pick up local transmissions on the AM radio ( back then there was a ton of music on am radio and not just a bunch of windbags trying to sell water purification systems, gold, and survival food by striking terror into the hearts of seniors, which the last time I checked was pretty much all you find on am radio nowadays),you could pick up stations from hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
You would have to tune the dial very gingerly, and strains of music would come in and out, but now there was a much bigger adventure involved. Picking up stations from all over the northern states, and when I would get a hold of my dad's shortwave radio, from all over the world.
Strains of sounds from New Orleans to China. Rock and Roll. Pop. Disco. Brass Bands.Big Bands.Big Brass Bands. The static infused strains of a Chinese singer.The Year of the Cat. Sultans of Swing. Rod Stewart wondering if you thought he was sexy. Bill Wyman's hypnotic take on the disco bassline. An endless string of ABBA songs. Dr John. One of any number of iconic sax solos from Baker Street to the one you hear when you Take a Walk on the Wild Side.The arrestingly dramatic high pitched harmonies of the Brothers Gibb proclaiming tragedy and fights for survival. Charlene's bizarre lament about never having been to herself, before the onset of irony. Louis Armstrong's joie de vivre, like he is right there somewhere in the wires, singing the way he plays trumpet and playing trumpet the way he sings, till in a reverie, the difference is no longer discernible.
Before the tribal implications of musical taste. Before video killed the radio star.
Strange transmissions in the stillness of the suburban night. Rapt, passive. Every twist of the dial was a roll of the dice, a chance to discover something new, or hear something familiar.
All washing over an 8 years olds sleep deprived brain.
In my imagined version of the discovery fire there is a moment out of time that flared up in the imaginations of Homo Erectus. Before the realization that the flame could be used to keep warm, or cook food, or scare off the howling wild beasts that stalked them in the night. A moment of pure infinite wonder, absent of doubt, or design. or any of the other burdens of thought.
Eventually I got a tape recorder which gave me the ability to catch the fire. Then records. Then I learned to start my own fires with a guitar and a notebook. All with its own magic, all driven by a desire to get back to that pure spontaneity of that initial sustained first contact.
But as Sade sang, much later when I could afford records, “It's never as good as the first time” ……