Word: radioing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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WHRB, (95.3 FM) got its head together Saturday with its first rock show in 10 years to the strains of the overwhelming Chuck Berry classic, "Rock and Roll Music" ("any old time you choose it"). The radio station had persistently refrained from Rock & Roll over the last decade, presumably to avoid sullying its air channels with anything so low-brow as a dancing beat. But there is no keeping down a good backbeat ("you can't lose it") and the new hour-long rock program will be broadcast at 6 p.m. on Saturdays for the rest of the year...
Good horror, like good art, depends on suggestion. The masters of horror are those who force the audience to use their own imaginations, to conjure their own terrors. (As the chestnut goes, Hollywood could never match radio for glamorous sets.) Freaks own director, Tod Browning, had just finished Dracula, where audiences never actually saw so much as a fang or a drop of blood...
...their most musical moments have been on records, particularly on their latest LP, The Who Sell Out. Cleverly framed in the breathless format of top-40 radio, this album mixes authentic station breaks, charmingly unpretentious songs (I Can't Reach You; Silas Stingy) and semi-satiric commercials (Heinz Baked Beans and Odorono, a deodorant). The album is The Who's imaginative antidote to the greatest danger they see in rock today: its solemnity...
Sheed has already disclosed in a prologue what all this leads to. In later life, James Bannister becomes owner and resident propagandist of two right-wing radio stations in California. Aloof and "Eastern" in the West, he fervently eulogizes his conception of a departed America while railing against English decadence in an incurable English accent. But Sheed's tale is more than an ironic pathology of the right-wing mind, more, even, than a wry diagnosis of a severely fractured nationality. It also captures the comic anguish of a youth who begins to understand himself just at the moment...
Even this grisly story is lightened by comic touches. Charley's family gathers gloomily around the radio and hears Gabriel Heatter, the doom-laden commentator, warn "of dreaded pyorrhea." On another occasion, Charley, in adolescent bravado, adds "the suicide caper to his repertoire of small talk, using it to fascinate women." Alas, it only bores them. As a companion piece to Factory, the story sharply emphasizes Sheed's overall theme: the harmful consequences of clutching at visions of the past, whether they are mythical but life-sustaining visions like Jimmy's or real but death-dealing ones...