Queen - Radio Ga Ga

To, For, and By Me on My 44th Birthday

1. My first great love, before the sea, before records, and even before Elisabeth Shue clinging to her bedposts singing The Crystals’ And Then He Kissed Me in Adventures in Babysitting, was the radio. Oh, how sweet it was. Those small but mighty transistors spoke to me, whispered secrets and howled truths, hummed melodies just for me. In my formative years, navigating the tumultuous waters of grade school alliances, hiding from my parents, and growing increasingly unsettled with my education, I found solace in those airwaves as they offered the kindest of comfort: tea and sympathy and tunes. As I drifted between being alone and being lonely, I pursued an alternative education. It was an education that served me better and longer than what I was getting elsewhere, but then again, I was always a little strange.

   For upwards of three hours each day, I tuned into a cheap, seafoam green radio, day after day and year after year. In the mid-1980s, some visionary bought a radio station in East Lansing, Michigan — WIBM, 94.1 FM. It was the nation's first true oldies station, playing rock and roll's earliest tunes to doo-wop's sweet "Ooh Oohs." I soaked in the rhythms of Motown, the sounds from Memphis, the first glorious wave of the British Invasion, the Brill Building's magic, and glorious pop music up to, but not including the first outrageous psychedelic era.

   I fell in love with Ronnie Spector when she sang to me and me alone, promising she wanted me to be her baby. I felt the ecstatic release of Tommy James and The Shondells' Mony Mony, though its meaning eluded me. I sang garbled words into a dozen hairbrushes, trying in vain to decipher The Kingsmen's Louie Louie while reveling in its pure, eager simplicity. I know I’m not alone in this matter because Queen agrees with me in full-throated exultation. Written by the most underrated percussionist of the rock era, Roger Taylor, and sung by a queer man from Zanzibar with the most famous overbite in music history. I don’t need to name names with that one… Radio Ga Ga isn’t a song to me. Radio Ga Ga is the opening paragraph of my autobiography.

   I'd sit alone and watch your light
   My only friend through teenage nights
   And everything I had to know
   I heard it on my radio

   -Queen, Radio Ga Ga

   For a rail-thin natural introvert with a kinky head of Jewish hair, that seafoam green radio was a kind of synagogue. It was my house of worship and brothers and sisters of the cloth, I fucking worshipped.

   Hey Mr. DJ, won't you hear my last prayer?
   Hey ho, rock 'n' roll, deliver me from nowhere

   -Bruce Springsteen, Open All Night

   I aped and strutted like a cocksure Mick Jagger, howled and wailed like a lovesick Otis Redding, and played world-class air guitar. Eat your heart out Jimi. I danced in the mirror, on my bed, and in the shower. I was liberated, joyous, and everything I wanted to be beyond my house's walls. Pop songs illustrated in perfect, rhyming terms that others felt the same way. Sam Cooke understood me, Simon and Garfunkel too. The Grass Roots stood the watch some nights, so did The Association, and all Four Tops.

2. In moments of trauma and pain, some real, some imagined, in times of homesickness, and in times of longing for a place I’ve never been, in moments of ecstatic joy and profound happiness, the radio has always known what I need in every singular moment. I still believe this to be true. We have a telepathic relationship. I recall the moments after enduring a beating hearing John Lennon preach out over the radio about shining on, and I was baptized in my own tears. I was able to endure. I remember feeling a profound emptiness and anger while eastbound on I-64 driving a ‘77 Chevy steakbed in the small hours of the morning and the classic country station I was tuned into played Waylon’s Lonesome, On’ry and Mean. The radio did that just for me. This phenomenon recurred through the years. The radio provided nourishment when I needed it, what the Flaming Lips would call Transmissions from the Satellite Heart. Thousands of songs returned to me as my life story took shape, visiting me as I traveled the spectrum of human emotion.

   The radio also gifted me hundreds of ballgames. I still prefer it to what Bart Giamatti called the all-falsifying television. I can recall with alarming clarity Ernie Harwell’s cherry wood voice broadcasting Tigers’ games from the corner of Michigan and Trumbull in the Motor City. I recall the chilly October night when I heard Magglio Ordóñez send one out in the bottom of the ninth to send the Tigers to the 2006 World Series over the radio while hanging shelves in my San Diego apartment.

   I’ve heard preachers preaching the old-time gospel as I streaked across the Great Plains. I’ve heard surf reports from the California coast as I careened through Steinbeck country. I’ve heard bizarre tales of UFO abductions on coast-to-coast AM signals, border radio blasting at 100,000 watts of power or more. I’ve heard swamp boogie, and rodeo results, murder mysteries and espionage dramas, smokehouse blues and school closures, the good time music and the Bo Diddley beat, blissful pop from a bygone era and juke joint blisterstring sets that sound like all of Austin, Texas might just explode. I’ve heard, I’ve heard, for the love of all things holy I’ve heard the great revelatory power towers beaming a signal out, ricocheting off the belly of the atmosphere, and terminating directly inside my brain housing group.

   I love this new channel I've found
   I love that record
   I love that noise
   This frequency's my favourite toy

   -Slade, Radio Wall of Sound

3. I don't regret the hours with the radio. I regret that my life is more ill-rhymed and ill-timed than any of those songs, except when I reveal the bright lights of my soul. I carry on beatifically facing my own precarious mortality, embracing the sometimes reckless aspects of myself and smiling inward. My song, THAT song, the NEXT song becomes prayer and deliverance, mischief and wisdom, and that boyhood seclusion fades as my own instrument gets in tune. I truly did learn more from a three-minute record than I ever learned in school, and I know in my heart of hearts that radio has yet to have its finest hour. It’s an instrument for communing with the dead, an electric Quija board for planet Earth. It’s a device that crackles to life with your new favorite sound. It rarely gives me what I want, but somehow, improbably, gives me what I need.

   Radio, what's new?
   Radio, someone still loves you

   -Queen, Radio Ga Ga