Tag: Radio Primer (radio play)

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Old-time Radio Primer: F Stands for Free

The dictionaries only manage to define it by telling us what it is not. It is such a troublesome little word, yet so attractive. “Free,” I mean. It has a lot to do with commercial broadcasting—the wireless with strings attached—which is why I am taking the liberty to include it in my old-time radio primer.  The state of being “free” is generally thought of as the absence of some restricting force or entity. However positive, it is a want we are wont to capture by negation. You are free to skip this line, by the way, unless, of course, you are somehow compelled to read on. Am I encroaching on your liberties by subjecting you to yet another sentence, by sentencing you to yet another subject? Go on, it is complimentary. And considering that wars are being fought over it, it is hardly a matter of no matter.

“Free” is so overused, misused and corrupted a lexical commodity that you have every reason to grow suspicious of anything offered on such terms—particularly that tautological fallacy of the “free gift” (with every purchase, no less). Eventually, you begin to wonder whether a word that only exists as an opposite, and exists only to be turned into that opposite, has any meaning at all.

If being free is the sensation of doing or being without, then freedom might very well be poverty, deprivation, and thraldom. Even if it is understood to mean doing or being without something on your own accord, you might want to take a moment of your spare time to consider how did you arrive at that accord, that agreement, without being under some forceful influence, and thus not free?

Here is the obligatory verse. It, too, is free this time:

“Free” is what looks good . . .
because you like the sound of it.
“Free” is what tastes good . . .
even if it smells funny.
“Free” is what feels good . . .
although it makes no sense at all.

In America, radio was being touted as a purveyor of gratis entertainment. And gratis deserves gratitude. You didn’t have to drop a nickel into the machine for every song or program you wanted to hear, even though the machine itself was no mean crystal set, but one of those expensive new console models that looked so nice in the advertisement and, the salesperson said, would fit so well into your living room. After all, you wouldn’t want to look cheap when handing out treats to your important dinner guests (the business kind, who could do something for you).

How comforting the thought that the entertainment at least was being paid for by someone who was also charitable enough to take care of all those who toiled and performed for your amusement over at the broadcasting studio, those big and expensive-looking facilities like the ones over at Radio City, which you’d love to visit some day, if only you had enough time or money for a trip to New York.

No need to get sarcastic. You are under no obligation to tune in tomorrow, as the announcer keeps insisting, although you sure would like to know whether Superman, “bombarded by livid bolts of atomic energy, and buried now for almost an hour,” will manage to save Metropolis or whether that “girl from a mining town in the West” can really “find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman”—especially now that she was being threatened by Lord Henry’s evil twin. Yes, you could turn it off. The freedom of it!

Sure, they’ve all got something to sell. That’s nothing, if hours of carefree listening can be had for just that—nothing. That’s why Jack Benny could make you laugh on the Lucky Strike Program last night and Nelson Eddy sang for you and the Chase and Sanborn people (the thought of which reminds you to get coffee at the market tomorrow—and to make it Sanka, just to show them)! It’s a free market.

So what if those who offered this free service really took it from you in the first place and used it for their own purposes! So what if they expected a little something—or rather a lot—in return for taking over the airwaves you quite forgot were free. You could always write a letter and complain, if it got out of hand. That was your right, as a taxpayer.

Perhaps we ought to remove the word from our vocabulary. It seems so much easier than striving for something so elusive. Feel free to differ.

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Old-time Radio Primer: C Stands for Crooner

Well, I am mad about music this weekend, or something remotely resembling it. After fifteen years of going without while living in the Eurotrash-resisting US, I finally got another hit of it last spring. The Eurovision Song Contest, I mean, the spectacle (or cultural war) in whose battles have fought the likes of Celine Dion, Olivia Newton-John, Abba, Lulu, Cliff Richards, Katrina and the Waves, and whoever it was first to belt out “Volare.” Thursday night’s semi-finals in Athens were predictably vulgar—short on fabric and long on fanfare, feuds and fanaticism.

Gone are the days in which a song could be sold without a dance, in which lyrics could catch the ear while the eye got a rest, on in which a chart-topper could have legs without the exposure of gams (assets that rarely hurt but failed Kate Ryan in her attempt to step up for Belgium).

So, my Norman Corwin-inspired Old-time Radio Primer, a lexical expedition of yesterday’s airwaves that got underway with definitions of “audience” and “broadcastellan“ will pay tribute today to a craze that is as closely associated with radio as the set itself; to the vocal chords that, if Marion Davies’s experience in Going Hollywood is to be believed, ensnared a generation, made youngsters rebel and schoolmarm’s swoon; in short, the crooners and their tunes.

The crooners seized the advantage of the sonic close-up, the proximity to the microphone that can lend force to a whisper, a subtlety and intimacy hard to achieve in a crowded auditorium. They performed for an unprecedented multitude, but, coming home into parlor or boudoir, could always create the illusion of reaching everyone separately, singly, and, if imagined so by the listener, secretly as well.

Having no voice to match the tones of Rudy Vallée or Bing Crosby—whose “Temptation” still sends me—I will salute the much-mocked crooner with some slight but only slightly irreverent verse I penned for the occasion:

Well-oiled enough to wrestle
And steady enough to grind
It finds a niche to nestle
In the ever so obstinate mind.

Well-groomed enough for cocktails
And flashy enough to blind
It sticks when other crock fails
In the ever so obstinate mind. 

Well-heeled enough to dally
Obliging enough to bind:
The crooner and his sally
On the ever so obstinate mind. 

The crooner and his bally-
hoo,
of the
ever so obstinate
no-chance-you-will-forget
cure’s-not-discovered-yet
match-that-your-mind-has met
(more? how about a bet?) kind.

With the notable exception of Mr. Vallée, crooners quickly came to resent the term, insisting, like Crosby, to be billed or labeled otherwise (a simple “baritone” would do). After all, as much as they were adored by the radio listeners of the 1930s, who fantasized about American idols like Vallée, their “Vagabond Lover,” the crooners were widely dismissed or ridiculed by the press, whose writers might have felt threatened by these newly emerging voices, vocal Valentinos whose low, lavender tones seemed to have so much more erotic sway than can be generated by the most aggressive and boisterous Winchellean journalese.

To the chauvinists of the tabloids, radio had opened a Pandora’s voice box, and what poured out into the air to impregnate the imagination of millions was a provokingly and intimidatingly potent seed, strongly suggesting that such sounds could be mightier than the pen.

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On This Day in 1941: Radio Listeners Get a "Primer" on Their Favorite Pastime

Well, I really ought to have it checked. My memory, I mean. Here I am celebrating the wonders of old-time radio and plum forgot the birthday of the medium’s foremost writer. Poet-journalist Norman Corwin turned 96 yesterday. He had been on my mind, however, since today, 4 May, marks the 65th anniversary of one of his most enjoyable pieces for microphone and antennae: his Radio Primer. Here is how it opens:

Soloist: This is a Radio Primer. 

Quartet: Fa la, fa la, fa la. 

Soloist: The most elementary show you’ve heard 

Quartet: By far, by far, by far. 

Soloist: An alphabetical primer. 

Quartet: A, B C, D; F, E; 

Soloist: Degree by degree, 

From A to Z 

Our Primer will prim 

The radio industry! 

Quartet: The ra-di-o in-dust-ry!

In Corwin’s “Primer,” the letter A stands for “announcers” (the suave voices that cajoled listeners with invitations like “Why not try? Have you ever wondered? Won’t you ask?”). Announcers were the most highly paid men in the business, precisely because radio was business, and the announcer served as a mediator between the sponsor footing the bill for entertainment and the listeners who were expected to express their gratitude by buying the products advertised. The announcer’s spiel linked the commercial, which he read, with the play he introduced or narrated.

Manipulative, you say? Sure, but at least the audience was given a choice to resist such temptations, free of charge, whereas today, in the post-broadcasting age of cable and satellite, we are forced to pay for it all—including the dubious privilege of receiving the commercials.

B, according to Corwin’s “Primer,” stands for “Breakfast food.” What’s that got to do with radio, you ask? Clearly, after 65 years, some footnotes are in order. The radio industry was practically running on soap suds and cereals back then. After their mothers (and quite a few male listeners who may not have had the guts to admit to it) had tuned in for another chapter of their favorite daytime soap operas, the kids returned home from school for their daily bowlful of serial adventure, which, with some justice, might have been called afternoon cereals. Thanks to the sponsor’s spokesmen, Corwin’s “Definer” reminds us, children all across America knew that “Breakfast food is what you have to eat before you can be a hero.”

Another entry in the “Primer” is a gentle mockery of radio’s most notable ham. Yes, “O stands for Orson”: “Who is Orson? What is he, / That all the critics hail him? / Holy terror of the Mercury, / Publicity doth trail him.” And V, of course, stands for the trade paper that was a must for everyone in the industry. I’ve read it myself for years—or tried to decipher it—until I came to the conclusion that, not being in the biz, I really couldn’t justify my weekly fix of nixed polysyllabics like this:

The cinema is Pix.
The hinterland is Stix,
The people there are Hix,
And critics all are Crix.

Fa la, fa la, fa la. I’ve got it in my ears now, that eminently hummable score by Lyn Murray, one of radio’s most versatile composers. Indeed, I am so cheered and inspired by Corwin’s musical perusal of the dictionary that I will inaugurate my own “Old-time Radio Primer” tomorrow. I shall endeavor to go through the alphabet, letter by letter (if not as a daily, so perhaps as a weekly feature of the broadcastellan journal), and looking forward to the lexical challenge. Any suggestions? A and B are already accounted for, but there are a lot of letters left to mull over . . .