I Have Nuthin' To Say

I'm not inspired. Gimme a minute, maybe I'll get there. There are a number of things I could rant about, but they'll end up hurting someone, somewhere, of that I'm certain.

OK, while I'm waiting for inspiration to hit, let me tell you how the name of this blog came to be.

Back in the 1950s there was a little AM radio station called WJLB, at 1400 on the dial. It was one of 2 black stations in Detroit, the other being WCHB at 1440, and it was the better of the two. The crown jewel at JLB, aside from the inspirational broadcaster Martha Jean The Queen was "Frantic" Ernie Durham, who was your quintessential 50's R&B dj, full of rhymin' jive & a hipper-than-hip attitude. He'd say things like, well, like "Great Googa Mooga Shooga Wooga!", and "what's your pleasure, treasure?" and "ooh-la-wee, it's Ernie D with another stack o' wax just for thee". And then he'd play some badass smokin' hot jam like "Think" by the 5 Royals or "Sexy Ways" by The Midnighters (google those tunes & find a ram file to check out). He used to whoop & holler along with the records, and he was just the coolest thing in town, with his red processed pompadour (Ernie D was not Irish, you dig). And rest assured he was NEVER lame, whatever thoughts you may be formulating.

So he obviously made a huge impression on me. About 10 years ago, maybe a bit more, I can't remember, he scored a Saturday night show on WDET back when that was the best - the ONLY - radio station in town, but at that point, at about 70 years of age, his game was slipping. Plenty of miscued records, a good amount of dead air, sad things like that. But it was great to hear his voice again, and his rhymes were still fairly on point. But truth be told, it was pretty pathetic & I kinda cringed listening to him, feeling bad for him.

Then one Saturday, he wasn't on the air. The next day's paper told the tale: Frantic Ernie merged with the universe.

I feel bad for people who weren't around back in the 50s or 60s, who missed the experience of the rapid and truly quantum leaps that were made in radio, like they missed something very cool and at the same time very important. And radio in the 60s took a lot more giant steps than in the 50s. It was a real important part of life, it was what you'd talk about at school. It was community, it was a SCENE that was happening all around, and you could watch it grow, no one was programming it for you from some corporate headquarters somewhere. There were REGIONAL hits, songs that were popular in your city but not necessarily anywhere else, which is unheard of today. Like it was YOURS, like YOU created the buzz. You'd hear some soul gem, followed by some English beat group, then some scuzzy little garage band (only then we didn't know they were "garage bands"), and they all fit comfortably side-by-side. Then when the first FM "underground" station started (because everything was AM until about 1967, FM was for things public access or farm reports, so it was virtually an untapped thing for pop music) you actually had a place to hear stuff you'd read about, like Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, the MC5 or the Stooges - it seemed DANGEROUS, like "don't let your parents find out you're listening to this subversive shit" and they were inventing rock radio on the fly at the time, so it was anything goes. ANYTHING. And little by little you found out people all over the city were listening to the same station, and there was a visible shift away from The Monkees and going-steady type shit to something with depth and a bit more reality. And it truly was exciting.

At this time, around 1967-68, Detroit was so alive, there were two, three, at times even more, places to see and hear live music. EVERY WEEKEND. The venues were old movie theaters in the ghetto, and there would usually be three bands, and we're talking the likes of the bleedin' WHO in their earth-shattering prime and Led Zepplin and people like that, and the average admissiion was THREE DOLLARS, and you could stand 10 feet from the stage, & yell stuff to the bands on stage, & at one venue the acts had to leave the stage by stairs at the front, not around back, so they'd be walkin' off through the crowd, slappin' five and getting patted on the back as they passed by. COMMUNITY. And no one thought anything of it. Now you pay close to a hundred bucks to sit half a block away.

Guess I got inspired.