So the old WNIB, may it rest in peace, used to play blues overnight, hosted by a guy who called himself "Mr. A." Pretty sure it was a brokered show and Mr. A. sold the ad inventory himself. My dad explained this mechanism of the radio industry to me when we'd listen to Those Were The Days in the car on Saturdays, which also aired on WNIB. But this wasn't the capital-letters The Blues that's been sort of preserved in amber for mass consumption as sort of a general Americana. This was a living, breathing continuation of blues, the kind of stuff that doesn't really make it out of The Community. Music people listened to because it was just what they liked to listen to, not as some historical curiosity to Know Our Rock-n-Roll Roots, like old Robert Johnson 78s or the execrable SRV.
ANYWAY. Someone has some airchecks of the guy and shared them with the world, and this is just so
human it almost brings me to tears. You have him talking to a caller during a song with his mic on but without the phone line patched in. You have him trying to rip-and-read and having no earthly clue what the hell he's reading
and saying so. Commercials for "the best barbecue" in Austin. Commercials for an extermination wholesaler in Woodlawn that also sells aloe vera juice (wtf?)
and buys/sells hubcaps (double wtf?). A grocery store at 103rd, I don't even know which neighborhood that'd be, advertising that its parking lots are "well-lit for your security." And then when this show ended in the morning, it would go back to playing tired-out classical music for dentists' offices throughout Chicagoland.
https://soundcloud.com/just_ted/sets/mr ... ight-bluesBest of all, this got me to listen to some Bobby Rush, since Mr. A. ties himself in knots
explaining that the Bobby Rush who sings the blues is not, in fact, the one repeatedly elected to public office on Chicago's south side. And Bobby "Blue" Bland. He's pretty great, too. Good stuff. I just wish I had been able to hear it over the air when I had the chance to. It must have felt like eavesdropping. I thought stuff like this was only on tiny little south-side college/community stations whose signals couldn't make it past 35th Street, but here it was on a relative torch of an FM signal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzUbNz9z-mc here's another aircheck that captures the transition between regular programming and his show. That's the second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique; I'd know it anywhere. Then blues. Some transition.
But the crux of the biscuit here is that here you had this guy buying 25 hours a week of, like I said, a pretty powerful radio signal, then making the money back by crisscrossing the south side to hit up all these small businesses whose -- let's be honest here -- clienteles were probably working third shift, where show was what kept them company during what we'll presume was some lonely/shitty work. Then he'd head up to NIB's studios all the way up at Ogden/the Kennedy and play this awesome music through the dead of night that you'd only have found on commercial airwaves in, like, three or four other places in this country,
at best.
I love radio. It can be so awesome when it has the chance.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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and buy the same incongruous combination anything from the same vendors each week. My favorites were along the lines of the used toilets and 8-track tape guy.
