I truly believe that mass communication reached its finest point in the first half of the twentieth century. There was radio and print, supplemented with the occasional phone call and the telegram. The written word is probably the most amazing talent of our species. To think that someone could transfer their thoughts into little squiggles and, years later, recreate their ‘voice’ for a distant reader is tantamount to cosmic.

The only equivalent miracle was the ability to talk over great distances. I often wish our communication technology stopped there. We still would have made it to the Moon. After all, Flash Gordon made it to Mongo.

When information retrieval requires more than one of your five senses, there is a lessening in the quality of life. You become part of the machine. Sure, back then, there were the theater and movie houses. Yes, they involved a voluntary hostage taking of your eyes and ears for a voyeuristic escape. But these had built-in time constraints. In the era that followed, even television knew when it was time to go home. Remember test patterns? The National Anthem?

These days, we are constantly teetering on the brink of a twenty-four hour cable/satellite/internet looking glass and the resulting couch potato syndrome is rampant. Maybe this is an example of what is referred to as the Gaia Effect, in which Macro Organism Earth always has the last word when it comes to organization. In light of overpopulation, cathode tube catatonia could be a way of keeping everyone from bumping into each other. Either that or the government has found a way to keep us in a herd until the flying saucers can harvest us for the Chicken McNuggets that we really are.

Radio was the cultural oracle of my generation. It delivered a message, and that message was music. No obligatory video and no increasingly rapid cinematography had to hold its grasp on an ever-decreasing attention span. We never even knew what the musicians looked like until we checked out the album cover. A concert hitting your town was right up there with major holidays and a free concert in the park was manna from Heaven. Our guides and mentors were the disk jockeys.

They were the naturalists in an exploding Gadda Da Vida. They knew the bands and their migration patterns. The later the hour, the more time they had to talk. It was sometimes as much a treat to catch them emceeing a concert as the Mass that ensued. They were the keepers of the Holy Flame.

It was Horace Greeley Junior High Assembly Day, 1966, and our guest speaker was WABC’s ‘Cousin’ Bruce Morrow. During the question and answer period, I raised my hand and was called upon. I asked Cousin Brucie what it was like where he worked. He responded by describing the office building that housed the radio station.

In retrospect, I should have said, in front of the entire student body, “Hey, I’m really interested in radio. Could I come down there sometime and watch you work? Hmmm? Huh?”

The brazen foot in the door ploy had more potential than even I could have seen, as Morrow would later move to the legendary and way cool WNEW-FM.

Hazard’s Law #7: Hindsight is twenty-twenty, foresight is worth the lottery.

In the years that followed, several other crossroads eluded my grasp. The 1980’s, however, were a spaghetti bowl of pathways that put me in touch with several radio types and, eventually, several radio gigs. I felt like the Mother Ship had retrieved its last, lost crewmember. When creative differences and upper-management interference crept in, I attributed them to problems indigenous to that station, and not the nature of a bigger beast. By 1991, I had become a major personality at a major station in a major market. It was at that point that I realized what the game had become. It was no longer the love of music, or even the love of the radio art form. It was Arbitron, Q-Ratings, consultants and, most of all, money. Radio had become a business as cut and dry as any firm on Wall Street.

Ninety percent of all disk jockeys in America are abused, overworked, underpaid and constantly in fear for their jobs. Play lists are determined weeks in advance by computers and freedom of speech has gone the way vinyl.

To me, listening to the radio is like listening to those censored, stiff upper lip tapes made by hostages and prisoners of war.

Throughout my life I’ve pursued many a lover on a pedestal and I’ve seen them all crash in the flames of reality. But you never forget your first.