Dick Summer Connection

 

The only words that get your attention faster than “Once Upon A Time” are “I love you.” Once upon a time. You want to curl up in front of a fire, light a few candles, put on some nice music…maybe a little wine…and close your eyes and listen.

Well, it’s once upon a time time tonight. Time for a story. Actually three stories. Two of them are love stories…one of them is dying and one of them is very much alive… and the third one is kind of a thread that connects the other two.

 

Let’s start with the connection thread story. Once upon a time, I had a cup of coffee with a young performer by the name of Tom Rush. It was in a diner, down the block from where I did the late night show on WBZ radio in Boston. Tom was tall and skinny…he had about 84 pounds of slightly un-tamed dark blonde hair…and he was wearing an old blue pea jacket and jeans. He was just in from a long road trip…mostly small to medium coffee house gigs in New England. He had kind of an easy George Clooney smile and that comfortable but careful way musicians have of laughing.

 

He looked like what he was… a talented young guy, who had just spent an exhausting month or so on the road.  He was slugging that thick New England coffee down pretty fast…trying to keep his eyes open and his mouth moving. Until he started talking about the tape. That’s when he lit up…and he stood up…and he rummaged around in his back pack for a small, battered reel to reel tape.

 

On it was his recording of a song that was written by an 18 year old Canadian girl…and he said both the girl and the song were the most beautiful things he’d ever met. There was something about him that made me promise to listen. So when I got back to the station…I did. And he was right. The song was called the Urge For Going. And the girl was Joni Mitchell. I played the tape so often it almost wore out. And it became a big hit in New England. Tom went on to become one of the top folk performers in the country. Even if you don’t remember his name, if you’re a member of the Louie-Louie Generation, you’ll probably remember his voice. So I played the title cut from his new album called “What I Know” on the current podcast.

 

The first of our Once Upon A Time love stories is really sad. Because the love affair is dying. It started one Christmas a long, long time ago, when Santa brought me an Emerson transistor radio. I turned it on, on Christmas day, and I don’t think I ever turned it off, except to change the batteries. I was just a little kid growing up in Brooklyn New York, but all these smart, sophisticated, famous people on the radio were glad to talk to me. There was Arthur Godfrey, and Jean Shepard, and William B. Williams. Especially William B. Williams. He was the evening voice on WNEW when I was a kid. He was your uncle, Hugh Heffner, Martin Luther King, and Robin Williams all rolled up into one voice. He called his show The Bachelor’s Apartment. And his guests were an endless parade of famous people and beautiful women. Willie’s was the voice I tucked under my pillow every night. And from the first time I heard him…I wanted to BE Willie.

 

That was the once upon a time start of the love affair that has to do with radio. Of course there could only be one Willie B. And it wasn’t me. But I did get to work at WNEW. And my first morning on the air, about a half hour before the show was over, the studio door opened, and there he stood. Willie B. He was such a classy guy. He smiled, shook my hand, and in that same Uncle Hugh Heffner, Martin Luther King, Robin Williams voice that used to hide under my pillow when I was a kid… he said…”Welcome to the staff. You sound fine.” It was a World Series ring, the Nobel Prize and an evening with Catherine Zeta Jones and her twin sister all rolled up into one.

 

It was a long love affair with radio. And a guy by the name of Matt Seinberg got me started thinking about it, when he put a bunch of air checks up on his wonderful Big Apple Airchecks web site. If you’re a radio junkie…or you’re just curious about the way things were with radio…go to www.bigappleairchecks.com and check it out. Fascinating stuff up there. Including lots of material from my time on the air. Matt’s doing a huge service…preserving the actual voices and sounds that dragged us out of bed in the morning, or hid under our pillows at night. Those sounds are mostly gone now. There are lots of screaming voices on the radio…shouting political venom, and lots of sound alike voices promising to play a half hour of your favorite songs, and lots of authoritative voices reading the news. But the voices and the sounds that Matt is preserving…are mostly gone.

 

That’s the way it has to be. The poet said the moving hand of time has writ, and having writ moves on. But a trip to Big Apple Air Checks would be a good move for members of the Louie Louie Generation…especially those of us who like to remember.  

 

If you’re new to this podcast, the Louie-Louie Generation is made up of people with almost constant headaches…because that’s what you get when you’re constantly pounding your head against a wall because of things someone directly related to you keeps doing…people who used to go skinny dipping, and now have to settle for an occasional clunky dunky…former members of the National Scholastic Hormone Association who are now doing graduate work at the Louie-Louie Institute for the Completely Bewildered. We used to throw open the window at 5am, and climb in…now…if it were not for the wisdom of Big Louie…his own bad self…the chief mustard cutters of the Louie-Louie generation, we’re just be a bunch of struggling hair farmers and hot flash dancers. Louie keeps us hopeful, and focused with words of wisdom like, “If at first you DO succeed, try not to look astonished.” And, Of course it’s lonely at the top. But it’s lonely at the bottom too. And you eat better at the top.” We’ve been around.

 

There’s a once upon a time story about a Louie-Louie Generation guy who’s been around in the Bedtime Stories personal audio cd. It’s called On The Prowl. That’s also in the current podcast.

 

If you like it you can just keep the podcast. Or if you want a fresh copy, just go back to the opening page at dick summer dot com, and download it from the Bedtime Stories icon.

 

Dick’s Details Quiz…all answers are in the current podcast at www.dicksummer.com

 

1- Why would you want to keep Pasi Pesonen out of your neighborhood?

2- What did one cow say to her friend about “The Gripper?”

3- Why would two Russian guys never want to face each other again ? Dick’s Details. They take your mind off your mind.

 

So, you’ve heard the story about the love affair that’s dying, and you’ve heard about the string that connects our stories tonight. And now it’s time for the other love story. It’s an old love story, but it’s getting hotter every day.

 

Once upon a time, a long time ago…there was a beautiful young woman…long soft brown hair…eyes the color the sky tries to imitate in June…a voice that you want to put your arms around and hold very close to your heart…kind of an easy, gentle laugh…a pair of glasses with blue frames and little rhinestones at the edges…and the most dangerous curves ever seen in Boston. She was a secretary, a ski-er a sexy smiler, and the person in charge of the program log at WBZ while I was there.

 

There’s a picture of her that was taken a few years later…while I was working at WNBC in New York.  It’s on the big apple air checks web site. She’s standing in front of the WNBC studios with our daughter Kris. Her name is Barbara Ann…my lady Wonder Wench. The love story we started…once upon a very long time ago…well…the last line of Tom’s new song ties thes old love stories together. It goes:

 

“I’m gonna love you love you love you till the day I die.”

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 9:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.