The Ninth House

It was probably 1980. Although it could have been 1979. The album, Bombs Away Dream Babies, was released in 1979, and I was a college freshman in the fall of 1979, and that’s when I first remember hearing it. So it was probably around then.

I could have heard it on any number of radio stations, but I probably heard it first on WQDR Raleigh, back when it was one of the Southeast’s pioneering album rock FMs, the first station Lee Abrams consulted, the one that put the Superstars album rock format on the national map. ‘QDR was a glorious cliché, staffed by laid-back jocks who sounded stoned and probably were. When I think of it, I invariably envision Q-SKY, the fictional West Coast album rocker from the 1978 radio fairy tale FM. ‘QDR might have been nothing like that in reality, but who cares about reality?

I visited ‘QDR once, before the owners flipped it to country in 1984 while it was still at the top of its game. I don’t remember why or how I got in there, but there I was. Just a couple of years a jock myself then, and there I was, standing in WQD-F-ing-R.

All I remember is, the lights were low and the hallway walls were carpeted and hung with gold records – Clapton, Tom Petty, Heart, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Eagles, The Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan…

I swear you could smell the pot smoke soaked into the shag. It was exactly what I wanted it to be. It was cool as hell.

WQDR was the big bad-ass regional FM and if you didn’t listen, you weren’t shit. If you didn’t have a ‘QDR bumper sticker stuck somewhere, you weren’t shit. And if you heard it on ‘QDR, it was officially OK to buy it. Hell, it was mandatory.

Yes, radio really did use to be that way. Good radio.

And WQDR is where I first heard “Gold” by John Stewart. Like I said, I could have heard it anywhere, really – it was a Billboard #5 single, so damn near everyone played it – but in my heart, I heard it on ‘QDR.

I heard it in the evening, in the sultry Carolina summer, when the dusk was just breaking the day’s heat but not the humidity, and walking from the campus dorm to The Attic nightclub downtown sometimes meant arriving soaked with sweat, stoked for that first beer.

I heard it coming out open car windows as they idled at the light, fratboy drivers leaning right to snog their sorority chick squeezes in the brief space before the green.

I heard it on my roommate Shawn’s killer stereo, the biggest system on our dorm floor, the one we used to listen to Styx and Queen and America and Supertramp and Zeppelin and Carlin and Pryor and Firesign Theatre and Monty Python and Holst and Wagner and even Flatt and Scruggs. And WQDR, when we weren’t playing albums.

***

John Stewart died on January 19^th. He was 68 and he’d evidently been ill for a while. I am no expert on his career, so I won’t even try to comment on it here, other than to note that he was a member of American folk greats the Kingston Trio, that he wrote the Monkees hit “Daydream Believer,” and that he spent his later years, his post-“Gold” years, writing hits for other artists, mostly folk and country.

John Stewart was also tight with Fleetwood Mac, Lindsay Buckingham in particular. Stevie Nicks sings the harmony on “Gold,” and it’s said that the song was inspired by Stewart’s friendship with Buckingham. It fits. The song could’ve been a Fleetwood Mac song, easy, with Buckingham singing it instead of Stewart. And it had that Southern California mellow rock feel that you could still find on American album rock radio then, but that was already passing.

Joe Jackson, The Police, The Clash, Dire Straits, The Ramones, XTC, The Fixx, Pretenders, Elvis Costello, The Cars, Peter Gabriel, hell, even Gary Numan and the B-52’s. Lots of guys with skinny ties and spiky hair were turning up on album covers and though lots of stations hated it, album rock radio was changing. Just a year or two later and “Gold” might not have been a hit at all, and I might not have had the chance to play it as a young punk jock, just a year into the business, playing the songs that I’d first heard on ‘QDR. Playing the regional bands too: Glass Moon, PKM, The Brains, The Fabulous Knobs, Super Grit Cowboy Band, Mike Cross and more I can’t begin to recall.

I wasn’t nearly as cool or polished as the ‘QDR jocks but hell, I was spinning the tunes, playing the songs I heard them play. Although the walls of our little radio station did not smell of pot. They most certainly did not. You had to go back into the production room for that.

So I was sort of fringe cool. And it was enough. I mean, c’mon. I was a rock radio DJ. You get automatic cool points straightaway for that. Or used to, at least. Back when having the right radio station bumper sticker on your car was akin to a political statement.

John Stewart has died. I read the news and pow, there I am, back in time, quick as a sneeze. Cuing up vinyl on the clunky Russco turntable, looking out the big studio window into the dusk, at couples walking glued to one another, hips riding together in easy synch, hands slipped into one another’s back jeans pockets. Cigarettes on the console, spliff burning in the ashtray and the big studio monitors go bump-buh-BUMP-buh-bump-buh-BUMP-buh with that bass line shuffle as I start the song, turn down the program master on the old Gates board and answer the request line.

All that, from one song. It’s not exactly tea and biscuits with Marcel Proust, but it’s good. It is very very good.

TNH

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 1:32 am and is filed under Aircheck, Poo Du Jour, This Actor's Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.