Monday, August 23, 2010
The Doctor is Out
I was doing a little on-line research a few weeks ago and learned that the world had just changed. Maybe it’s not the worst change in history; it’s certainly not the biggest. Still, it is a significant change for me, one that caught me unawares but it deserving of some attention, liek the disbanding of a local minor-league sports team or the closing of a longstanding but underappreciated restaurant. The doctor is off the airwaves, and it doesn’t matter that I hand’t been particularly aware he’d even still been on them. I assumed he was; I assumed he’d so remain and endure into perpetuity. But nothing endures, truly, and doctors probably know this best of all. I guess it’s time I learned that lesson myself.
Let’s start at the beginning. My first clock radio was a landmark in my journey toward maturation. It meant that I had responsibilities and was expected independently to fulfill them. I could make myself awaken of a morning, or push that inevitability off by ten minutes per snooze. I could see how late I’d stayed up reading, and for how many hours after lights-out I’d lain awake awaiting sleep. Likewise, I could enjoy the best musical offerings that both frequency and amplitude modulation had to offer. I particularly recall plugging it in the first time and having it immediately ring out with the sound of Glen Campbell’s “Southern Nights,” a piece that remains a nostalgic favorite for me for that reason and none other whatsoever. My first clock radio endowed me with powers both chronologic and harmonic, and I liked it.
One aspect in particular about it that entertained me was the design of the volume and tuning knobs. Both were circular, equal in size, placed on the face of the radio about a centimeter apart from each other. Silver with black rims, their position indicator was a thick black line from the center to the edge. When both knobs were set to the indicator lines matched up, they rather resembled a pair of googly eyes. Put thick brows above them and a greasepaint mustache beneath from which a phallic cigar extended, and and you’d have a decent caricature of Groucho Marx.
At this time of my life I was a Marx Brothers fanatic. I had memorized gags, songs and scripts. Lydia the Tattooed Lady, Hello I Must Be Going, and others now lost to the obscurity of withered neurons and decayed dendrites - I sang them loudly and lustily from 2nd grade forward. I loved me my Marx Brothers and I got my fix anyplace I could. My clock radio, in this regard, was both a reminder and a source. I could look at it and imagine Rufus Firefly or Hugo Hackenbush waggling a comic gawk at me or rolling his eyeballs in ribald glee, but I could also tune in a radio program that made Groucho’s actual songs available for my listening pleasure as I lay comfortably abed.
It had been my dear old young neighbor across the street who’d first clued me in: was I aware of the weekly radio program devoted entirely to funny songs? In fact I had not been, and the reality behind this impossible-sounding claim shocked and amazed me. But, you know, in a good way..
Airtime was Sunday evenings, six to ten pm (four full hours!), on the local heavy rock station. The station’s reputation for playing dangerous music by unsavory characters like Led Zeppelin and Spirit caused me some disquietude, but I was willing to brave those coarse, barbaric airwaves for a taste of classic novelty music by Spike Jones and the others luminaries that preceded him and followed in his footsteps. Who, indeed, put the Benzadrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine? There was the Cockroach that Ate Cincinnati and the immortal Shaving Cream song and the marathon recapitulations of the Crepitation Contest. Add in Groucho Marx occasionally singing about body modification, and there was no real way to keep me from listening - even when the final song of the weekly top 10 came on so late that I had to keep the volume of my beloved clock radio down to a minimum, breaking an in-house electronics curfew so I could listen to that last tune each week, the dials turned so their Groucho eyes seemed comically crossed. It was silly, repetitive, and bad for my sleep schedule, but I didn’t care. I was a going to listen to Doctor Demento on my clock radio, and no one was going to stop me.
This phase lasted at least two years. It was a treasured ritual of mine to settle down in my room and have a nice intense listen to the D-D show. I learned a surprising amount from novelty jazz and comedy rock - vocabulary, history, cultural sociology and musical forms, for a start, but also comic timing, satire and irony, and a perspective that has been an aid and comfort for me my whole life since. Tom Lehrer, Martin Mull, and - let’s give credit where it’s due - Weird Al: Having their voices among my own, having “roly-poly fish heads” as part of my cognitive repertoire, made it easier for me to get through things sometimes. Some times you’ve just got to eat them up yum. And if you don’t know that I mean, that’s exactly what I mean.
So I visited the doctor regularly and even talked to some of my closest friends about him, asking if they’d heard that week’s top 10 or trying to reconstruct some particularly delicious tun of phrase or gag. Damn good times, people, and I admit it. I was way into comedy as a kid and the Doctor Demento Show was a big part of that. Hell, I still actually have an LP he issued of some of this biggest favorites.
My Dr D habit lasted a few years, but it did eventually gutter out. My tune-ins grew briefer, more sporadic, less about the thrill of being exposed to new hilarities than about the ritual of doing what I’ve always done. I never chose to drop my coverage with the Doctor. It just wound up happening that way.
By the late 70s I was pretty well past my Dr D phase. Video tape, cable TV, theater classes and generally expanding horizons left me less time to focus on the radio; the playlist of novelty music, bawdy jazz, and goofball rock wasn’t growing very rapidly, and I too rarely heard anything new on the Dr D show to justify the time I once spent listening to it. My love for Dr D faded. It wasn’t him, it wasn’t me. We just grew apart until I realized he was more an element of my past than anything else to me. I never regretted a moment I spent with them - I just wasn’t spending any more of them.
Years passed. I never got rid of my one Dr D LP but I really didn’t listen to it - it was archival, not active. I still remembered a lot of the songs I’d learned from him, and even sang snippets of them to myself on occasion, but I really didn’t talk about where I’d learned them. It was not a topic well-calculated to impress new friends at JrandSr High, Bigshot U, Law School, or the workaday world. Dr D was a quiet chapter early in the book of y life, but a valued one nonetheless. Though I no longer checked in on him, I still cherished the surety that he continued at his old game I could listen anytime the spirit moved me, if ever I were to find myself so moved.
Well, I now know those days are finally over. Even if I wanted to tune in again, I couldn’t. After forty years on the air, after the glory of live performances at Magic Mountain and the intoxicating thrill of national syndication, by halfway through 2010 the Dr found himself with a mere five distribution outlets, small towns and isolated outposts, Alabama and Alaska and not much in between. The nitrous oxide gigglebubblle had deflated to flaccidity. The Doctor Demento Show, to which I’d not been a listener for 34 years at least, had left the air waves. Sure, there’s still an on-line presence, I could download a decades-of-dementia playlist or a classic Top 25, but its just never going to be the same as scheduling a listen-in on my old Groucho-faced clock radio. Hell, the old clock radio’s changes a bit too, but you know what I mean The doctor, for my purposes, has retired. I’m hoping self-care will suffice in the future.
This one was delayed for a few days, as I worked my way through a bit of a kidneystone issue. Unfortunately it hasn’t yet worked its way through me. It’s not a very pleasant experience. Make a note of that for future reference. Hope to get more coming up and out at you when I return from the preposition market. (downstairs.)
