Why I Do Live Radio
by Michael Feldman

Life’s funny and so is “live,” at least as a word in English. It can mean, intransitive verbally, a la Susan Hayward, “I Want to Live!” or adjectivally as in the Rolling Stones’ “Got Live if You Want It,” more accurately if you can hear it above the screams at the Royal Albert Hall. The Beatles stopped touring when they could no longer be heard live, entering into their wildly creative studio experiments but never to emerge as a band playing for a crowd. Many musicians, some people are fond of saying, you had to hear live, and many an FM jock fantasized both having been there with Miles or Sonny and being on a first name basis. Television was a live birth, and is so now only in surveillance and the local barely Live at Five’s or cable shows where it is still possible, if not desirable, to get your own show; overwhelmingly TV is a canned medium, even in “reality” where people who have no business doing so are forced to cohabitate without the club of marriage; their edited inability to do so amuses the rest of us who can’t cut and paste our homelives. Super Bowl half times used to be live, but no longer, given the threat of wardrobe malfunction imploding American society as we know it.

Radio, of course, once was nothing if not live—that was its charm, its use and its attraction. Live is what you listened for and what you listened to. It happened in real time, before there even was an inkling that some time was more authentic than others. It’s certainly what I used to love about listening, particularly to the rock jocks out of Chicago, especially Larry Lujak, whose insulting banter with traffic copter reporters and news girls in the booth was live radio to die for—radio you’d listen to both for it’s manic hilarity and the fact that you never knew what was coming next. Local shows, on another level, featured surrogate guys on the block, like Gordon Hinkley at WTMJ in Milwaukee, who hosted “Ask Your Neighbor,” in which actual listeners with actual stains on their pillows or bushels of chestnuts they were at a loss as to know how to blanch, took solace from fellow Milwaukeeans, who, collectively knew how to solve any domestic problem within reason and the social parameters of the mid-20th century Midwest. Good stuff which predated talk radio, “Listen to Your Neighbor Rant,” which makes you not want to leave your house unless absolutely necessary. And what about those swap meets, still on the air in some places, always a delight to stumble onto, where a fella with a back hoe can hook up with a guy with a bass boat for mutual pleasure, and a woman with a Hummel is not alone. A useful and entertaining employ for the medium which used to be the lifeline of a younger America and can still summon, when freed from the shackles of corporate formatting, the utility if no longer the hypnotic appeal it once possessed.

In high school I won a contest (actually two contests I used the same entry essay for) to be on the WOKY with Milwaukee’s (five million four hundred and seventy-) fifth Beatle, Bob Barry, who gave me a half hour of my own one Saturday morning in 1965 to play songs of my choosing and talk, in between, like real DJ. Naturally, I played “Louie, Louie” for the innuendo of it, and Anthony Newley’s “What Kind of Fool Am I?” dedicated to the Braves management then in the process of packing their carpetbags for Atlanta. Afterwards, Bob told me I talked too much (an assessment he reaffirmed recently in a very kind note on the 20th anniversary of “Whad’ya Know?”), and that a DJ’s job was to get into and out of the music, not to get around it. At WRIT the jock told me to go to college and forget about radio altogether, advice he wished someone had given him, and which I took, what with the 60’s being in full bloom, stumbling into it many years and several careers later by volunteering at a listener-sponsored station, WORT, in Madison.

From the beginning, I thought of myself as having maybe three radio- useful talents: I could free associate under pressure, I could work an audience, and I could talk on a telephone (as a kid I used to call people randomly from our phone book and offer them a pint of boy blue ice cream if they knew the capital of Bulgaria). This modest box of tools were sufficient for this trade, or so it seems some 25 years of having no real job/having a face made for radio later. The caveat for me was that I needed a live audience to get nervous in front of in order to perform and to exploit for material, since I didn’t come equipped with expertise (much the same problem I faced teaching high school English). Besides having an undiagnosed case of dyslexia, which caused me to reverse the logic of things, my social lack of ease (had?) caused me to deflect conversation and go off on tangents when around more than three people; at some point I realized that if I could make that pay it would no longer be a disability. For me this means live. In a soundproof airlock isolation booth of a studio I tend to sit, listlessly, and not say too much, not a good feature of a radio personality. From the first microphone stuck in an empty water glass at Dolly’s Fine Foods, where my job was to prevent people from enjoying their meal (any distraction from the food was not a bad idea at Dolly’s)—I’ve done live radio, in front of live people with the living listening and joining in; even though it was all about me, it became about them. I felt like an electrical conductor personally completing a circuit, and it gave me a capacitor-like charge. Aside from those who hated me, people seemed to like it. I showed signs of being able to make a living at it. It dawned on me that I had a calling through call-in. On my brief stint at WGN, the worst part of a year, 1984 ( no less) I was filling in for Eddie Schwartz one overnight, when a woman in downstate Illinois called in to say that someone had dropped a lamb off at her house and she didn’t know what to feed it. I Gordon Hinkley’d her and said I didn’t know (Gordon never seem to remember what anybody told him all those years) but I bet somebody out there did—and sure enough, lambing advice flowed in from the tri-state area. Unlike the times people called in asking for directions—I’m the wrong guy to ask for directions on the air or off—I was being helpful without having to have gone to law school. Moreover a connection was being made between people through me—I dug it! So, too, for the young woman with a bat in her closet and a useless boyfriend trying to scoop it up in an infielder’s glove—by tapping the collective wisdom we had the terrified creature back in the night in minutes—the bat, I mean, not the boyfriend—and it was somehow very satisfying. Not for the pest control, necessarily, but by connecting people. As I have often (just about always) told my audiences during the warm up, I am an empty vessel, fill me! I also tell them it’s audience participation, so if it’s a bad show, who’s fault is it, but it’s a rare audience that will take the blame.

That, briefly, is my life in live, and my raison d’etre to boot. I have no doubt that I could be edited into a more presentable package, but, hey, this is a live and not a reality show, and as mother used to say, you’ve got to take the good with the bad; hopefully, you'll have more of the former. That’s live.

Other Whad'Ya Know? listeners share their thoughts on Keeping It Live.

Bios . FAQ . Schedule . Directory . Tickets . Reviews . Hotline

The Show . Features . Quiz . Poll . Shop . Speak Up . Search