Caught in the Carousel

Letter from the Editor - May 2009

Radio, Radio

A few weeks ago I headed off to my old high school to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the campus radio station, KVHS. I was a DJ and the Music Director there from 1985-1988 and although a lot has happened since then, a lot happened there and I hadn’t thought about any of it for a very long time.

I went to Clayton Valley High School in Concord, California and not only had I not physically been there in over twenty years, I hadn’t even driven near the campus in almost as long. So as I made the approach over the highway—right up to the stretch of road that was once like driving through a goalpost of hills—I saw my former pastoral field goal had been replaced by houses on either side of the road, a quick stack of suburbs erected with all the sterility and cold-hearted technicality that lacks as much in character as it does in architectural grace.

Before I turned into my old school, I couldn’t help but notice that the last left turn was now dominated by a storage complex; big, sleek and brutal, it glowed with the same kind of institutional terror of strip malls and technical colleges.

I only bring any of this up because my great worry was that the new landscape—and I was sure that given the time between visits there would be certainly be one—would erase my old memories and immediately replace them with a series of shellacked new ones. In fact, on my way there, I scanned through my four years of high school—the halls, the buildings, the parking lot, the fields—and took comprehensive notes, even though I knew it was futile because no amount of mental alacrity can ultimately prepare one for sudden drastic changes in the landscape. They come in one big, blinding geographical blitz and, steeled for the fight as you may be, the sheer muscularity of the new images are far too overpowering for the papery cities of the past.

In other words, they’ve really got no chance.

So my dominant, almost frantic thought, as I turned into my old school was, What the fuck used to be where the storage center is? An empty field? A basketball court? A small pond with ducks and fish and a rumored alligator carelessly deposited by an angry parent whose kid made a weird trade with an even weirder kid who knew things about things he shouldn’t?

I didn’t know and it caused a cold shoulder panic that made me think that from now on I would look back to my scruffy youth and see that storage center beaming away smugly as if to say, I’ve always been here. What about you?

And then the terror passed.

It passed because after I got out of my car and entered the campus, I found that from parking lot to hall, things looked basically the same. Maybe not as scrappy or as weather beaten or as cracked in certain places as it once was, but those cosmetic improvements aside, it was undoubtedly the same place.

I’ve always found it funny that my high school was the epicenter for Bay Area metal. Behind an innocuous heavy door that students walked past every day—so innocuous in fact, that it seemed to be a sealed and soundless closet that hadn’t been opened for hundreds of years—was the batcave of thrash, the hidden headquarters of headbanging. It was the secret hideout for us deejays, the place we would go to turn up the volume, flip on the mike and ride that long left of the dial wave. Because KVHS had ample wattage and great antenna positioning, we reached quite a bit of the Bay Area, putting us in some regions on equal footing with commercial radio stations ten times our size.

But we definitely weren’t commercial.

We were trained by Mr. Wilson—who was a sort of rogue AM deejay, with his perfectly calibrated voice and his open cynicism for the ills of the radio market—and for all intensive purposes, he instructed us as professionals. Not only were we drilled for months before going on the air in basic radio theory and production, we had to pass tests on electronics, maintain quality shows that were constantly being monitored and be strict adherents to the rules that were stated by the F.C.C. on the paperwork that accompanied our licenses. So we may have sounded like pros, or at least like disciplined and youthful broadcasting novitiates, but the music we played wasn’t anything like you’d hear on other stations.

We played a strict diet of metal by bands from Antioch to Antwerp and the station had a library of albums adorned with hyperartistic metal iconography that featured demons on fire, hooded figures carrying flaming tablets, bloody hands holding razor blades, glass shattering, red rivers rising and steroidal zombies swinging axes into lightning covered skies.

My partner David Fieni and I started by obediently playing Accept and Metallica and Judas Priest and Venom, but, subversive post-punks that we were, we started throwing in the Sex Pistols and The Ramones and David Bowie and The Replacements and Hüsker Dü and no one batted an eye. Around this time, metal guys started breaking ranks a bit and let three bands in: U2, The Cure and The Smiths, so we started weaving in “In Between Days” and “Red Hill Town” in between “Fast As A Shark” or “Trapped Under Ice” and people got into it. But for some staff members, the very presence of Meat Is Murder or The Head On The Door inside the station was too much, and often we’d come to “The Dave and Alex Show” and find our records broken, the pieces shoved back in the sleeves in crude and crooked crumbles of vandalized vinyl.

But to be fair, we were also smartasses galore, teenage insurgents whose every word was meant to undermine, incite and cause some kind of a reaction. Of course we were just trying to be funny, but not everyone was laughing. On our weekly show, the regular features included “Meat Of The Week” (my favorite: Old English Black Breasted Gamecock), the adopted personas of the Ravioli Brothers (David’s voice was a hoarse old-time Italian mobster and mine was muttering and rabbinical) who would “take over” and haphazardly guest deejay for us (because we were ostensibly tied up in the closet), “Poetry Corner” where we would give overdramatic readings of Rod McKuen’s poetry that would thoroughly skewer the bard and other various messing arounds that got us suspended, crank called and, in one bizarre instance, got a knife pulled on us one rainy night by a guy who wanted us to play Ted Nugent.

We didn’t. And we didn’t get stabbed. And there was pizza. Guess who cut it? Another time, another time.

But back to the party.

In a room of 40 years of metal deejays, people looked great, they seemed happy and as the metal pounded from the loudspeakers, everyone fell into the relaxed, easy groove of social congress. I had envisioned Fieni and I not missing a beat, swaggering in with slouch and cynicism, taking stock of our former 1985-1988 teammates and rattling off snappy asides with the rhythmic speed of Borscht Belt gunfighters. But David had just landed a job teaching college in New York, so I was left to snap away on my own.

From an old rival becoming a professional hypnotist to the old Concord metalheads still openly carrying torches for the halcyon days of Ozzy and Maiden, there were plenty of opportunities for fast-talking jocularity and biting sarcasm, but I didn’t go that direction. There was nothing consecrated or holy about the old multi-purpose room of my high school, but to have gathered 40 years of people like me--people who used class time to write out playlists, people who took shelter in the station, people who thought more about their show than Homecoming or football games--to celebrate the place that saved our lives was suddenly overwhelmingly moving, old grudges and ratty British Steel shirts, be damned.

Amidst the rush of sentimentality, a guy with a mike who was flanked by a woman with a camera pulled me aside and asked: “When did you know you loved being a deejay?”

A question that came with a set of innumerable answers:

**At 9 when I made mix tapes where I introduced every song.
**At 11 when I read the sports page into a tape recorder and used a different voice for every sport. (Why it was Russian for golf still baffles me.)
**Sitting in the back of the bus at 13 impersonating my teachers saying dirty stuff for everyone for a dollar a shot. (Average daily intake: $8)
**Watching Comfort And Joy at 14 and wanting so desperately—more than Han Solo or Luke Skywalker or Mad Max—to be the Bill Paterson-played deejay Alan Bird who gets mixed up in a Glasgow ice cream war.

And the list goes on. But here’s the thing—I always knew I’d love being a deejay, of course, but I really knew for sure when I flipped on the mike at KVHS in the fall of 1985. It was as if I had moved a switch in myself to the ON position permanently. I came to life, I sprung into action, I became—and forgive me for sounding like a camp counselor recounting his first day as a junior camper in the canoe—myself. I had no idea that nothing—not sex or getting my book published or interviewing David Bowie or sitting in the wobbly basket of a hot air balloon that glided thousands of feet above the Napa Valley while my girlfriend smiled at me with what seemed like real love—would ever be as satisfying. The fact is, sitting in a dark studio playing records and freestyling into a microphone cultivated my identity more thoroughly than anything I’ve ever done in my life.

I would plan for my weekly shows a week in advance—the backs of my homework always had scribbled potential playlists (“What is The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy?” a teacher once wrote)—and when that show was over I would race home and listen to the tapes (I taped every second I was on the air) breaking them down forensically, marking in a notebook where improvements were necessary. This kind of post-show autopsy did lead me to the brink of some moments of utter Maversian madness that ultimately taught me that even though one strives for perfection, perfection is an unreachable ideal, but it also made me a sharp and intuitive deejay.

But I’ve slid off the road into another topic, haven’t I?

What that aforementioned flick of the mike did was more than just make me into a deejay—it rebooted my entire life, installed an operating system (apologies for the wearisome computer analogies) and changed everything. I did the morning announcements over the school loudspeaker, I spoke at graduation, I walked on stage at a college introductory seminar and just started saying stuff. The fact was, I had become a confident social animal, endlessly garrulous, conversationally promiscuous and positively fearless. I talked my way out of fights, into girls’ bedrooms and into roles in plays in spite of having never acted before.

In the same way that a studied and serious teenage martial artist committed to the art of corporeal systemization—the flash of hands, the geometry of kicks, the way the body must stay loose and coiled—finds that their discipline seeps into other areas of their life, imbuing them with an almost preternatural maturity, I found that being a deejay made me a better person. Better is a relative term, I do realize, but what I mean is that it fortified every aspect of my life in a way I could never have anticipated in the guise of an adolescent mix tape narrator, back of the bus mimic or team of multi-national sportscasters.

I’m not saying, however, that it was always perfect. Like a misused superpower, I’m sure I veered more than once into verbal pomposity and I’ve probably paid for that in ways too numerous to count here, but now that I’m older and I’ve tempered the almost predatory verbosity of my youth, I can look back and say without hesitation that my tenure at KVHS was the most important and best thing I’ve ever done in my life.

I’ve always known that, but it deserves a barbaric shout.

When I left the party and headed back to my car, awash in sentiment, overflowing nostalgia and remembered purpose, I didn’t know what to do next. So I sat in my car and watched the night spill over the roof of the storage facility. That behemoth of a building didn’t stand a chance—the shadows swallowed it and suddenly it wasn’t there anymore and everything looked the way it used to look. The school slanted the way it always did under the streetlights. The air smelled cool with a familiar note of oak behind it. On the radio a deejay talked over a lone backbeat that turned to a sea of guitars and I thought, That’s my job.

Love and Rockets,
Alex Green
Editor, Caught In The Carousel
Alex670@earthlink.net