Culture Vultures: The Day the Music Died
Steyn, Mark
by Mark Steyn The Day the Music Died And you can blame it all on the mickey mouse N.Y. Times. T his is war. Until December z7, I could live with Disney. I m not one of...
...But that's okay: hearing things you know you don't like is the price you pay for hearing things you don't know and discover you like very much...
...But I wonder if the paper would have been so eager to sign away WQEW to, say, Larry Flynt for Radio Hustler...
...It's been too long...
...Someone someday will be playing Sinatra on a New York radio station again...
...But the performance exemplified WQEW's philosophy —that this music wasn't just about Ella and Crosby and Sarah Vaughan and a lot of records made a long time ago...
...The station's morning man counted down the New Year, the band played on, and it was almost as if I were there myself floating across their famous revolving dance floor, except that, as I was wearing plaid and heavy boots, I probably wouldn't have been allowed in...
...I hope Kayley gets her autographed Hanson poster, but, if she'll forgive me saying so, if she were really "cool" she wouldn't be listening to Radio Disney, would she...
...it especially prides itself on being New York's cultural arbiter...
...Coverage of WQEW's demise apparently doesn't fall within the parameters of "All the news that's fit to print...
...But, of course, such incitement is irresponsible...
...instead of climbing into an off-the-shoulder dress, you simply climb into an off-the-shoulder pickup...
...The soi-disant suffocating omnipresence of Disney's whole new world...
...So I'll say only this...
...Since Rich stepped down as "butcher of Broadway," his successors on the drama beat have been a bunch of indistinguishable dullards who've slowly killed the paper's authority in the field —though, fortunately for the Times, their readership is so craven it may be a couple of generations before they realize it...
...My dad, like, got me my own phone...
...As midnight approached, I pulled my truck offby the Sabbaday Falls trail and listened to the room's orchestra play "The Way You Look Tonight" as a good-looking cow moose sauntered out from the trees...
...Rich could barely conceal his contempt for those Broadway producers who inflicted long-term damage on the theatrical arts for short-term gains...
...or that film of theirs directed by a convicted pedophile...
...roulette wheels, etc., whereas it seems like only yesterday you could walk the entire strip without dropping more than zo bucks on a transsexual hooker...
...46 February z999 " The American Spectator But that's the point...
...it was about living artifacts which, in the hands of interpreters like Nancy, were contemporary and "cool" in ways that Radio Disney couldn't begin to imagine...
...In an age of stifling formats that define themselves mostly by what they exclude ("Your Favorites From the Eighties, Without Any of the Hard Stuff'), that's something to cherish...
...We may have a problem...
...To be honest, I don't actually live in New York but from sunrise to sunset the signal bounced up the East Coast all the way to my mountain vastness in New Hampshire and even beyond to my pad in Quebec...
...Mr...
...Like every other station in town, there was some gal telling you about 25-minute delays outbound at the Holland, but in between only WQEW offered you singers and musicians performing in the studio—sometimes landmark hits by Cole Porter...
...there's money to be made playing Gershwin songs and Peggy Lee CDs...
...The old WQEW was a success: 7oo,ooo listeners in the metropolitan area tuned in, and the station placed nineteenth out of 7o in the most recent ratings surveys...
...I scoffed...
...So how did it come to be on the Times's spot on the AM dial...
...I'm stunned now to find I took it all for granted—that on Sunday morning you could switch on the radio and find Rosemary Clooney and Linda Ronstadt doing impromptu duets...
...Standards" are songs that transcend Hit Parade status and speak beyond the generations...
...I don't know how many pre-teens are around to sing along to favorites from The Lion King at two in the morning Eastern Time, but two in the morning in New York is probably just-getting-in-from-the-mall time in the Midwest or Guam or Iraq or wherever it is where the last kid on the planet without any Disney merchandise lives...
...If the Times's pose as cultural arbiter were real, then WQEW is just the sort of station they should be running...
...No doubt Radio Disney comes from a basement at Disney World or Disneyland, but in practice it's one of those stations that goes everywhere but comes from nowhere, alighting on whatever frequencies in whichever cities it can find...
...I didn't mind the Disney Channel...
...With Miss Stevens and her colleagues, the filing date is usually some months before the Broadway show you're writing about is due to open...
...I remember, one December 31 a couple of years ago, driving back through the White Mountains along the Kancamagus Highway on a cold starry night and listening to WQEW ring in the New Year live from the Rainbow Room...
...True, strolling the area with a kid, you'll be lucky nowadays to get a hundred yards without blowing a couple of C-notes on Donald Duck T-shirts, Little Mermaid fridge magnets, Hunchback lunchpacks, Mickey Mouse/Dunkin' Donuts ultra-realistic "chocolate sprinkles;' Pocahontas "I love my tax-flee casino operation...
...Cool...
...I think he does," said my assistant...
...That's probably why he used it...
...This gives them plenty of time to do an initial edit...
...On a live tribute to Sammy Cahn, someone mused that "Teach Me Tonight" works in any style —R'n'B, Country, whatever—and a wag at the piano chipped in with a chorus in the voices of John Lennon and Billie Holiday...
...But that was before the Mouse got into bed with the gray lady one block north on 43rd Street...
...Every Monday, during drivetime, he hosted a live music show...
...The ponderous self-importance of its arts pages is one of the wonders of the age...
...Frank Rich, who's devoted several columns to Disney's unhealthy influence on the news content at ABC stations, is silent on the subject of what Disney's done to one of his own paper's stations- a station that used to broadcast his own theater reviews, and to whose most respected disc-jockey, Jonathan Schwartz, he turned for a column on Sinatra's death...
...MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...But that's the magic of radio, where you can spend New Year high atop Rockefeller Center from the comfort of a truck parked just offthe Kancamagus...
...Stan Martin, WQEW's program director, understood that...
...If it's "just business," since when did the Times become "just" a business...
...This word `bargain-basement,'" said Miss Stevens...
...by Mark Steyn The Day the Music Died And you can blame it all on the mickey mouse N.Y...
...London time with more serious dilemmas...
...IfI sound as if I'm speculating in the dark, well, what's a fellow to do...
...If, for example, you've referred to "Lloyd Webber," the Times amends it to "Mr...
...Miss Stevens had some work for me, as she does from time to time...
...Until December z7, I could live with Disney...
...sometimes odd little things from downtown songwriters struggling to make a living...
...and it's on the streets in the first edition five hours later...
...At a stroke, the paper has contributed more to the cultural degradation of the city than all the Andrew Lloyd Webber freak-shows Rich has railed against for zo years...
...But I didn't mind...
...It thinks of itself as falling somewhere between the Pope and the Supreme Court as an adjudicator of human affairs...
...I m not one of those Southern Baptists who get upset about "Gay Days" at Walt Disney World, or, conversely, one of those New Yorkers who feel the new Disneyfied 4znd Street is so bland and theme-parky they pine for the good old days ofporno houses and crack dealers...
...sometimes the singers were big names, often they weren't—and for every tremulous, overwrought cabaret darling appearing at the Algonquin, you'd make a real discovery like Nancy LaMott, a gorgeous, emotionally true voice whose career soared until her premature death three years ago...
...s for me personally, during WQEW's final week I came home to find a message from Andrea Stevens of the Times Arts and Leisure desk...
...Sinatra's voice, Goodman's clarinet, Johnny Mandel's arrangements, Jerome Kern's music, and Frank Loesser's lyrics sprinkled their fairy dust into the ether...
...In the meantime, how should those of us affronted by the Times's vandalism object...
...For six years, since December 199a , WQEW had been "The Home of American Popular Standards," and not just a home, but a glittering palace, a make-believe ballroom where...
...T his is war...
...It wasn't merely some round-the-clock "Music of Your Life" format, a clunky computer-programmed generic nostalgia-fest of 4o's bigband hits, 5o's ballads, and 6o's MOR instrumentals...
...Alec Baldwin recently suggested that folks should go down to Washington, drag Henry Hyde out and stone him to death...
...Being granted access to the Times's pages is a tortuous process for those of us used to the less fastidious ways of Fleet Street, whereby you file the piece at six p.m...
...When you explain that Andrew is not a "Mister" but a "Lord," Miss Stevens responds that unfortunately he has to be called "Mister" unless he's a "Doctor...
...Fortunately, the editor's editor's editor suggests an alternative formulation, though, by the following week Miss Stevens is calling to explain that the editor's editor's editor's editor is unhappy with the revised sentence and would I mind if it were changed The American Spectator • February 1999...
...So what rocked your summer, Kayley...
...Steyn may not be aware that in America the term has a pejorative connotation...
...I'm wise," she sang, "and I know what time it is now"—and she did: a few days later she died of Crohn's Disease...
...The Times's defenders say privately that it's just business: 4 ° million bucks is 4 ° million bucks...
...The following night, at two a.m., she calls to say her editor's editor feels a pejorative word is not appropriate at that stage in the sentence...
...or the fact that everything on Disney World's Main Street USA is "Made in China"...I didn't mind, any of it...
...A couple of months back, Disney quietly offered the New York Times $4 ° million for an eight-year lease of the paper's AM radio station, WQEW...
...started up and suddenly pre4eens were calling in to say what "rocked their summer" in the hopes of winning autographed "stuff" from the boy group Hanson...
...A pleasant two or three weeks passes discussing such issues...
...But what is it the Times has done...
...And I'll bet they wouldn't have sold out to James Dobson...
...But then Miss Stevens submits the piece to her editor, who in turn passes it on to hers, and soon Times persons are calling my assistant in Britain at home at one a.m...
...In 1995, she was on air at WQEW's third birthday party live from New York's Museum of Television and Radio, delivering the most affecting reading I've ever heard of Rodgers's and Hart's "I Didn't Know What Time It Was...
...To be sure, listening to WQEW meant putting up with things I never want to hear again —like booming Italiano ballads from the 50's and drippy movie themes from the 70's...
...You'd hear lyricist Betty Comden reminiscing about writing "Just in Time" and then Tony Bennett would step to the microphone and sing it...
...Call me," she said...
...We should all go down to the Times, drag out whichever one of those Sulzberger guys runs the place, clamp a Walkman on his ears, and force him to listen to endless loops of Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack...
...Alas, a few weeks ago, on December 27 at the stroke of midnight, my make-believe ballroom turned into a mouse, the Mouse: Something called "Radio Disney--we're all ears...
...Then we should go down to Disney, drag out Michael Eisner, clamp a Walkman on his ears, and force him to listen to endless loops of Anthony Lewis's droning apologias for President Clinton...
...Times style requires that everyone be accorded his proper title, even if it's incorrect...
...For 4o million bucks, they've booted the Great American Songbook off the radio dial: There is now no station in New York that plays Berlin and Rodgers and Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Arlen...
...Oh," said Miss Stevens...
...Lloyd Webber" because every living person mentioned in the paper must be given his title...
Vol. 32 • February 1999 • No. 2
