DIALSCAN BOSTON, APRIL 26, 2009

Before I start spinning the dial, will you indulge me as I tell you something semi-personal? Unlike many of the other cities on the Dialscan tour, I’ve actually been to Boston. Only once, but I’ve been there. One Saturday in June 1995, my sister and I landed in Boston, were greeted by our father and stepmother, and toured Fanueil Hall and the Freedom Trail. (To think that two hundred and twenty-four years and one week, give or take a few hours, have elapsed since Paul Revere got on horseback; shame that William Dawes doesn’t get the same press coverage.) Anyway, one of the stops we made was at the federal building, where there was a bronze statue of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. We took photographs climbing up and down JFK’s back, for we felt had license to do so. You see, the woman who designed and sculpted the statue of the Thirty-Fifth President of the United States of America was Isabel McIlvain. Isabel is one of my aunts. Connections like that are so profound and powerful that even the nod I am giving it does not do it justice. It hardly matters, then, that the statue of JFK has been moved to an isolated section of the Massachusetts State House, where children can’t climb on it.

With all of that in your hip pocket, those of you that live there know that Boston has a veritable smorgasbord of good radio for listening to, and WBZ-AM 1030 is as good a place to start as any. Browsing their website, I see that one of their personalities is a distinguished-looking chap by the name of Dan Rea, which triggers another childhood memory. When I was in second grade, at Woodlynde School in Stratford, PA, circa 1986, our teacher, a lovely lady named Judy Getz, would take us to the local library every so often. We were set loose among the treasure trove of books and one of the unpolished pearls that caught my eye was called A Day in the Life of a Television News Reporter. This book followed a youthful, hard-charging teevee reporter through the hallways of WBZ-TV and the streets of Boston. That youthful, hard-charging man was named Dan Rea. It’s amazing that a man can recall his boyhood with such opacity. But now I snap out of my reverie, to the sound of a steel drum being seemingly machine-gunned while the weekend morning man, a Rod Fritz, tells me that there’s a swine flu outbreak, among other things. I don’t need bad news, especially not when the stream is two minutes behind.

So let’s get over about three clicks north, to WBIX-AM 1060. WBIX claims to be “THE Business Station”. This apparently does not extend to the weekend; they are airing an outdoors show. This seems ever so slightly incongruous, given the fact that the host is more than likely indoors. If he were a true outdoorsman, he’d be broadcasting from the woods, pausing every now and again to assassinate a poor moose. Glancing at their webpage, I realize that I have just bagged on the founder and president of the National Radio Network, a man called Alex Langer. I apologize to Alex for my presumptiveness. Alex is now telling me it’s a beautiful Sunday morning. I look out my window and I believe him, but I wonder if Alex has a window in his studio so he can believe it.

All right; eleven minutes of this crap is quite enough. I have zilch interest in cat fishing. So we wander on over to WBNW-AM 1120, which looks like it has some cool stuff to listen to; interspersed with business talk are shows like The Journey of the Soul and Heal Yourself Talk Radio. I shall have to consider this when the tour comes back to Boston; maybe next time the internet won’t crash when I try to listen.

Boston has three sports-talk stations. The trick today will be trying to find one where the testosterone addicts aren’t talking about the NFL Draft; as if I truly cared who was doing what and going where. That said, we start with WWZN-AM 1510. The good news is that right now, there’s no one talking about football. The bad news is that right now there’s a sermon on. I spin the dial backward, praying to God that He can give me a radio station that I can listen to for more than five minutes at a time.

Let’s try WEEI-AM 850, which is apparently the flagship of a vast network stretching all across New England. Just now, a man named Michael Felger is talking about, yep, you guessed it, the ramifications of the NFL Draft. I want to come through the radio on this jarhead and tell him,“Football starts is September, you dingbat-dingleberry-doofusoid crankshaft. We’re in April! Talk about the Red Sox; it’s not gonna kill you to do so. Talk about the Bruins, the Celtics, the goddamn New England Revolution, if you must. But please, until late August, spare me the pigskin prognostication. It ain’t time for football!”

Mercifully, I won’t need to know if I’m shouting into the Massachusetts breeze, because WAMG-AM 890’s stream is unavailable for the moment. Perhaps that’s a blessing in disguise; it seems like little more than ESPN Radio’s feed anyway.

So now, we come to our oasis, WGBH-FM 89.7. A smart-seeming fellow called Brian McCreath has just introduced a piece by a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steve Reich called Eight Blinds. About a minute in, I find myself listening to this piece and wondering to myself, “For this shit, this guy won a Pulitzer Prize? Sounds like another Philip Glass wannabe.” Nearly all people who attempt classical music nowadays want to have the avant-garde sound that only Philip Glass has cultivated and mastered, but I nevertheless cannot stand. We move away from the relentless cacophony to their digital station, where you would think that a station as reputable and as legendary as WGBH would run a separate stream of classical music. Alas, it only seems that they’re running Mr. McCreath’s program on a delay. For such a reputable station, they sure don’t know the credo of “Hear and Now” all that well, do they?

Let’s go up the dial, before I go down the creek. On WTKK-FM 96.9, some earthy-sounding guy is coaching a hapless caller on how to deal with car salesmen. Sadly, his advice excludes the use of nunchucks, Chinese stars, mace or broken whiskey bottles. Evidently, he needs help doing this, because he has a sensible-sounding lady sitting next to him who has now piped up. Because WTKK is repairing its website, I have no idea, who these people are, how long they’ll stay on, etc. But, hey, at least it’s not sports talk. We just found out—it’s The Best Money Show in Boston. Well, I’ll take them at their word. This is, at best, filler. It doesn’t drive me to action, make me feel happy or sad—it’s fodder. Sunday morning fodder. I expected more from Boston, to be perfectly frank.

And so, I arrive at the last lighthouse, the one belonging to WCRB-FM 99.5. Fittingly, the Boston Symphony Orchestra is playing, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus is singing, Brahms’ beautiful oratorio For All Flesh is as Grass from A German Requiem. At least they were, for it has just ended and been replaced by Mozart’s Symphony #41 in C, his Jupiter Symphony. It, too, triggers a memory. I can just see Diane Keaton piloting her VW Bug convertible, a nervous Woody Allen in tow, up to the cottage in the Hamptons while the sun sets on a Sunday.

And on this Sunday, the sun continues to rise.