DIALSCAN:  TAMPA BAY, APRIL 13, 2009

 

        So as you slide into your car after watching the Rays massacre the Yankees in their home opener (to my withering dismay), here is what you might hear, or not:

 

            Beginning at WWBA-AM 820, with the Laura Ingraham show. She looks winsome and willowy enough, and to my highly trained ear, her conservative credentials seem to be in order. Now the bad news. Laura Ingraham is an attorney. I deal with enough attorneys in the course of my workday. I don’t need to deal with another at night. I don’t even wait for the end of the show.

 

            So I move over to WHBO-AM 1040, where it sounds like a basketball game has just ended—some stevedore is giving the basketball scores, telling me that the Cleveland Cavaliers have home court advantage throughout the impending playoffs. Big Christforsaken deal. In any event, the incompetent board-op just cut off the stevedore by cutting to commercial. I pick up the remote control to my Sony HD Radio receiver and switch bands.

 

            At WUSF-FM 89.7, my de facto home station, the relaxing basso profundo of Bob Seymour, the station’s jazz director, pours out of the speakers. He introduces I Can’t Get Started, with Sonny Stitt on tenor sax, among others. Here I take a note of pause to tell you that WUSF-FM comes billed nowadays as “Your First Choice for Classical Music”. Around here, it’s the only choice. But what a splendid choice it is. Many’s the steamy summer afternoon that I have tooled through the Tampa Bay area listening to the World’s Greatest Music. Whether it’s an hour’s getaway for lunch on a weekday or a weekend jaunt up Gulf Boulevard overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, whether it’s Chopin & Co. by day, or Coltrane and friends after ten, any time I put on WUSF is a vacation from my worries and woes. That is, of course, until the turned-up noses at NPR News take control every afternoon at 4:00 PM. And the pledge drives! I avoid WUSF like bubonic plague during the pledge drives. To hear them talk, you’d swear that classical music as we know it would evaporate like mist if you didn’t send money. Besides that, as you know, there are other stations in this country that still do classical music and jazz, without public funding.

 

            My soapbox is wobbling again. So if you’ll excuse me while I put my feet up…

 

 

            You just knew that couldn’t last, didn’t you? Bob’s gone and put on a piece by Sammy Figueroa, a Miami-based percussionist. Far too “smooth jazz” for my taste. So, because there is virtually nothing else on the FM dial in this Podunk, redneck, jerkwater burg that I wouldn’t run screaming from, we go back to the crackle of the AM dial.

 

            At WQYK-AM 1010, which would run Yankee games were it not for the fact that it cheerfully insists on broadcasting USF college baseball to the four people who care, (three of whom are in the stands), we find the Tony Bruno show, also known as Into the Night. Tony, from what I understand, is a Philadelphia native and got his start in radio there, and so I would think he was at least as sorry to see Harry Kalas leave us as the rest of the Delaware Valley and its natives. Tony’s shtick is sports talk, and so I am, to say the least, slightly puzzled that he is interviewing someone from the Discovery Channel show Deadliest Catch, which is probably as far removed from the sporting realm as it’s possible to be. WQYK just reaffirmed their commitment to USF Bulls baseball in a taped ten-second spot. And without even turning around, I lifted my right hand and extended my middle finger. Oh, holy jumping screaming Jesus—the guy who gives away his Social Security number has struck again during the commercial break. I don’t give a sweet Christ what his Social is—leave me out of it. Keep your social off the radio. Teevee, too, while you’re at it. 

 

            This Dialscan ends as it full well should. Tony just put on a cut of Harry the K—that most marvelous of broadcasters, if not men—reading a poem to his constituents, ending with “Philadelphia fans/I love you.”

 

            Chaplin was right. “Words are so feeble, so fragile.”