THE WYMAN WEEKLY

Underemployed. Unattached. Unimpressed.

Issue 43 March 15, 1997

 

 

 

You ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up?

  - Hard Harry in the film “Pump Up the Volume”

 

Well, I found out the news Tuesday afternoon at work while checking my messages from home: cool cousin Chris left a series of distraught messages telling me that Rev 105 had switched formats. Not only switched formats, it turned out, but had been sold to Disney, and then left in the scrap heap. The deal was made so that Disney could tighten their grasp on the local radio market. They now own five FM stations in the market (Rev was made up of three transmitters) and their elimination of the Rev leaves their mainstream alternative (no, I can’t explain that term) station, The Edge, with no competition. Rev 105 was entertaining, diverse, and cool. They played tons of new music, while keeping in touch with their roots. They paid attention to local artists. It was easily the best radio station I have heard in my thirty-one years.

 

Things you need to get used to hearing now that radio has taken a decided tilt to the mediocre and you’ll be listening to more music programmed by dimwits:

 

“Here’s some classic Supertramp.”

“Here’s some classic Crosby, Stills, and Nash.”

(My personal favorite:) “Here’s some early Blind Faith.” (Seriously, I heard that once.)

 

What I truly love is when a station like Cities 97 promises “no hard rock.” Quick, name me a genre in the whole world of rock ‘n’ roll that is “soft.” But I’m too hard on 97. You know, Eric Clapton has put out 250 albums in his career, and dammit, it’s important to hear every string that he has bent, every I’m-so-anguished-check-me-out-I’m-an-authentic-bluesman lyric that he’s ever sung. Doesn’t matter that the fossil has the weakest voice this side of Kathy Lee Gifford, hey he’s Clapton, man, he fucking rules!

 

So now I’ll end up flipping over to The Edge (ah shit, and Live has a new album out...)

 

Although the Rev’s dial position has been replaced by a hard rock station, please don’t pick on the metalheads. A bunch of alternative music is really metal anyway. These cities should be able to support both a Rev and a headbanger station. What The Man would love is for the alternative music fans to turn against the headbangers, that way we don’t see what really went down: that some rich people with a bunch of money decided to make more money by buying everything in sight, and then marginalizing the fringes. They’ll tell you it’s capitalism, baby, but it’s not the kind of capitalism that Adam Smith preached. It’s a different, ugly kind that defines competition by allowing the wealthiest of corporations to do whatever they wish in their efforts to eliminate competition.

 

But, ya know. The Minnesota Twins don’t make money (so they claim, I can cook books too, it’s not that tough) so fuck ‘em. Sell them. Sell them, Carl. And if they get moved out of state, so what. They didn’t make enough money. If you’re not making enough money to add to your billion-plus, then sell the team and stay out of my face with your pleas for my money. Hey, if you want more money you can always go back to your Depression-era roots and collect on bankruptcies. Next time I read The Grapes of Wrath I can put your face on all the debt collectors and greedy bankers in the book.

 

Well that long black train / Carry my baby and gone

  - Junior Parker

 

So I’m left with memories. Like last summer on Friday night I was driving up north, and Joanne had car trouble and was late for her shift. So Thorn ends up going late on his shift and turns the Rev into his version of freeform radio. He plays Chic’s “Le Freak” and then AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” He tries to play matchmaker in hooking up various Phish fans for a road trip to Wisconsin to see their band. Then plays Zep’s “Communication Breakdown.” Stuff like this goes on for about forty minutes, the whole time I’m driving further and further away from the Rev’s signal and am contemplating just pulling over until Thorn wraps things up...

 

It’s like the deejays at the Rev were this ultra-cool group of friends you had. Brian Oake was the coffee-guzzling conspiracy theorist with an opinion on everything. Shawn Stewart was the New Age girl, and she loved baseball, so she balanced perfectly. Thorn, well he fucked around on the air, and that was perfect, because he was the man who drove you home in the afternoons. (Or if you bus it to work, he was waiting for you when you got home with some stream-of-consciousness insight that made you forget whatever bullshit you were doing at the office.) Mary Lucia was Cool personified, talking you through the evenings. Plus she had what was arguably the greatest Rev quote ever, in a spot advertising her show “Somethin’ Else”:  How can you be so skinny and live so phat?

 

And there are so many other little memories of the personalities and the station tucked away. Radio is of the moment, unlike television and movies. That song you hear in your car on the way home from the grocery store. That song you hear while you flip the radio on while you’re putting discs in your CD player. That’s why the random button is on your CD player, it’s an attempt to get the moment, to sneak up on you, to surprise you, to let you know that life can be fun. That life is, as John Lennon once said, what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

 

Anyway, let me continue to try to explain what this station was like. The Rev was like this cool friend you had, and at any time you wanted, you could invite this friend into your living room, your cubicle, your car. Your friend would play music for you. Music, that for the most part mattered. Music that was cool. Music that made you feel cool, that made you feel special. Because, the music set you apart. You didn’t necessarily want it to, but it did. While everyone else was starting relationships, getting real jobs, figuring out what they were going to do with their lives...you were listening to music. And you never forgot that the music wouldn’t leave you. And when you were all grown up, and the formative-years cool people ended up being on the outside when it came to rock ‘n’ roll and yukking it up over some inane joke that Barnard made, you were so busy thinking about the cool song, comment, or interview that you heard on the Rev that you didn’t care.

 

Speaking of Barnard: I haven’t listened to that egomaniac in a few years - tell me: does he still make fun of blacks, Orientals, and Arabs? Yeah, I find most racists funny. Ha ha ha. Has Tubby realized that Tom Kelly is a great baseball manager yet?

 

That’s it. I give up. It’s like I said last fall, pretty soon Microsoft, Disney, and Nike will own the world. And I wanna sell myself to the highest bidder. I wanna become some sort of commercialized slacker, a Gen X stereotype appearing in TV commercials, wearing my ripped jeans and flannel, acting irreverent, selling products that are probably something you truly don’t need or are just variations on something you already own. Cell phones, sports cars, designer jeans, Rolling Stone, vacations in the Gulf of Mexico, beepers, box sets...you name it, I’ll sell it. WYMAN SEZ BUY THIS!!! It’ll be so much simpler that way. My first step: tomorrow I’m going to trade in my Son Volt, Semisonic, and Social Distortion discs and get me some “Edge music.” I wanna be sedated.

 

Or maybe I fight back... alright here’s the deal: I’m putting a contract out on Mickey Mouse. I want that fucking rodent offed. I don’t care whether it’s via poison, guns, knives, or a mousetrap; but somebody’s going to have to pay for what Disney did to the Rev. An example must be made. Two cases of the beer of your choice to whoever brings me Mickey’s ears. I’ll throw in a third case if you put the whammy on Minnie, too. I don’t feel like watching her pull some Yoko trip on CNN for the next year.

 

But why hire someone to do something that I could just do myself? Yeah, I hop on a plane, head to Orlando, and buy a gun. I’ve never fired a gun before, but I’m sure I can figure it out. Then I find Mickey Mouse, that rat bastard (pun intended), and empty my weapon on him. Just like that, bang bang, see ya. Now Donald Duck can claim his spot on the Disney throne. I always thought he was the better actor anyway, so justice is truly served.

 

The nation goes nuts. GEN X SLACKER LOSER CHARGED WITH MOUSE MURDER screams the headline.

“He just wanted attention,” said the psychiatrist.

“He was such a quiet young man,” said his next door neighbor.

“He signed his last time card ‘Mickey Mouse,’ crossed it out, and then put in his real name,” said the temp agency.

The trial is celebrity-filled, I spend my time making eyes at Pocahontas. What a doll. The crucial moment comes when they put me on the stand. The judge makes me take my sunglasses off, then the prosecutor lays into me. The trial hinges on the next exchange:

 

Prosecutor: “So you feel no remorse for killing a cherished figure in our country?”

Wyman: “Ah, big deal, he wasn’t a living thing anyway - he was just a cartoon.”

Prosecutor: “Living or not, you did kill him.”

Wyman: “Yeah, well, the Rev wasn’t technically a living thing, yet Disney killed it.”

 

And you know the rest. Mickey Mouse made more money than some little radio station in Minnesota, so he meant more to our society. So I’m found guilty. It didn’t help that I had bragged about my offense while in jail. I get 99 years to life. The media horde gathers on the steps outside the building. Handcuffed, but not gagged, I’m led to the state trooper’s car to take me to the state pen.

 

“Hey Wyman: what are you going to do now?” yells a reporter.

“I ain’t going to fucking Disney World!” I reply.

 

 

Things to do:

 

·         Listen to Radio K - 770 AM on your radio dial, you can buy some of the station’s watts to help ‘em out financially

 

·         Shop at independently-owned record stores

 

·         Support your local music scene

 

·         Read Jim Walsh’s columns in the St. Paul Pioneer Press

 

·         Read City Pages and hope it stays fresh now that its competition has been eliminated (what a week it has been...)

 

·         Read zines like Cake and The Squealer