My big sister’s radio

by David Benjamin

“… So many deejays so far away/ You oughta heard the records they would play/ On that little transistor, my big sister’s radio/ My big sister’s transistor radio had a song for my heart and a song for my soul/ One for my heartaches and one for my fears…”  

—Tommy Castro

MADISON, Wis. — Here’s a surprise. According to an online bio by the Radio Hall of Fame, Dick Biondi is still among us. He’s alive! 

Although Biondi was one of the curses of my childhood, I’m thinking about calling him up and forgiving him. He was, in a backassward way, my gateway to music appreciation. For a long tine, this was a reluctant enlightenment. In my “fictional memoir,” The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, this is what I wrote about a Chicago deejay’s unwholesome relationship with my big sister Peg:

“… My sister loved Dick Biondi.

“Every night from around her eleventh birthday on, Peg had made a nightly ritual of commandeering the bathroom, dressed in her flannel nightgown and giant mohair slippers, armed with hair rollers, face cream, Q-tips, twelve pounds of Kleenex and an Arvin bakelite radio, where she would perform a three-hour toilette. Her routine brooked no deviation. Her only companion was Dick Biondi—known to [my kid brother] Bill and me as Dick Head. WLS radio in Chicago had the most powerful AM signal in the Midwest, so pervasive that you could drive from Syracuse to to Sacramento and never have to adjust your radio dial, unless you couldn’t stand one more minute of Dick Head. Biondi was the most beloved disk jockey west of Murray the K, but I hated him—and I hated rock ’n’ roll. Dick and rock kept me out of the toilet. Peg would station herself at the mirror, executing endless ablutions, swaying gently to ‘Earth Angel’ or ‘Love Me Tender,’ allowing no intruder to enter—not even Mom—until she was completely cleansed and composed and ready for her four-hour phone call with Rosie. If I addressed Peg while Dick Biondi was speaking to her, Peg would turn on me viciously and hiss, ‘David! Ssssh!’

“Because of Dick Biondi, I peed off the porch for three years…”

I recently flashed back to Peg’s love affair with Dick Biondi and WLS (which operated at 50,000 planet-circling watts). The memory kicked in when Tommy Castro’s song, “Big Sister’s Radio” came around on my iTunes shuffle. Like Castro, I had a big sister who, every waking hour she was at home, had her radio tuned to the strongest AM signal on the dial. Castro sings about picking up Memphis and New Orleans on his sister’s little one-dial, monaural Motorola—or maybe a Regency, Sony or Panasonic. Sister Peg wasn’t nearly so eclectic. By the age of twelve, forsaking all others, she was bonded with Biondi. 

My anti-pop hostility cracked somewhat when, in the eighth grade at Franklin School, I started attending Friday afternoon dances in the gym—where I never got up the nerve to ask a yummy little classmate named Martha Werner to trip with me the awkward fantastic. But I heard the beat throbbing through the gym and, like Tommy Castro, felt the warmth in my blood and the itch in my feet. Irresistibly, I found myself synching silently along with the Essex as they belted out, in infectious harmony (with bongos!), “Easier Said Than Done,” or the Orlons cruising “South Street.”

I could never admit it but, yeah, Shirley Ellis (“The Name Game”), the Contours (“Do You Love Me?”), Chris Montez (“Let’s Dance!”) and even Dick Head were seeping through my defenses. While I wasn’t looking, I found myself caught up by the visceral drumbeat and muttering to myself (but not—coward!—to sweet, pretty Martha), “Hey baby, won’t you take a chance? Say that you’ll let me have this dance. Let’s dance!…”

I mean, by my freshman year, I had barely danced with any girl but I knew the rudiments of the twist, the stomp, the mashed potato (God love ya, Dee Dee Sharp), too. But I still held Top Forty rock ’n’ roll in intellectual contempt—with the notable exception of one chart-topper by Frankie Valli, whose soaring Jimmy Scott falsetto made me want desperately to serenade a girl named “Sherry, Sherry, ba-yay-by.”

(Actually, there was a Shari in my class at high school, but she was even scarier than Martha.)

As a defense against Peg’s radio, I became a Kingston Trio fan, on the theory that folk music sung by clean-cut white guys in ironed shirts was morally and culturally superior to Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry. Seeking salvation from the lowbrow sins of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, I saved my nickels and dimes to to buy my first jazz LP, Time Out by the Brubeck Quartet. I dabbled in Mussorgsky, Bartok, Aaron Copland and Julian Bream. 

Then, when I thought things couldn’t get worse, pop music went all to hell, thanks, of course, to Biondi. In February ’63. Dick became the first deejay in America to play the Beatles—the song was “Please Please Me”—which I probably heard while Peg was hogging the bathroom, installing her rollers and creaming her face. Boy, as much as I deplored Paul Anka and Lesley Gore, I hated the Beatles tenfold. Long-haired girly-boys—from England!—singing that they wanted to twist and shout while holding my hand? C’mon, man! For a sense of the rage and revulsion directed, at that critical juncture, against the sissified Fab Four by teenage boys—while girls swooned and squealed—check out Robert Zemeckis’ film, I Wanna Hold Your Hand. The character of Tony Smerko (Bobby DiCicco) is the apotheosis of anti-Beatlism.

My resistance was futile. Dick Clark kept insidiously—accurately—reminding me, and all the other loyal American guys at the school dance (where every band slavishly flooded their repertoire with, quoting Tony Smerko, “the goddamn Beatles”), that John, Paul, George and Ringo had just a hell of a good beat and they were easy to dance to. 

And I caved. I couldn’t help it. I danced to it. In my secret heart of hearts, I gave “She Loves You” an 85.

Even as I crumbled, I did my best to atone by frequenting the Madison Public Library, where the LPs were abundant, eclectic and free. I could take home and soak up rare, earthy music taped by Alan Lomax and Sam Charters in those exotic locales sung of, two generations later, by Tommy Castro—Memphis, New Orleans, Harlem, Central Avenue. I graduated from the Kingstons to Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and Bessie Smith. I gravitated from Brubeck to Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery, Cannonball Adderley… and Ella.

More important, my vicarious adventures in the Lower Ninth at Mardi Gras, downstairs at Club 47 and up at Birdland, I learned how American music is a living thing unique in the world. It has evolved persistently, inevitably, unpredictably and danceably from the work songs, gospel hymns, minstrel shows and the blind pigs of the Black South to ragtime, jazz, blues, swing, honky-tonk, gutbucket, Tin Pan Alley and, whoops, there it is—rock ’n’ roll. 

Belatedly but immersively, I absorbed, collected, appreciated and came to love—more than Peg—the jungle rhythms, sexual undertones and teenage heartache of all that Top Forty “crap” that trapped me in our too-small apartment—listening, memorizing, tapping my toe, singing reluctantly along—on my big sister’s crummy, tinny, battered plastic-back radio…

… none of which I might have heard, twisted and shouted to and figured out without the daily, weekly, constant raving of a loudmouth payola-grubber at (I can still hear the jingle) “WLS, in Chicago-o-o.”