WNEW, WQEW, RIP

WNEW, WQEW, R.I.P
From 1999, I think.

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THE SONG WAS YOU

Help, there’s a hole in my radio.

This morning, while driving my sons to their respective playdates, I instinctively pushed preset three and waited for the voice of Sinatra to fill the van. Fooled again! For the ninth or tenth time in the past few weeks, the sounds of the Disney Radio Channel—obnoxious announcers, bubblegum tunes, smart-bomb commercials (they’ll only kill your kids)---woke me from my self-deception. WQEW was gone, and with it Sinatra Saturday, the latest victims of demographics and Disneyfication. For me, it was as if Ol’ Blue Eyes died twice in one year.

I’m a Disney shareholder myself, have been for a long time, and I’m going to continue to be one. Michael Eisner, notwithstanding his lukewarm ’98 season, is one of a handful of CEOs I’m comfortable entrusting with my risk capital. I’ve been making money for years off the schmaltzy culture he’s so good at manufacturing, and I don’t intend to stop now just because Mickey’s invading my backyard. (I know, evil triumphs when good men do nothing, but let’s not get carried away with ourselves here—we’re talking about disappointment, not tragedy.)

WQEW (and its predecessor, WNEW) was, as it never tired of telling you, the “home of American popular song”. Not the “pop” that runs up and down the Billboard charts today, but the songs we call “standards”—the incredible catalog created by maybe a hundred men (and a few women), largely between 1920 and 1960, for Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. It is a body of work which provided the raw material for thousands of vocal recordings and countless jazz interpretations and which found its highest expression in the performances of Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett, Nat Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. The authors of these songs were brilliant, meticulous artisans who cared how words scanned, and who knew whether they rhymed or whether they only came close—who could paint the whole spectrum of emotion and humanity with notes and chords, rarely falling back on the musical cliché--who could tell a story and make you care deeply about that story and its characters in the time it takes to boil an egg, and who did so within a framework of rules that most of today’s practitioners would find difficult and confining, both musically and lyrically.

But these were writers who refused to sacrifice craft on the altar of expression; they proudly served both masters and thereby didn’t just produce entertainments, but invented an art form. The quality of their work is remarkable especially in view of its enormous quantity; considered in its totality their output is, arguably, the high watermark of American popular culture.

And 1560 on the AM dial was where they lived in New York. There are great jazz stations that serve up much of the same material (mostly as instrumentals), but on QEW it wasn’t just the music that mattered---the song itself was king. Sure, you were listening to Clooney or Sarah Vaughan or Jo Stafford or Joe Williams (or, of course, Sinatra), but they were merely delivering the message. The station belonged to Arlen, Berlin, Porter, Mercer, Loesser, Lane, Lerner, Loewe, Rodgers, Hart, Mancini, Mandel, Coleman, the Bergmans, Shire, Maltby, LeGrand, Burke, Van Heusen, Parrish, Schwartz, Dietz, Kern, Fields, Hammerstein, Carmichael, Leigh, Sondheim,Youmans, Ellington, Warren, McHugh, and the Gershwins. (Not a small part of Sinatra’s genius, of course, was his ability to pick material.)

QEW, unfortunately, wrestled with its own demographic demons, and spent much of the average broadcast day pinned to the mat. Mid-century pop kitsch (and why pick on anyone here?) can be ear candy in small doses, but many a WQEW afternoon was the musical equivalent of Trick-Or-Treat --you pay the price later. (The sucking sound you heard in the fifties was Elvis filling the vacuum left by this stuff.)

When QEW was bad, though, it was just bad, but when it was good it was terrific, even sublime. Self-absorption aside, program host Jonathan Schwartz (his style was once described to me as “All Jonathan, All The Time”) is an exceptionally intelligent critic, a compellingly listenable raconteur, and a walking encyclopedia of the songs and their creators. You didn’t have to like him; if you cared about the songs, you listened to him anyway. His voice and demeanor suggested an aging prep school wiseguy fighting off laryngitis, but he cultivated an intimacy with his audience that enabled him to enter the microphone at his end and emerge from your radio at the other, Captain Kirk-like, plopping himself onto your car’s back seat or the recliner in your living room and holding forth. He invested “Sinatra Saturday” with an authority that made his arrogance not only tolerable, but necessary--he knew more than you did, much more. On his rambling Sunday morning show he often told the same story more than once, treating the names of the celebrated as Hansel did breadcrumbs, but you stayed with it to the end even after the umpteenth telling. These were stories, by and large, about the people who created the great songs and great recordings. One of my favorites is of the lyricist Howard Dietz who, upon being asked how quickly he could write, tossed off in a flash this parody of “Jealousy”:

Cyd Charisse
Get down off that mantelpiece
You’re quite a shock there
I think we need a clock there

I think that’s right, but I’m not sure—I only heard it twice.

Schwartz could be sanctimonious and overbearing, but he knew his stuff. And if he dropped a lot of names, so what? He had not only met most of those people (they hung out in his living room when he was growing up, the son of composer Arthur Schwartz), he loved them, and he loved their songs as much as we did. You could hear it.

And you could hear the love of the songs in morning man Bob Jones’ voice when, after playing a cut, he’d repeat a line from the lyric (“ ‘Hide your heart from sight, lock your dreams at night, it could happen to you’ ”, Jones might opine after listening with you to Jo Stafford’s take on Burke and Van Heusen, a discreetly seductive lilt creeping in on “could”.) And you could hear it when Stan Martin interviewed Julie Wilson or Mary Cleere Haran. Or when Les Davis said just about anything. In the old days (the 70s and 80s), you could hear it in Bob Haymes and Ted Brown and Jim Lowe and Jazzbeaux Collins and William B., and in the really old days you could hear it, as my mother did, in Martin Block.

And now they’re gone, having failed to pull off another death-defying jump to a different frequency (they landed at 1560 in 1992 after WNEW-AM 1130 was acquired by Bloomberg, another really smart Mike that I’d put my money with). So now a small but dedicated group of enthusiasts for a sound and a feeling that’s totally out of step with America at the millennium no longer has a place to turn when they sit in front of a radio. A new NPR station, anyone? Count me out. I don’t want to quench my thirst for elegance and refinement at the public trough. A Disney boycott? Not, I repeat, for my money. In the great scheme of things, this is really a tiny matter, surely smaller than Kosovo or teenage drug-use or Y2K or even the conversion of a Civil War battlefield into a theme park. Business is business, and art is art. When the twain meet it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t happen often and we shouldn’t come to expect it.

In the end we get the face and the culture we deserve. So don’t blame a rich guy named Mike, even if next week a newly retired basketball icon acquires your favorite station and changes it to an all-hoop format. If you love the songs, buy the records and listen. Over and over.