This Wonderful Invention

It was a dark Saturday night in Chicagoland. I think I was on 294, heading toward God knows where. A familiar voice mumbled out from my car speakers.

“Oh, my baby, baby…I love you more than I can tell…”

It was on the radio. It was on WXRT. All six minutes and forty-five seconds of “I Want You,” and I savored every one. 

That wasn’t DJ Lin Brehmer spinning that tune; he worked mornings for most of my time listening to him. As I graduated college and started my working life in Chicago, he’d be on in the car, often handing off to Terri Hemmert on mid-days as I was pulling into the parking lot at the office. It was warm, congenial radio that still had plenty of room for smartass humor. 

But I’m thinking about that Saturday night in my car as I think about Brehmer, who died way too soon on Sunday at age 68. His was always a welcome voice on my car stereo, but more than that, the radio station he helped define was my musical home base, a place that shaped my tastes in ways that echo still through my Apple Music library. 

I’m thinking about Lin, and I’m thinking about the radio, and before you know it, I’m thinking about Elvis Costello. (Among others.) 

Elvis Costello loves the radio. It’s not an uncommon sentiment among songwriters who grew up in the medium’s ascendant age. As recently as fifteen years ago, the easiest and cheapest way to hear music was a radio. Every car had one. It was a talk and music transmission technology, but in the right hands, it was an artform.

By the time I went to high school in the early 90s, the industry of radio was busy suffocating the medium in its crib. Corporate consolidation led quickly to playlists designed to eliminate risk, which turned DJs into little more than copy readers between preassigned blocks of songs and commercials. Lots of commercials. So many commercials that the old trick of spinning the dial to find a station without commercials stopped working, because inevitably, every station was playing as many commercials as songs, or so it seemed. 

In a way, “Radio Radio” predicted this future; “Radio Silence” from 2002’s When I Was Cruel crystallized it as an inevitable current state. Its narrator is a conflicted character—at times hell-bent on destroying radio, at other times realizing he’s trapped within it. He sees the beauty and the power; he also sees the failure and decay. 

Again, if radio was dying more than twenty years ago because of “too much choice,” then you’d think the baby would be long dead in the cradle by now, when the choices available to a listener in 2023 make those choices look laughable. An algorithm can make you a radio station where you are guaranteed to love every song, and if you shove enough music into it, it might almost feel like there’s a consciousness behind it. But there isn’t. 

In many ways, we may never have improved upon the simple technology that allowed one person to play a song for anyone within broadcast distance to hear at the same time. You could be alone but never lonely, part of a community with no boundaries you could see except the ones in your own mind. You were connected. 

With “Radio Silence,” EC is mourning that loss too, although with a healthy veneer of cynicism and bile. For Costello, radio was more than just an entertaining medium or a way to hear music; as an artist, it embraced him, and ultimately pushed him away. 

WXRT was a station I graduated into. I cut my teeth in high school on classic rock, oldies and alternative. In Chicago, that meant WCKG, WJMK and WKQX–105.9, 104.3 and 101.1 on my FM dial. I started favoring XRT when I was in college in Evanston, and then as a young twentysomething, XRT was an anchor in a world that seemed like sometimes it was shoving my head underwater as a cosmic prank. 

Throughout the six years I spent living on the north side after college, my life quietly revolved around XRT. I went to XRT shows all the time at Metro, the Vic, the Riv. I listened every morning on my way to work and on my way home. Sometimes I remembered to listen on Sundays to Breakfast with the Beatles and Terri Hemmert, who I eventually saw in person as emcee at Beatlefest, the annual Beatles convention held in Rosemont. 

It wasn’t some conscious elaborate thing; I was deep into music, and XRT was deep into playing good music. That’s where it began and ended. I didn’t love every track that made their playlist, but they turned me on to many bands I’d never have found otherwise. They nurtured my love for an artist like Elvis Costello with just the simple validation of playing his music when I knew no other station in the city would go near it. And they were always there, day or night, a gumbo of Boomer nostalgia, punk defiance, and roots rock geniality. 

I know I can listen to WXRT whenever I want on the internet, but it’s not quite the same, although I do dip in occasionally. Part of the magic of terrestrial radio is that you are in this finite square of space and time, and you are experiencing something with other people you will never meet who are also in that same finite square, and you are all grooving or tapping together. The DJ is the priest in that wordless prayer, and we’re the congregation. 

Yes, radio has been dying for at least twenty years, and yet the dial still spins and the frequencies still buzz. But a certain kind of radio dies with Lin; it’s human radio, made by people for other people, who want to create moments of indelible wonder in the middle of ordinary life. Tom Petty sang about it: “There goes the last DJ/who plays what he wants to play/and says what he wants to say/Hey hey hey.” 

It was a cold January evening downtown at the seasonal skating rink on State Street. I was spending the weekend at a sci-fi con in the suburbs but something had possessed me to also drive back 30 minutes to the city so that I could join this ice skating outing with my friends. 

It was freezing and snowing, chunky white flakes of the stuff; the streetlights were halos in the dark. WXRT was playing on the sound system, and up came “Shine A Light,” that titanic gospel soul number about junkies and jewelry by the Rolling Stones. It was like I was hearing it again for the first time, a bluesy wail of hope that traveled down through a couple decades and a couple thousand miles to land in the hands of a DJ who put it on the radio, which was playing at the ice rink, which was where my ears were at the time. 

It seems impossible that circumstance could create such a perfect moment, where place and mood commingle to elevate not just your spirit, but your entire existence. I think about that moment at least once a week. 

Listen to “Radio Silence” on the streaming service of your choice.