by Lorraine Ray
Can you dig it? The clue from The Hound of the Baskerville that won the contest (come on down to the radio station for your prize!) was webbed fingers in the portrait of the Baskerville ancestor.
And while we were listening to radio contests, from far, far away, we began to vaguely discern manic howls and cackles. These came from the inimitable disc jockey of the west, the magical gentleman that made it good to listen to rock and roll and who put soul into the western night air. Screeching and growling and howling, he embodied the voice of cool.
The dinner dishes scrubbed, we rushed away; we secretly tried to receive his broadcast, for it was the best thing we’d ever heard. We found, when trying to tune into his show as it crossed the desert, that the voice travelled in and could be heard well, then faded out in masses of staccato static, which brought us to our desperate search again, for where it might be picked up we did not know. Bouncing off lonely desert mountains, off clouds unseen and mighty, his laugh, his cry, coming from the west to us. His voice on our transistors in the bedroom or the bathroom left us dancing and giggling, trying the boogaloo, the cool jerk, the twist. Trying all the dances to this music and picking which one worked best.
“That’s the kinda loving makes a man looooooose his mind. You lookin’ good. You so grooooovy, man. Just the way they told me you would. Mr. Clean. You wear your dresses tight. You wear foxy furs. Mommy got your mojo.”
“Come with me. From Sunset Strip in the great West Coast. Soul.”
“Let it all hang out!”
“Right on! Hit me with it, man! Get it on!”
“Right on! Get it on!”
The fantastic phenomena of the west spoke to us that way—of things we didn’t comprehend. Sending us his coolness. We paid so little attention to the less than sensational aspects of his show that we thought he transmitted from somewhere near Mexico or from the little towns on the border between Mexico and California. Instead he broadcast from Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and he announced that fact several times every hour. This is an example of how the writer must take the mundane and stretch it into the fantastic. Without knowing how foolish it sounded, we had glamorized the unknown person, the crazy voice, and housed him in a cave. Ours was the obsession of thousands of young children and teens—to find him on the dial, night after night, to search gleefully for a connection to his world. Tuning in on the radio in the night and waiting for the well-known voice, crossing the lonely desert to us, and we felt the laughing voice in the night would be leading us to coolness, which we desperately desired. Introducing the songs (when would the one we wanted start?) our requests not reaching this unknown place where the man lived and spent his time cutting into the songs and singing along with his croaking voice, high pitched and crazy. We danced in the bathroom to his soulful songs. We kissed the mirror and laughed like we were gassed up on something.
“Peeeanut, Peeeanut Butter. Peeeanut, Peeeanut Butter.” We imagined him and his coolness, providing us with the necessary mojo through osmosis just hearing his voice. Did he live in a cave beside a desert pool? We traded our knowledge of where on the dial we had encountered him and what music we heard him playing. We traded knowledge of what we thought might be cool, of what he laughed about and what he said was important and full of soul. We wanted the soul he offered. We wanted the coolness factor that he had. We were silent listening to him, none of us wanting to talk over the wonderful sound of his soulful voice, everyone eager to hear everything about dances, about being soulful and how we would let it all hang out some day.
What did he say about this musical group? What did he discuss? Was it concerts in LA that he discussed? Exactly how could we go to those? Exactly what was an LA? What time had it been, and what night exactly, if we could say if rain made it better to find his radio broadcast or wind or cold would we do so? When exactly was the best hour to listen? We wondered about other peoples’ experiences and we tried to see how closely we could get a perfect signal from him. How we leant in, leant forward, to hear exactly what he said and we laughed when he joked, so funny we could get the meaning, be in with the in crowd on the latest and funniest thing that he had said. Even on the transistor that we clipped to the screen of our window, the space-age transistor, on that plastic monstrosity, we could hear the Wolfman occasionally as he broadcast in the desert night air.