Because I really am so cool, I was invited to be a guest on publisher Angel Ackerman’s “Take The Mike,” recorded at WDVR (find it here) the other day. Angel, a wonderful editor and publisher (she’s published and edited yours truly), asked me to join her on the show she recorded with Carla VanDyk about the intersection of books and music. We gabbed over ‘School House’ rock songs, plenty of others, and I was lucky enough to sing and play one of my kid’s songs, “The Ballad of Otto the Oak,” live in studio.
It was a grand old time for a radio broadcast to be broadcast later.
I happen to love WDVR. It’s radio of the old-school variety that I love so much, with an eclectic mix of shows featuring an equally eclectic mix of music, played by DJ’s that just love what they are spinning and know so much about it. It reminds me of the days when you could listen for hours to a broadcast, be given a whole bunch of info as well as some great anecdotes from shows that were hosted by such interesting and informed personalities.
These were the truly wonderful days of radio I grew up with. I’m sorry, but satellite streaming, etc., does not, nor will it ever, compare for me with what creative radio used to be…and still is at WDVR. Imagine how great radio was in those days before T.V.!
As I want to give the good folks doing such great radio a ‘shout-out’ here, and of course gush over Angel and Parisian Phoenix (which you can find here), I had a little something happen to me when I was driving the half hour over from my girl’s place to the station that as much prompted this useless little blog today.
I try not to engage my GPS (in my case, Waves) all that often, as I think it rots the little grey matter I have left, keeping me from trying to figure out where I am. At the very least, I usually write down directions to take with me, along with my phone, knowing that a GPS can take you well out of the way sometimes, or even through areas you don’t want to drive through (it has done both to me a’plenty). Driving to the station, as I came off Route 12, I was taken down some really quiet, deserted NJ streets, with maybe a house every mile or so, lots of woods around me. It was a beautiful ride, but God knows where the hell I was!
And just as I was coming to another one of those ‘main’ country roads sporting a triple digit, yup, you guessed it…my phone died.
Where the hell am I? I said aloud, cursing my phone when I knew this hiccup was my own fault as I had not charged my phone that morning. I have warned plenty here about our overreliance on our gizmos, and there I was getting bit on my own backside with this scenario playing out in real time for me, when I was to blame for not even giving my gizmo (phone) a fighting chance this time.
But, as I say, I had written down the directions and address of the station, and as I came to that semi-main road, I was able to navigate, even given my limited brain capacity, to the station. Sure, I could have also rolled into any store/gas station to ask directions, but who knows if that wouldn’t get me shot these days, as folks don’t rightly ask for directions in this way too much anymore, nor do clerks or attendants even look up and talk to customers when they walk into a store or silence their earbuds enough to hear you ask them something.
So, score one for me using my pea brain and for actually enjoying being lost for a nanosecond in another part of New Jersey I have never been.
And again, thanks to Angel, Carla and WDVR for letting me get on a radio station doing it the way it used to be.
