Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Paul to the Romans, on Creation and Hope)

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”—Romans 8: 22-25 (Revised Standard Version)

The 1612 image accompanying this post, Apostle St. Paul, was painted by the Spanish Renaissance painter, sculptor, and architect El Greco (1541-1614), and hangs in Museo del Greco, Toledo, Spain.

This Day in Radio History (Pioneering Female DJ Alison Steele Debuts on WNEW-FM)

July 4, 1966—Complying with a directive from the Federal Communications Commission that FM stations could no longer simulcast programming from their AM station counterparts, WNEW-FM coupled something tried and true—pop music in a middle-of-the-road (MOR) with something new: an all-female roster of deejays.

A member of this unusual group made this declaration on that Independence Day:

“Hello New York and America, this is WNEW-FM ... Where the girls are ... Welcome to history.”

The background and selection of that early group—actresses, models, and assorted TV personalities—represent a long, fascinating story in and of itself, which Dan McCue relates in this Substack post from this March.

But I want to focus on the one who delivered the above greeting, survived the format switch and mass replacement by male DJS a year later and, amid an employment environment far different from today, created a template that other females in the role pursued: Alison Steele.

To say that Steele was the first woman to win Billboard’s FM Personality of the Year in 1976 and that she was an inductee in the Radio Hall of Fame and Rock and Rock Hall of Fame doesn’t begin to describe the place she held in the imagination of faithful listeners.

You had to experience it, night after night, at your most restless and searching when you were unwilling or unable to sleep.

At the time of her hiring, Steele, a divorced single mom with a nine-year-old daughter, trailed a set of broadcasting gigs behind her: office aide, production assistant and associate producer at a New York radio station, morning exercise program leader, and, in the parlance of the day, “weather girl.”

“I was determined to be in show biz; I would do anything,” she told Su Yates of TV/Radio Week in an August 1978 interview. The Brooklyn native had been taught well by her mother, a singer and concert pianist: “She taught me a very simple rule: If I wanted something, all I had to do was go and get it.”

The entertainment world is filled with ambitious, hard-driving people who are sure that with one break, they can vault to the top of their profession.

But Steele’s willingness to try something different in that first year in her 2 pm-7 PM—theater reviews, celebrity interviews, whatever might reasonably hold a listener’s interest—may have impressed her bosses that she would be a quick study when they instituted a free-form, progressive-rock format in October 1967.

Once given her new perch from 10 PM to 2 AM six nights a week, she demonstrated the intelligence to craft an utterly individual on-air personality, signaled in her characteristic opening—a jazzy, flute-inflected melody followed by an intro she herself wrote and made famous throughout the New York City area, that, with some variations, went like this:

"The flutter of wings, the sounds of the night, the shadow across the moon, as the Nightbird lifts her wings and soars above the earth into another level of comprehension, where we exist only to feel. Come fly with me, Alison Steele, the Nightbird..."

During my adolescence more than 50 years ago, WNEW was the New York station you listened to be cool, to hear concert simulcasts, musician interviews, and most tellingly, cuts from up-and-coming artists. Truth be told, I was more familiar with Steele’s male on-air colleagues because of the early hours I needed to maintain for school.

But I stayed up for the first hour or so to hear where her inclinations took her—spinning records by Yes, Genesis, The Moody Blues, Santana, and the Grateful Dead, interviewing Thin Lizzy, KISS, and Moody Blues bass guitarist John Lodge, and reading Poe, Wordsworth, Ginsberg, and Shakespeare—all in that voice.

That voice—low, honeyed, sultry, as if Lauren Bacall or Kathleen Turner were purring directly to you. (Luckily, listeners only heard her purr and not her French poodle, Genya, chewing on a bone in the studio near her.)

Her aural allure was matched by a physical one, marked by flaming red hair and bohemian attire: suede fringed vests, leather skirts, bell-bottom jeans, and flowing velvet materials. No wonder she was rumored to have dated Frank Sinatra, Johnny Carson, Sean Connery and a few rock stars.

It’s been 25 years since I read veteran DJ Richard Neer’s memoir of working at the station, FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio, but I can still vividly recall this passage:

“There was once a summer concert in Central Park when [Steele] wore a thin leather halter top, a leather bikini bottom, with high boots and a bare midriff. Boys were literally falling out of trees to get a better look.”

Unlike her high-living colleagues, Neer also notes, she was never “intoxicated by anything more than a New York Rangers victory.”

During those first years on the job, Steele disclaimed negativity (“I’ve always gone by the idea that there’s something fine in life, but you have to make the effort to find what it is,” she told K. Michael Blumberg in a 1974 New York Daily News profile).

She never wrote a memoir, as another DJ, Meg Griffin, for instance, urged. But in later years, after The Nightbird had flown from WNEW, she slipped hints about the sexism and bruises along the way.

“She was burned badly a few times,” recalled Griffin. “She lost several opportunities because she was a woman, and I don’t think that’s something you forget. She’d always tell me women had to work twice as many hours and be 10 times as good to be noticed in radio.

She related additional frustrations to women’s studies scholar and author Becca Anderson, observing that at a Madison Square Garden concert, “I was the last person be introduced. So they [her fellow male WNEW deejays] were all on stage when they introduced Alison Steele, ‘The Nightbird.’” They had to wait while the crowd cheered wildly for her.

There were also petty annoyances, as when station management wouldn’t buy her a step stool so she could reach records on the top shelf, or not giving her the night off to accept her Billboard award.

Management and, perhaps, some of her fellow DJs may have felt annoyed over the attention this radio pioneer received. But it’s doubtful that any of them ever inspired, as she did, at least three fictional nighttime deejay characters on TV and screen:

*Angie, a female trucker who worked with the air name of “The Nightingale” on BJ and the Bear;

*Rita McCall, a controversial personality who draws the attention of a murderous stalker in the Kojak episode "A Strange Kind of Love"; and

*Stevie Wayne, a smalltown deejay with a beguiling voice that Adrienne Barbeau patterned after Steele, in John Carpenter’s 1980 horror film The Fog.

By the end of the 1970s, WNEW and the Nightbird came to a parting of the ways. According to Neer’s account, the station asked him whether her extensive outside activities (public appearances and producing radio and syndicated TV shows) were distracting her from the work.

For her part, Steele could see a rising demand that deejays move away from the free-form format that emphasized personality-driven selections and towards homogenized choices. So, after 13 years, she left the station that made her famous in September 1979.

Her remaining 15 years were more nomadic—a stint announcing the soap opera One Life to Live, commercials (again), serving as writer, producer, and correspondent for CNN’s entertainment and lifestyle program, Limelight, and returning to her “Nightbird” roots at 92.3 K-Rock in the late 1980s. Increasingly, they were also darkened by health concerns.

Psychologist Dr. Patricia Farrell recalled becoming acquainted with Steele after meeting her on a late-night talk show, Last Call. Off the air, Steele confided that she had cancer and “was convinced that her job and the discrimination she had to battle in the industry had caused it.”

Her “vacations” had become trips to Lenox Hill Hospital. Exhausted from the chemo, she should have taken time off but couldn’t because she needed the health insurance.

The driven woman who’d become a radio legend and role model for later female deejays Carol Miller, Jody Peterson, and Rita Houston should have had a happier ending than death at age 58. 

Rock died some time ago at WNEW, but it continues to live in the memories of Steele’s listeners, who would agree with how colleague Vin Scelsa characterized her in a tribute:

“In her undying devotion to her audience, Alison was unique. She was one of the last purveyors of the utopian, communal vision of radio.”

Quote of the Day (John Quincy Adams, on the Deaths of His Father and Thomas Jefferson)

“[Tavernkeeper John] Merrill told me that he had come this morning out from Baltimore, and was informed there that my father died on the fourth of this Month, about five o’clock in the afternoon. From the Letters which I had yesterday received this event was so much expected by me, that it had no sudden and violent effect on my feelings— My father had nearly closed the ninety-first year of his life: A life illustrious in the Annals of his Country, and of the World— He had served to great and useful purpose his Nation, his Age, and his God— He is gone, and may the blessing of Almighty Grace have attended him to his Account— I say not, may my last End be like his! it were presumptuous— The time, the manner, the coincidence with the decease of Jefferson, are visible and palpable marks of divine favour, for which I would humble myself in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe— For myself all that I dare to ask is that I may live the remnant of my days in a manner worthy of him from whom I came, and at the appointed hour of my maker die as my father has died; in peace with God and man, sped to the regions of futurity with the blessings of my fellow men.”—John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), Sixth President of the United States, diary entry for July 9, 1826, in Diaries 1821-1848, edited by David Waldstreicher (2017)

Many Americans felt similarly to John Quincy Adams: that the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both on the 50^th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, were “visible and palpable marks of divine favour” on the United States.

Many of my readers will know that Jefferson had died at 12:50 pm, and that John Adams—who had reconciled with his longtime friend turned political rival the decade before—passed away later in the afternoon, unaware of what had happened in Virginia, with the words, “Jefferson still survives.”

Fewer people will know that, because of the still-slow state of overland communication in those days, John Quincy Adams, in Washington, was unaware of Jefferson’s death in Charlottesville 117 miles away. And it would not be for another three days when John Quincy learned of his father’s death at the family home in Massachusetts, 447 miles away.

When John Quincy Adams passed 22 years later, the news spread far more quickly, because the first links between major Eastern cities had been established for the telegraph, which Samuel Morse had publicly demonstrated in 1844. (See this 1999 C-Span clip for how the new invention was used so dramatically for what became a true “media event.”)

The younger Adams—who, like his father (and unlike Jefferson), was turned out of the White House after one miserable term—did indeed, as he hoped, “live the remnant of my days in a manner worthy of him from whom I came.” As the last prominent living link to the American Revolution, he lent tremendous prestige to the antislavery cause.

He was, in fact, engaged in another front in his struggle against slavery—a House of Representatives vote related to the Mexican War—when he was felled by a fatal stroke. 

By this time, this former President, after a long public career marked by controversy, was hailed as “Old Man Eloquent” by admirers and even recognized by opponents as a debater and legislator of formidable passion and shrewdness.

In its way, his last words were as memorable as those of his revered father: “This is the last of earth, but I am composed."

(The image accompanying this post is a detail from John Trumbull's 1818 painting of the Committee of Five presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. From left to right, the figures are: John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Francis Hopkinson, Sending Up Redcoat Readiness in the Revolution)

“A soldier stood on a log of wood,
               And saw a thing surprising.
 
              As in amaze he stood to gaze,
               The truth can't be denied, sir,
              He spied a score of kegs or more
               Come floating down the tide, sir.
 
              A sailor too in jerkin blue,
               This strange appearance viewing,
              First damned his eyes, in great surprise,
               Then said, ‘Some mischief's brewing.
 
              "These kegs, I'm told, the rebels hold,
               Packed up like pickled herring;
              And they're come down to attack the town,
               In this new way of ferrying.’ 
 
              The soldier flew, the sailor too,
               And scared almost to death, sir,
              Wore out their shoes, to spread the news,
               And ran till out of breath, sir.”— American polymath and signer of the Declaration of Independence Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791), “The Battle of the Kegs,” originally published in 1778, reprinted in American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by David S. Shields (2007)
 
Faithful reader, if you’ve been reading this blog long enough and frequently enough, you’ll notice that I open and close the workweek with a humorous quote, on the reasonable supposition that everybody needs a laugh as they start their jobs on Monday and once they make it to Friday. I find no reason to change that pattern as we begin celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
 
If you read anything at all about that document and the American Revolution in general (which I hope you will), nearly all of it will be very sober. And I’ll provide a bit of that over the weekend myself.
 
But human nature doesn’t change that much over the centuries, and the men and women who created this country liked to drink and laugh as much as we do. I think they would have nodded in agreement with a bibulous fellow writer on my college newspaper, when hearing a recent article described as “very sober,” remarked, “Gee, I hate anything sober!”
 
So did Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence whom I think you and I would have liked to hang with. A blog post of mine from 18 years ago described the general arc of the career of this witty Renaissance Man of the Revolution, but his part in depicting one incident in the war deserves a fuller explanation.
 
If the rhythm of his verses above sounds familiar, it should: they’re written to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” Modern Americans associate that tune with patriots playing it on fife and drum on the way into battle, but it began a few decades before the war, with British doctor Richard Schuckburg creating a straw man with a colonist who was both a provincial hick and a pretentious fop.
 
By the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord, according to this account of the song on the Website of The Kennedy Center, the colonists were throwing the insult back, singing the tune derisively at the fleeing redcoats.
 
Nearly three years later, Hopkinson decided to make further use of the tune’s melody. You can see from the verses I’ve quoted that the lyrics are in ballad form, as capable of being sung as read.
 
What he was doing was rather audacious: taking a failed patriot military operation and, instead of being defensive about it, using it to mock vaunted British heroics.
 
In my high school, if you mentioned “The Battle of the Kegs,” some rowdy classmates might have seen it as a dare to finish off libations at a party. 

But in the American Revolution, it referred to a real patriot tactic in January 1778: to float explosive barrels at British ships. The colonists needed to try something: the British had captured and made themselves comfortable in Philadelphia, the capital of the young republic.
 
The whole thing was a big dud: no British ships blew up. But Hopkinson used the opportunity to satirize the redcoats’ panic and overreaction to the unknown objects coming their way.
 
Ultimately, the American Revolution would have to be settled by other means. But then as now, satire directed at an enemy possessing overwhelming power was necessary to sustain the spirit for the larger contest.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bob Dylan, on When All Signs Point Away From Love)

“The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.”—American singer-songwriter and Nobel Literature laureate Bob Dylan, “I Want You,” from his Blonde on Blonde LP (1966)
 
I’ve blogged before about Blonde on Blonde, but my special feeling for one single from the Bob Dylan double-album, “I Want You,” requires me to focus on that today, the 60^th anniversary of its first appearance on the U.S. Billboard “Hot 100 chart. (It peaked at #20.)
 
More than a few critics and academics have parsed its lyrics. I’m not going to pick one interpretation—many seem perfectly plausible and non-exclusive to others. That’s what happens with lyrics so quicksilver and elusive, much like the nature of love itself.
 
Variations exist as much in its performances as in interpretation.
 
The brisk, buoyant tempo of the original recording reminds me of a later Dylan song I cherish, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” But a decade later, indulging his penchant for not settling for a single way to play his classics, he slowed it down to give it a torch-song feeling.
 
Three decades ago, in the tribute album A Nod to Bob, the folksinger Cliff Eberhardt delivered a plaintive, keening acoustic version that rends the heart without doing any violence to the spirit of the original.

Quote of the Day (Sara Coleridge, on What July Brings)

“Hot July brings cooling showers,
Apricots, and gillyflowers.”—English poet and translator Sara Coleridge (1802-1852), “The Garden Year,” in Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children; with Some Lessons in Latin in Easy Rhyme (1834)
 
“Hot July”? More and more the last few decades, it means a heat wave—and it looks like this year will be no different, at least where I live.

Quote of the Day (Alfred North Whitehead, on ‘The Art of Progress’)

“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.”—English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)