This song was replayed over and over again one summer on WABC!
Those were the days. It was 1973. We didn't have Ipods or Ipads or Iphones. We had kitchen phones with long cords and typewriters with ribbons that got all over your hands. That summer we went to Coney Island a lot. A bunch of us would go on the F Train. We didn't need much. A towel. Flip flops. Shorts. A Yankee t-shirt. Maybe a bottle of baby oil. I am very white so I burned like a motherfucker the first few times we went. But eventually I tanned for the summer even though I probably had sunstroke a couple of times.
Anyway the one thing we always brought was the battered white transistor radio. I used to have it with me when I went to bed and listened to the West Coast games with my shitty earpiece. I think that is where my love for listening to baseball on the radio comes from. Listening to Mel Allen and later Phil Rizzuto was the Golden Age for me.
We brought that radio and turned up to the highest volume and put it on WABC. We actually didn't need it because almost everyone was listening to Dan Ingram or Cousin Brucie. When you went from your towel to the water you passed twenty people listening to the same people. Three Dog Night. Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Maybe some Grand Funk. The Jackson Five. Sonny and Cher. The Rascals. The same seven songs played over and over and over again. It made you a community. Everybody knew those songs. Everybody knew the words to those songs.
All of that is gone now. The audience is splintered into a million pieces. We don't listen together. We listen past each other. It is part and parcel of the New America.
In my mind I am still on that beach. Sweating and getting sunburned. Waiting to go to Nathans for a hot dog. Maybe riding the Cyclone. Sneaking a beer at Sloppy Joes. Thinking about fucking Cher right through her sequined breechcloth the whore.
Do you think she might get cancelled today?
