The Snake Finally Consumes Itself

Over the years, Lee has offered me some amazing insights and assistance made more so by the realization that we originally met one another, somewhat briefly about thirty years ago. I was to succeed him on the airwaves of American Forces Network when he opted to return to the Land of the Round Door Knobs and, then much later, I followed him back to the States to the Land of Steady Habits where we lived oblivious to one another for a score of years and more. He has been very gracious after his luck ran out .

He is, despite admitting to knowing me, a very intelligent person capable of amazement and amusement in a single bound and who discards or ignores bright ideas that don't quite meet his standards at a rate and pace approaching light speed.

I mention all of that because he shared a post with me the other day that in some shape, size or form, I think we both expected would someday happen, just not in a someday near our lifetimes.Cynic that I am, I'd suggest this has been coming since formatted radio of any kind, Top 40, Soul, Country, Rastafarian-Polka, created demarcations and boundaries in what our ears, hearts and brains all heard as simply music. When we put the hyphen in, we took the adventure out.

Across radio in the USA for the last decade or so, local station owners railed against conglomerates like Infinity and Clear Channel, and to battle them, became them without seeing either the irony or the end game of that strategy. I confess to having given up on listening to local radio years ago. I have connectivity on my cell for weather and traffic and had satellite radio as well as compact discs and, more recently streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and Slacker.

I had already stopped smoking when auto manufacturers stopped putting cigarette lights and ashtrays in their dashboards. I remember my Dad using the ashtray in his Ford Country Squire station wagon, off yellow with that fake wood, but really sheet metal, paneling on the sides, to hold the tokens for the Easton-Phillipsburg Bridge when we were going to the lake house in Pennsylvania, first at Indian Mountain Lakes and later out at Harvey's Lake. I keep eye drops in my ashtray in the Subaru Forester and use the lighter plug as an an outlet to charge my phone.

As a kid I listened to William B. Williams and the Make-Believe ballroom on WNEW AM and then when rock and roll hit, it was Bob Lundy, Dan Ingram, Cousin Bruce Morrow and Scott Muni on WABC-AM. Talk about Paradise by the Dashboard Light-and I had no idea as to Mr Loaf's meaning at all, believe me.

And now, it's all circling the drain, doomed to share the fate of Ozymandias. Somewhere Hudson and Landry are furrowing their brows while the hits just keep on comin'.
-bill kenny.