If I Only Had a Voice (like that)

True story: When I first moved to my present location, I took a job as the "news director" for the area's largest radio station. You know the old saw about having a face for radio? Well, I had the face for radio and the voice for print. I hated it.

I hated it because I worked for a guy who, while he wasn't the absolute biggest asshole I'd ever met to that point, he was certainly vying for the crown.

I also hated it because well, I wasn't very good at it. I've never liked reading aloud, and I discovered that I had a tendency when reading on-air, to mix up names and stories. Inadvertently transposing the name of a local high school baseball coach with the name of a local man just charged with rape? Yeah, I did that...

I also hated it because it was, naturally, a top 40 country station and I had to listen to an endless loop of unspeakably horrible, brainless, vapid, willfully and proudly ignorant chicken-fried country pop-schlock. And no, I don't dislike country music. I love country music. Really. You're looking at a guy (figuratively speaking, of course) who owns and cherishes his Merle Haggard box set. I don't know what modern country has devolved into, but it's not music, it's auditory stupidity.

But mostly, mostly, I hated it because I had to hear my voice on-air; the tinny, weak, slightly nasally quality of it. I sounded, quite honestly, like a whiner, not unlike Martin Short's Ed Grimley character from SNL. I simply did not have a good radio voice.

But if I only had this voice, man if I'd only had this voice, then things may have been different...(via James Lileks' Pop Crush blog in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune





And speaking of Pop Crush, Lileks also has a good blog about the death of seventies pop star Gerry Rafferty

Now I will make no claim to be an authority on late seventies pop music. When "Baker Street" came out I was all of eight years old. But it was one of those ubiquitous songs that always seems to take me back to a certain place and time, and sometimes it's nice to be reminded that yes, you were once a child and didn't have a care in the world.