What is the Last Deejay? It’s what we call that vanishing breed of radio broadcasters who did it their way, played what they wanted to play from the entire songbook of music and said what they had to say about it, whether you liked it or not. Most of us liked it and listened closely to all the great tunes and the insightful comments.
Since we created radicalradio.media (HERE) to archive their work and honor their legacy, many of them have passed away: Ed Bear, Dusty Street, Scoop Nisker, Jim Ladd, and just the other day Tony Pigg (HERE), all in the past 30 months. Too many others preceded them. These people and their colleagues at stations across the country created something unprecedented and inspired. Their passing is sad but it would be a tragedy if their work was forgotten.
At the height of his very formidable career, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released an album, The Last DJ, that was a love letter to these people and all the artistry they brought to the audience. Freeform Radio birthed the Classic Era of Rock Music. Tom knew it, all those great musicians knew it, and we shouldn’t let it be forgotten (HERE).
What is a song (legally)? And who owns the rights to the melody? That’s a very complicated question, one that’s explored in detail (HERE). Sorting it out has cost well-known musicians a pretty penny when they were sued for plagerism (HERE).
We all love the music, right? We all have favorite tunes, maybe a song we hum to ourselves when we’re feeling good, the special one we share with a sweetheart that’s “our song,” maybe even like my 102 year old grandmother the song you instruct should be played at your funeral as you’re lowered into the ground. Hers was Bobby Darin singing Mack the Knife, which if you knew her would not surprise you, but still.
No artist of integrity would steal another’s work, so we can assume in many of these cases what the creator thought was inspiration was actually a subliminal earworm rattling around in the old brainpan. Get it on tape, write it on paper, and when it’s published, another artist pops up and says, “Um, I think that’s mine.” Oops. Lawsuit. Whatever else we might say about it, art is NOT for the faint of heart.
What is a Ring of Fire? When Mt. St. Helens erupted in May of 1980, I slept that night in a room in Montana with the window open and woke up covered with a fine layer of silicate ash. The entire town was covered. I drove to Washington that day and the ash got deeper the further west I went. In Spokane it was 6 inches deep.
It was just another day and its aftermath of a periodic incident in the Ring of Fire. There is a belt along both coasts of the Pacific Ocean some 25,000 miles long that contains more than 450 volcanoes and is the site of ninety percent of earthquakes, including nearly all of the most violent seismic events on earth (HERE). The cause is shifts in tectonic plates that stimulate subduction.
When a massive plate of rock is pushed down by another plate moving over it, the subducted rock turns to magma, bubbles up, and eventually blows the top off a mountain. It also sets off a massive earthquake. When I began writing the serial novel CASCADIA (HERE) a few years ago, it was inspired by the geologic expectation that the really BIG ONE among earthquakes was overdue and inevitable. When it happens, it just may be the largest ever to occur on earth. At this point I’m tempted to say one Ring of Fire incident per lifetime is more than enough, but thus far nobody’s asking.