When was the last time you listened to the radio?
I don’t mean satellite radio, a podcast, or starting a “radio station” by right clicking a song you like on Spotify. When was the last time you put your phone in your pocket, turned off the bluetooth, and switched on some honest-to-goodness terrestrial FM radio? For me, it was several years, but recently, I began playing a game with it.
Sometimes, when I need to partake in a quick corner store sojourn or pick up some food, I’ll throw on the local classic rock station and see if I can guess what band is going to be playing. It’s always unfailingly predictable, usually Boston, AC/DC or Led Zeppelin. Once I heard “Tom Sawyer” by Rush twice on the same outing. It’s rare that they’ll even risk venturing into KISS territory, even though they aren’t exactly a pearl-clutcher. Most of the time I’ll hear one song, followed by 15 minutes of ads, and then one more song.
They say that video killed the radio star, but in reality, twas internet killed the beast.
Radio is dead technology now because we don’t need it anymore. Anyone with a podcast app and a streaming service can be their own DJ. Personally, I like to hear George Jones followed by the Clash followed by Naughty By Nature, and there are simply no stations offering that kind of variety. The local Kia dealership wants to do business with someone keeping it right down the middle, and stations need that advertising money to keep the lights on.
I’m one of the lucky few who got to live through the local radio death rattle. It was still big business when I was growing up. I know all the words to “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind because I heard it so much riding around in my mom’s car throughout 1997. I miss that, discovering brand new bangers simultaneously with everyone else in the country; it had a way of binding us.
My dream as a kid was to host my own radio show. I wanted to play entire sides of records, take phone calls, interview bands, and tell interesting stories about the history of music. I always felt that was my calling, but unfortunately, I was born a couple decades too late. As fate would have it, however, I did intern for a local station one fall during high school. One of the records I always talked about exploring on the air was Standing in the Spotlight by Dee Dee Ramone.
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The Review
Dee Dee King (Dee Dee Ramone)
Standing in the Spotlight
1989
Standing in the Spotlight is a slice of sweet insanity from a demented genius.
For those unfamiliar, Dee Dee Ramone left the Ramones at the end of the 1980s to try his hand at a hip-hop career. How lucky are we to live in a universe where something so random and crazy is just a casual fact. You can go on any streaming service and listen to it right now, which I vehemently encourage you to do. Is it good? No, obviously it’s terrible, but boy howdy do I love it to death.
Standing in the Spotlight is dumb, campy fun. It’s one of those records that’s so hilariously bad that you can’t stop listening to it on repeat and calling your friends to tell them about it. I’ve listened to that record more than records I genuinely love. I preordered the vinyl remaster the minute the link went live. Nothing about it makes any sense at all, and yet it congeals into a product that is undeniably listenable.
My favorite aspect, if I had to pick, is that Dee Dee had a very fast and loose understanding of what constituted hip hop, structurally speaking. It’s 10 vaguely rock, vaguely punk, vaguely pop songs that feature Dee Dee rapping to the beat. Sometimes he even abandons the concept completely and delivers straight ballads.
“Baby Doll,” for example, is a simple, sweet love song absolutely dripping with cheesy late ‘80s production and synthesizers. Some other tracks try to stay on theme but end up as catchy one-offs from a genre all their own, where Dee Dee essentially talks instead of sings, shrugs his shoulders, and calls it rap. A great example is the A-side ender “Commotion in the Ocean,” which sounds like something Mike Love might have written while concussed.
Believe it or not, there are some tracks that manage to hit the mark.
I read once that Marky Ramone (who allegedly played drums on the record but refused credit) said “2 Much 2 Drink” would have probably worked in the hands of a group like the Beastie Boys, and honestly, he’s not wrong. “German Kid,” in which Dee Dee raps half in German, because he’s half German, is kind of rad despite itself. Debbie Harry is on that track too, which is bizarrely fitting. “I Want What I Want When I Want It,” has genuinely good bones, hindered only by Dee Dee sounding like a cracked out muppet.
Then, out of nowhere, there are sincerely great songs. “Poor Little Rich Girl,” sounds like it fell off a Huntingtons record. “The Crusher” is such madcap fun that the Ramones wound up using it on ¡Adios Amigos! Finally, we have “Emergency,” which might be the best song of Dee Dee Ramone’s entire solo discography.
I can’t stress this enough, “Emergency” is a perfect song. It’s so perfectly Dee Dee, and had he saved it for the Ramones, it would have been one of their best songs, too. The entire experiment was justified for producing a track so charming, goofy, and timeless. Why no band has ever scooped it up and covered it is a mystery.
The only track I haven’t mentioned is the opener, “Mash Potato Time.” Mainly, I don’t want to ruin the surprise. Press play; sit back, and enjoy. It’s so crazy that my words could never replicate the experience your ears will provide. Enjoy it, and tell them Tyler Evans sent ya.
Listening to Standing in the Spotlight often brings me back to a night at the radio station, when I played it for a coworker who sat stupefied, eyes gleaming with an all-encompassing laugh slowly working its way up from his core.
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The Tale
It was the fall of 2006, and I was barely old enough to drive.
I was old enough to work in the state of Georgia, and that held the allure of independence. The summer before, I had worked for the city of Dalton cutting grass for the road crew. The days were punishing, eight hours in the 100-degree heat with 100% humidity, wearing blue jeans to save flesh from cuts and bruises. It paid $6.50 an hour, enough to feel like a king in those days, but deep inside, I felt a pang for something cooler, literally and figuratively.
My friend Jeffrey worked for the local radio station, Mix 104.5, and mentioned to me that he could probably get me on if I so desired. It was an entry-level position, running boards and answering phones, with less money than I had made before, but I didn’t care. It was a chance to walk inside the belly of a dream, and I said yes without hesitation.
The radio station was an otherwiseinnocuous white building surrounded by gravel next to the mall. If it weren’t for the satellite dishes, no one would have known its purpose. Through the front doors sat a reception desk forever unmanned. We came in through the back, which held a long corridor with rooms every 10 feet or so. It looked like a soulless office building, no describable personality adorning the walls.
“What kind of music do they play here?” I asked Jeffrey on my first day.
“Ugh,” he grunted.
“Who picks it?” I continued.
“Satan,” he said.
“No, seriously, who?” I asked.
“I assume someone in a wheelchair with water on their brain,” he said.
We dropped the subject there, and never picked up again. It didn’t take long to figure out what he meant. For the most part, at least during the day, hours would pass by where I didn’t recognize a single artist or song. This wasn’t Top 40 or even Top 200, it was more like the radio station had bought 1000 songs for a dozen dollars at auction to keep the royalty payments low. These were the B-sides of B-sides of artists no one had ever heard of and never would again, outside of our airwaves.
The radio station had no shortage of characters.
There was a man named Lance who had been with them for so long that he seemed to no longer give a good god damn. He was dry, sarcastic, and quite funny once he warmed up to you. Also among the troops was a guy whose name I can’t remember, so I’ll call him Hahoon the Bizarre. Hahoon mostly read Halo novelizations and was so greasy that I had to wash my hand after he shook it, waiting a respectful amount of time to protect his feelings.
I mainly worked with a guy called Anthony who had the spirit of music running in electric currents through his very bones. He took the playlists seriously, the mission of our job seriously, and he had seen Pearl Jam something like 100 times. I loved him immediately, and to this day I still sing his praises. Anthony, Jeffrey, and Lance had once pitched having their own morning show, which the station immediately rejected. I assume they needed that space for all those Jermaine Jackson deep cuts.
As it was still an active part of the school year, I only worked Friday evenings and Saturday and Sunday mornings. Work is a generous term, since what I mainly did was babysit the machines that did the real heavy lifting. Every so often I would push a button, but those blips didn’t often occur. On Friday nights I would work high school football games, which meant switching from live broadcast to prerecorded commercials. On Sunday mornings I worked the boards for local church groups offering sermons to weary travelers, which followed an identical process to the football games. It was monotonous to say the least, and we weren’t reaching a wide audience, but I found myself quickly falling in love with it.
After two weeks, paychecks started coming in. They were handed out in white envelopes with the recipient’s name scribbled in pen, but I couldn’t help but notice there was no “Tyler” in the pile. It wouldn’t have been much money, probably something like $120 before tax, but I needed that money for gas, records, and snacks.
When I asked the higher ups, they told me that I was still in training. I was too young and wide-eyed to realize that most companies pay for training, and too dumb to realize that I had never given anyone any banking information, so I rolled with it. A two-week training program was annoying, especially since I was left on my own after less than a day, but I wasn’t a complainer.
Two more weeks passed, and yet my paycheck remained elusive. I can be a good sport in the short term, but an entire month without pay didn’t pass the smell test. I knew my worth, and it was at least $100. I’m my father’s son, so when fuckery is afoot, I make my voice heard. After all, was I meant to hang around the radio station unpaid like some sort of pervert?
“Well Tyler,” the station manager said as I took a seat in his office, “I understand there’s some confusion about your status here.”
Right away I saw red.
The station manager went on to explain that unbeknownst to me, my position had been changed at the midnight hour from part time employee to part time intern. I would not be paid for anything I had already done, anything they had me scheduled to do, and they best they could offer was eventually giving me four hours a week at minimum wage, if I proved so worthy.
What could I do? I was just a kid, and my options were limited. My initial impulse was to lock myself in one of the rooms, commandeer the airwaves, and play nothing but Ramones records until I was forcefully ejected. That would have been satisfying, but it would have only resulted in hefty fines that I couldn’t pay, since I wasn’t even an employee. Instead, I played the only hand available.
“You’re scheduled to work the Murray County game this Friday, do you still want it?” the manager asked.
“Oh, absolutely,” I said.
Then, when Friday rolled around, I took a nap instead. The way I figured it, it made more sense to not get paid at home than at a radio station. I left them in the lurch, burned that bridge right down to the ground. Honestly, I didn’t want there to be any bridges that led back to that place anyway. Even now, almost 20 years later, I stand by that decision. They made a last-minute decision with no empathy, so I did the same. An eye for an eye.
Truth be told, I did tune into the broadcast that night and it was pure chaos. They were scrambling. Knowing I put my—well I guess I couldn’t call them “coworkers”—in that position gave me twinges of guilt, but I knew I could explain it to them later.
What I did hear was dropped calls, static, and heaps of dead air. Every so often, a voice would come on to apologize for the “technical difficulties,” which didn’t smooth out in the 10 or so minutes of my listening pleasure. It was a quiet, pacifist rebellion, and it exceeded my wildest expectations. Part of me felt like shrugging it off and lending a hand, confident that they had learned their lesson. I didn’t do that, though.
In that moment I was content to watch the fire burn.
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The Aftermath
When you’re a white kid from the suburbs, your life is usually a boring history of things working out fine.
There’s a lot of playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater in someone’s basement, but not usually much in the way of adversity. Obviously no two situations are identical, and evil lurks behind closed doors all over, but by and large, the bubble goes un-popped. Everyone secretly wants a heroic origin story full of misfortune, but the truth is that it’s mostly long and boring Saturday nights making cringey attempts to chase girls.
I used to love the radio, and I miss the way it made me feel. The cool buzz of static as you turned the dial, the unfamiliar stations like space exploration and the way hearing a song for the first time in years could capture your heart. The radio station didn’t rob me of that, but it damn well tried.
It was one of the first times in my life that I learned that things are sometimes simply unfair. It’s late in life to learn that lesson, but for the reasons painted above, it came when it came. Sometimes there are cruel bastards whose sustenance is joy. There’s a special place in hell for them, next to congressmen and assistant principals.
The one thing the radio station gave me was a natural sense of distrust I carried to every job I’ve had since then. I learned that no one is a bigger advocate for you than yourself. It’s best to learn what you can, try your best and keep a close eye on the exit doors. Maybe it will all work out, but if it doesn’t, you’re always free to stand up and walk out of the building. It isn’t illegal.
I also learned that sometimes, as trite as it may sound, sometimes the journey is truly about the friends you make along the way. Surviving the trenches with your fellow downtrodden is worth something, even if you can’t pay your rent with the experience. The laughs, inside jokes, rolled eyes and stories matter.
At the end of the day, what else is there?
