More has happened in rock music on Christmas than one might think.
The number one single today in 1971:
The number three British single today in 1982 at least has a Christmas theme:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Dec. 25
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Starting shortly after my birth, my parents purchased Christmas albums for $1 from an unlikely place, tire stores.
(That’s as unusual as getting, for instance, glasses every time you filled up at your favorite gas station, but older readers might remember that too, back in the days when gas stations were usually part of a car repair place, not a convenience store.)
The albums featured contemporary artists from the ’60s, plus opera singers and other artists.
These albums were played on my parents’ wall-length Magnavox hi-fi player.
Playing these albums was as annual a ritual as watching “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” or other holiday-season appointment TV.
Those albums began my, and then our, collection of Christmas music.
You may think some of these singers are unusual choices to sing Christmas music. (This list includes at least six Jewish singers.)
Of course, Christians know that Jesus Christ was Jewish.
And I defy any reader to find anyone who can sing “Silent Night” like Barbra Streisand did in the ’60s.
These albums are available for purchase online, but record players are now as outmoded as, well, getting glasses with your fill-up at the gas station.
But thanks to YouTube and other digital technology, other aficionados of this era of Christmas music now can have their music preserved for their current and future enjoyment.
The tire-store-Christmas-album list has been augmented by both earlier and later works.
In the same way I think no one can sing “Silent Night” like Barbra Streisand, I think no one can sing “Do You Hear What I Hear” like Whitney Houston:
This list contains another irony — an entry from “A Christmas Gift for You,” Phil Spector’s Christmas album. (Spector’s birthday is Christmas.)
The album should have been a bazillion-seller, and perhaps would have been had it not been for the date of its initial release: Nov. 22, 1963.
Finally, here’s a previous iteration of one of the currently coolest TV traditions — “The Late Show with David Letterman” and its annual appearance of Darlene Love (from the aforementioned Phil Spector album):
Merry Christmas.
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Today in 1954, R&B singer Johnny Ace had a concert at the City Auditorium in Houston. Between sets, Ace was playing with a revolver. When someone in the room said, “Be careful with that thing,” Ace replied, “It’s OK, the gun’s not loaded. See?” And pointed the gun at his head, and pulled the trigger. And found out he was wrong.
The number one album today in 1965 was the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul”:
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From Rich Lowry …
Pajama Boy’s place in Internet infamy was secured as soon as the insufferable man-child was tweeted out by Organizing for America.
He is the face of a Web ad that is the latest effort by the Obama team to leverage the holidays for conversation about Obamacare. “Wear pajamas,” the ad reads. “Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”
And, sure enough, Pajama Boy is wearing pajamas — a zip-up onesie in classic Lamar Alexander plaid — and drinking hot chocolate. He is in his 20s, sporting hipster glasses he could have bought at Warby Parker and an expression of self-satisfied ironic amusement.
Pajama Boy is about as threatening as Michael Cera and so nerdy he could guest-host on an unwatched MSNBC show. He is probably reading The Bell Jar and looking forward to a hearty Christmas meal of stuffed tofurkey. If he has anything to say about it, Obamacare enrollments will spike in the next few weeks in Williamsburg and Ann Arbor. …
But it’s hard not to see Pajama Boy as an expression of the Obama vision, just like his forebear Julia, the Internet cartoon from the 2012 campaign. Pajama Boy is Julia’s little brother. She progressed through life without any significant family or community connections. He is the picture of perpetual adolescence. Neither is a symbol of self-reliant, responsible adulthood.
And so both are ideal consumers of government. Julia needed the help of Obama-supported programs at every juncture of her life, and Pajama Boy is going to get his health insurance through Obamacare (another image shows him looking very pleased in a Christmas sweater, together with the words “And a happy New Year with health insurance”).
The breakdown of marriage and its drift into the 30s mean there are more Julias and Pajama Boys than ever. The growth of government feeds off this trend and, at the margins, augments it. The vision of the Obama Democrats, distilled to its essence, is of a direct relationship between the state and the individual without the mediating institutions of family, church, and community that are an inherent check on government power. …
Never has the difference between what Chris Matthews memorably dubbed the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party been so stark. Pajama Boy’s mom probably still tucks him in at night, and when she isn’t there for him, Obamacare will be. A less nurturing reaction is, as New Jersey governor Chris Christie put it in a counter tweet, “Get out of your pajamas.” There’s a reason President Barack Obama is underwater by a 2-to-1 margin among men in the latest Quinnipiac poll.
For all the ridicule directed at Julia during last year’s campaign, she got at something important: Single women do look to government as a cushion against their economic insecurities. Pajama Boy isn’t so apt. He might be glad to pay more for his health insurance to include maternity benefits he doesn’t need as a blow against gender stereotyping, but most young people will presumably consider Obamacare more rationally and realize it’s a scheme to get them to subsidize insurance costs for older people.
… and Jonah Goldberg …
By the time this “news” letter reaches your e-mail box, pretty much every joke imaginable about “Pajama Boy” will have been made. But I reject such a dour Malthusian view of Pajama Boy humor! …
Pajama Boy doesn’t exude homosexuality; he gives off the anodyne scent of emasculation. Seriously, the construction worker from the Village People would kick his ass. Besides, this is the gay enrollment ad for Obamacare (there’s also this). All of these dudes are manlier than Pajama Boy.
If you try to play out the life of Pajama Boy in your mind, he probably has a girlfriend. It’s just that she’s wearing the pants in the relationship, as they used to say. I picture her like Sarah Silverman in School of Rock or the girlfriend at the beginning of Office Space who everyone knows is cheating on Peter.
Pajama Boy is a Low-T liberal who wears a “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt and flinches whenever his girlfriend makes a sudden movement. He’s the sort of guy who thinks the “Consensual Sex Contract” given to him by his liberal-arts college R.A. is a good place to start, but ultimately doesn’t go far enough. Charlie Cooke compares him to Leonard from Big Bang Theory, but I think he’s more like Raj, who “manscapes” (and moisturizes!) and is ecstatic when he’s invited to girls’ night. I imagine he was terribly conflicted when his girlfriend finally made him watch The Silence of the Lambs (he wanted to rent Pitch Perfect again), because while he was horrified by all of the violence and he was dutifully empowered by the Clarice Starling character, he was secretly thrilled by the idea of having his own human-flesh girl suit.
First, it’s worth stating this isn’t about Ethan Krupp, the Obamacare activist who plays Pajama Boy. For all I know he bow-hunts alligators and rides a Harley. Though, come on, it’s doubtful. The point is that the Obama social-media folks, for whom Krupp works, are going for an image, so what Krupp is like in real life is irrelevant and people should probably leave the guy alone.
There’s a debate over why on earth the promoters of Obamacare would pick this image to hawk their wares. One side says that it was a brilliantly cynical move because it got people talking just like those “Brosurance” ads with the keg-stands got people talking. (The motto of the campaign is, after all, “Get Talking.”) If you can make young people chatter about Obamacare, goes the theory, more will eventually sign up. The other side of the argument is that this offers a real peak into the collective mind of liberalism (and the collective incompetence of the Obamacare team). Pajama Boy represents an actual constituency. There are males (if not necessarily “men”) who fit this profile.
Like most people who’ve thought it through, I’m more inclined to the latter. The Pajama Boy image is an extension of the original Thanksgiving enrollment video, which featured parents saying, “We love you no matter what, but it’s time to get covered.” Which isn’t quite as weird as saying “We are admirals of the pantless armada, give us your ball-bearing vestibules,” but still strange. The “we love you no matter what” line — like the “get talking” line — is an attempt to make getting insurance both edgy and mature at the same time. Edgy because there’s a vague hint that talking about this stuff violates a taboo or is difficult. Mature because it’s something grown-ups do.
But there are problems. For starters, Obamacare actually delays adulthood. You get to stay on your parents’ plan until you’re 26! Which means the young people we’re talking about are 27-year-olds! Twenty-seven used to be the age of seriously grown men. John Wayne was 27 in the Lucky Texan. You can go to college, enlist in the army, do a couple tours, and come home again before the age of 27. The average age of marriage for men is 28. (Though the women I’ve talked to think dudes who have difficult talks in their jammie onesies while drinking hot cocoa might have to wait a good deal longer. Seriously if women had Terminator-like vision that saw the world by sexual attraction instead of infrared, Pajama Boy would be an almost invisible boy-shaped vapor.)
Moreover, isn’t it interesting to see the contempt Gen-X and Baby Boomer liberals have for Millennials, or at least Millennial men? (By the way, where are the ads targeting young women?) Twenty-something males are either testosterone-addled idiots doing keg-stands or they’re suffering from estrogen poisoning.
Last, I love the rearguard effort from liberals trying to turn the mockery of Pajama Boy into proof of right-wing sexual insecurity. It seems to me this is a pretty desperate attempt by the MSNBC fanboy set to compensate for the fact that so many people find Pajama Boy pathetic. That cuts too close to home. So it must be more proof of racism or gender confusion. But if you just take a step back, you can see the problem. If you find yourself in the position of arguing that real men get snuggly in their jammies and drink cocoa, you need to push the keyboard away and walk around the block a bit.
… we get Kevin D. Williamson:
The president’s low standing among the Y-chromosome set, dramatic though it is, is not entirely surprising. He couldn’t close the deal with them the first time around, he presided over an ugly recession in which men were particularly hard hit, and then he presided over a sickly recovery in which unemployment remains elevated and is significantly higher for men than for women. And the labor-force participation rate, in many ways a better measure of employment, has plunged during the Obama years. Forgot the bicycle helmet, the mom jeans, the wife scolding us about eating our veggies, the fact that he throws a baseball like he should be relaxing with a mug of cocoa in his footie pajamas — President Obama loses points for style, to be sure, but he has a substance problem too. …
The experience of joblessness is, I think, particularly despair-inducing for men. It isn’t that unemployment is not stressful for women as well — it surely is, especially for women who bear the burden of economic responsibility for their households. But there is entangled in that issue something more than simple financial well-being for men. To be a provider, for oneself and one’s family, to do something useful and to earn, is deeply connected to many men’s sense of self-respect, to their identity as men. A second strong correlating factor in men’s suicide rates is being single, which is itself linked to the question of employment. With weak economic conditions persisting, suicide rates have been rising.
For those men who have experienced extended unemployment, the memory is often a vivid and painful one. And even those who haven’t can detect the scent of economic fear in the air. Suicide is an extreme reaction, of course, but you don’t have to be an economic weatherman to know which way the financial winds are blowing. Women experiencing economic vulnerability tend toward welfare-statism, with SNAP and Medicaid and all of the rest of it acting in loco mariti. Men experiencing economic vulnerability, or who have reason to think they may experience it in the future, seem to move in the opposite direction: President Obama lost white men without college degrees by 31 points last time around.
It may be the case that men see Barack Obama as a kind of romantic competitor — not the man himself, but the vision of government he stands for. The more the state steps into the role of provider, the less men have to offer in that capacity. This is especially true of men with modest earnings potential. I doubt that very many of those non-college-educated, working-class white men follow the careers of Hanna Rosin or Maureen Dowd, but the message — “men are obsolete” — infiltrates the culture at large. President Obama is the messenger, and an agent of the Rosin-Dowd worldview: His vision of the good life is universal kindergarten and universal graduate school, a coddling welfare state, etc., and a gimlet eye cast upon much of what used to be thought of as man’s work: drilling for gas, timbering, mining. President Obama is first and foremost the public face of his own agenda and his own economic record, which is a poor one. But he is also the face of something else, an unbrave new world with little use for men whose Christmas plans do not involve buttonholing family members for precious and grim-mouthed homilies about Obamacare.
American men have been losing ground since 1973, the year their real wages peaked. Strong economic growth from the Reagan years to the turn of the century, along with strong economic mobility and a general national sense of optimism, helped soften that blow, as did rising household incomes as more women entered the work force. But our once-dynamic economy has grown sclerotic, and economic mobility has declined — and that wasn’t supposed to happen. President Obama represents what admirers such as Michael Grunwald have called a “New New Deal.” American men don’t seem to think it is a very good deal at all.
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After a great deal of speculation wondering whether or not he would, Gov. Scott Walker signed the Indian tribal mascot bill.
Walker’s statement channeled the inner libertarian no one knew he had:
“I am very concerned about the principle of free speech enshrined in our U.S. Constitution. If the state bans speech that is offensive to some, where does it stop? A person or persons’ right to speak does not end just because what they say or how they say it is offensive. Instead of trying to legislate free speech, a better alternative is to educate people about how certain phrases and symbols that are used as nicknames and mascots are offensive to many of our fellow citizens. I am willing to assist in that process.
“With that in mind, I personally support moving away from nicknames or mascots that groups of our fellow citizens find seriously offensive, but I also believe it should be done with input and involvement at the local level.”
Well, maybe he does see it as a First Amendment issue. The cynical view is that Indian tribes give neither votes nor money to Republicans, whereas conservatives would be offended by a veto, so Walker signed the bill.
Regardless of motive, Walker did the right thing. There is no, and has never been any, intent to pick a nickname or mascot for the purpose of self-denigration. Complaints about self-esteem and institutional racism are a bunch of politically correct horse manure.
For some inexplicable reason, the state Democratic Party felt the need to send a news release with quotes from someone named Arvina Martin, listed as “(Ho-Chunk, Stockbridge-Munsee), chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin American Indian Caucus:
“In a time where public opinion moves against the use of American Indian imagery as school mascots, I am saddened that Governor Walker decided to take Wisconsin backwards by signing AB 297, regarding race based mascots in our public schools into law.
“Walker falsely claims that signing this legislation will protect the free speech rights of school districts while failing to realize that First Amendment does not allow government programs, in this case, schools, to offend, harm or otherwise discriminate against citizens.
“With a stroke of his pen, Governor Walker ignored the statements of many, both American Indian and non-American Indian, in order to push through legislation that does nothing but further marginalize American Indians in our state.”
Martin, not surprisingly, didn’t consult those with opposing views before her blanket “public opinion” statement. Consider a newspaper poll in an area with numerous Indian-nicknamed high schools, asking whether high schools should be required to change their Indian nicknames:
- Yes: 24.
- No: 174.
- “It depends on the nickname”: 70.
Only a PC-sodden reading of the First Amendment allows protection from being “offend”ed. I wonder how opponents of abortion rights feel about government funds — that is, their own tax dollars — funding abortions. I suspect they are considerably more than offended, but what is their recourse? None. For that matter, I am offended that state legislators make as much money by themselves as the average family in this state. To quote John Cougar Mellencamp, my opinion means nothing.
Since I had never heard of Martin before last week, I have no idea if she’s an elected official somewhere. I certainly hope she never becomes an elected official outside a reservation, because her view of the First Amendment is an offense by itself.
The head of the state’s education establishment, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, isn’t happy either:
“The children of Wisconsin are not served well when legislation makes it more difficult for citizens to object to discrimination they see in local schools. There is a growing body of research documenting the negative educational outcomes associated with the use of American Indian mascots, logos, and nicknames. Yet this new law requires the signatures of 10 percent of a school district’s membership to file a complaint about an Indian mascot or logo. In no other situation of harassment, stereotyping, bullying, or discrimination must an individual gather signatures from others to have the matter considered by a government body.
“While many local school districts have moved away from race-based mascots, there are a few left.
Civil rights issues have seldom been resolved locally. This law is a disservice to the children of Wisconsin and their education.”Evers is not only himself “a disservice to the children of Wisconsin and their education”; now he’s throwing not-so-veiled threats. (Since court challenges to school mascots have failed anywhere, I’d suspect Evers’ threat is an empty threat, except that you can’t guarantee that in an Obama appointee-poisoned federal judicial system.) To make this is a civil rights issue is to cheapen the entire concept of civil rights. (And it once again makes me wonder why in the world Wisconsin conservatives cannot find a candidate to remove Evers and his predecessors of the last 40 or so years and find an advocate for the two groups of people whose opinion should count in schools — parents and taxpayers — more by far than they do.)
As long as we’re being cynical here, I’m surprised an obvious solution didn’t come to the minds of tribal leadership. The tribes are making millions of dollars every day from their Wisconsin casinos. School districts are living in fiscally lean times, thanks to the abuses of government of the past. Most of the school districts with Indian mascots probably would have been just fine with changing them had the tribes been willing to pay the costs of the changeover — athletic uniforms, school signage and so on.
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Today in 1964, a group of would-be DJs launched the pirate radio station Radio London from a former U.S. minesweeper anchored 3½ miles off Frinton-on-the-Sea, England.
It’s probably unrelated, but on the same day Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys had a nervous breakdown on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston. Wilson left the band to focus on writing and producing, with Glen Campbell replacing him for concerts.
The pernicious influence of unions reared its ugly head today in 1966, when Britain’s ITV broadcast its final “Ready, Steady, Go!” because of a British musicians’ union’s ban on miming. The final show featured Mick Jagger, The Who, Eric Burdon, the Spencer Davis Group, Donovan and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.
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Proving that there is no accounting for taste, I present the number one song today in 1958:
The number one single today in 1962 was by a group whose name was sort of a non sequitur given that the group came from a country that lacks the meteorological phenomenon of the group’s title:
The number one single today in 1963:
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The number one album today in 1968:
Today in 1969, the Supremes made their last TV appearance together on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew, with a somewhat ironic selection:
Today in 1970, Army veteran Elvis Presley volunteered himself as a soldier in the war on drugs, delivering a letter to the White House. Earlier that day, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had declined Presley’s request to volunteer, saying that only the president could overrule him.
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The aftermath of Sunday’s improbable 37–36 Packer comeback win over Allas (because the Cowboys have no D — get it?) includes, of course, social media, according to UW journalism classmate Rob Hernandez:
Meanwhile, this ESPN.com development is cool — the NFL Playoff Machine, in which the previous 15 weeks’ results are added to your picks for weeks 16 and 17 to create a playoff scenario. All you need to know about the Packers is that two wins get them the NFC North title and third or fourth seed. That’s the good news. The bad potential news is that their first playoff opponent is likely to be a team with a better record, though as a divisional non-champion that opponent would be a fifth or sixth seed. (Possibly New Orleans or San Francisco.)
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A voice from my adolescence died Wednesday night.
About this time throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Larry Lujack went on the air to start his morning show on WLS radio in Chicago. Like nearly every one of my middle and high school classmates, I woke up to a clock-radio, but it wasn’t set to WISM, or Z104, or WIBA-FM; it was set to WLS.
Lujack died of cancer Wednesday. The fact he died wasn’t that surprising, though at 73. There were many unusual facets to Lujack, as Robert Feder shows:
“Larry didn’t want an obituary filled with people saying what a great guy he was and how talented he was,” his wife, Judith, told me after confirming his passing at age 73. “He was more than that. He was more than a jock. He was more than an employee of WLS. He was a truly amazing, caring, wonderful human being. He didn’t want to be known by the awards he won. He just wanted to be remembered as a person who cared about people — about children — and really tried to do things to help them.”
Though pretty much out of the limelight for more than 25 years and enjoying retirement in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Lujack left an impression on Chicago that endures to this day. Mere mention of “Ol’ Uncle Lar” from the “Animal Stories” bit he played to perfection with Tommy Edwards still conjures fond memories for hundreds of thousands of loyal fans.
His legacy also lives on among the countless broadcasters he influenced and inspired. The next time you hear Rush Limbaugh rustle a paper on the air or puff himself up with mock grandiosity, remember who did it first — and did it better. …
A genuine original, Lujack perfected a world-weary, sarcastic style that was in stark contrast to the cheery and effervescent DJs of the era. If he was in a foul mood — which seemed to be the case most of the time — he didn’t try to hide it. Audiences found his dark, edgy humor real, relatable and unlike anything they’d ever heard on the radio before. …
In moving up to mornings on WLS, he became a radio superstar of the first magnitude, dominating listenership among 18-to-49-year-olds and making millions for parent company ABC. In 1984 he was rewarded with an unprecedented 12-year, $6 million contract in order to keep him from jumping to WGN.
“It ain’t no big deal,” a typically nonchalant Lujack told me at the time. “I can honestly say — and my wife even finds this astounding — that I am not the least bit excited. Trite as it may sound, you can’t take it with you.”
Ratings declined with his ill-timed move to afternoons in 1986, and Lujack signed off from WLS a year later when ABC bought out the remainder of his contract and sent him into much-too-early retirement at age 47. He made a couple of Chicago radio comebacks on WUBT and WRLL by remote from his home in Santa Fe, but he never commanded center stage as he had in his heyday.
Practically every industry honor imaginable followed, including induction in the National Radio Hall of Fame, the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame and the Illinois Broadcasters Association’s Hall of Fame. He took them all in stride. …
In a Sun-Times interview published 30 years ago this week, a 43-year-old Lujack told me he had two main goals in life. Neither one had anything to do with radio.
“First and foremost is to make it to heaven when I die,” he said. “If I do that, then my life was a ragingsuccess, no matter what the Arbitron ratings say. My only other goal — and this is a far, far, far, far, far, far distant second — is to one day shoot 72 on the golf course.
“On the first one, I try to be a good person, an honest person and, in the crude vernacular of the rock ’n’ roll world, I don’t fuck over people. On the other thing, I hit zillions of practice balls. But if I achieve the first one, I’ll be quite satisfied even if I don’t come close to the other one.”
I heard Lujack on his second WLS iteration. He started at WLS doing its afternoon show and then its morning show …
… after and before stints at WLS’ main rock and roll competitor, WCFL in Chicago.
Lujack’s on-air personality was unusual for the day. His sarcasm and irony was sort of a preview of the ’80s, but he also would go entire seconds saying nothing, for the dead-air effect. That’s commonplace now, but it wasn’t in those days.
Feder compared Lujack to Limbaugh, and Lujack did occasionally channel his inner Floyd Turbo, though it was probably for entertainment value more than for the political statement. Limbaugh, remember, started as a rock DJ before he became a right-wing talker.
One of Lujack’s former bosses, John Rook, inherited Lujack:
Larry Lujack and Art Roberts were common folks, with distinctive voices and an abundance of imagination. I instinctively knew they figured into my plans. …
Larry’s rebellious image and appearance gave need for me to think he must have some James Dean or Marlon Brando in him. As time would tell, both Art and Larry were radio originals and LuJack would become a radio franchise. He never ventured from radio but I feel certain he could have made major contributions as an actor.
Larry inspired and left his imprint on a young David Letterman. …
Rush would borrow heavily from the Lujack style and become a talk radio star….but he never forgave me for not hiring him at WLS, where today his “talk” show is featured.
Everyone who listened to WLS during its top 40 heyday agrees that WLS didn’t stand out for its music. WLS stood out because of its personalities, including Fred Winston, who replaced Lujack on the morning show and whose deeeeeep voice can be heard from Ferris Bueller’s clock-radio at the beginning of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”; and John Records Landecker, who has been written about on this blog. (WLS’ first renowned rock DJ, Dick Biondi, is still on the air, five decades after he started at WLS, which wasn’t his first radio job.)
Radio guy Ted Ehlen explains why Lujack and his WLS colleagues were as so great at what they did:
In the time that I’ve been involved in radio, mornings on the medium have changed for music stations. The yuck-it-up, wink-wink-naughty and often noisy nature of “morning zoo” radio has been in vogue for decades now. The listener has become the eavesdropper rather than the recipient of the message in this venue, which is why I seldom listen to morning music radio (or music radio as a whole these days) and stick to a one-host talk show in the morning, because that’s the way that morning hit radio used to be with personalities like Larry Lujack. He groused, he voiced his opinions, and poked fun of the world around him while he gave you the time and temp and cranked out the hits on WLS and WCFL. Larry Lujack was made for morning radio, because he sounded an awful lot like you felt as you rolled out of the sack, got on your feet, and negotiated your way to getting ready to get out the door and head to work. And he talked to YOU. Yes, you’ll hear an awful lot about “Animal Stories” with Lil’ Snotnose Tommy, but, for the most part, Larry Lujack was sharing his world with YOU. …
When I was first learning about radio at WBSD, the 10-watt FM station at Burlington High School as “Top 40 Ted”, my on-air style was molded by those I heard primarily on WLS Musicradio…Bob Sirott, Fred Winston, even the likes of Clark Weber from the ‘60’s (John Records Landecker, as I told him on my Racine program last April, was a level of disc jockey talent that I looked up at, and, realizing my personal personality limitations, appreciated without attempting to duplicate). I listened to Larry Lujack, but he really didn’t influence me directly during this formative period, but I appreciated him much more the further down the road I went in broadcasting when it was putting bread on my table. However, the indirect influence of Lujack at the time is tangible, because his on-air delivery allowed me and every disc jockey who cracked a mic to have the ability to truly be themselves on the air and not have to fit the stereotypical deejay mold of smiley, pukey platter patter guy. And when I hosted WLKG’s “Saturday At The ‘70’s” show for about five-and-a-half years, I tried my best to synthesize what a good hit radio personality sounded like then, and bring it to the present day. My models for that were the jocks from the WLS Musicradio years, especially ol’ Superjock, Larry Lujack…
For a legion of air personalities around the country like me, he will be remembered for his contribution to our own on-air presentation formation.
The Letterman parallel is perfect because in each of those cases, there was one and only one DJ on at a time. Everyone else — the news and sports people, and “Animal Stories” sidekick Little Tommy — they came on when needed, and then left. It wasn’t the “Lujack and _______,” show, it was Larry Lujack, first and foremost.
The aforemtnioned Landecker’s book coauthor adds:
I’ve known John Landecker for more than twenty years now, and everywhere he goes someone tells him how important he was to their lives because of his stint on WLS. People really look up to him. But one of the people that John always looked up to was Larry Lujack. He keeps an autographed picture of Larry in his home office, inscribed with classic Lujack wit: “This is to certify that John Landecker knows me personally.”
And Landecker adds in his book Records Truly Is My Middle Name (because it is):
WLS already had an all-star lineup when I came aboard in 1972. Superjock Larry Lujack was the morning man, Fred Winston was doing middays, and J.J. Jeffrey was the afternoon man. I was hired to fill the evening slot.
I met Larry before I was on the air a single time. The program director Mike McCormack called me into his office because he wanted me to sit in on a Larry Lujack aircheck. In the radio business we call them “airchecks,” but they’re really just critique sessions with the program director. The disc jockey brings in a tape of his or her show, and if the program director likes it, he praises it. I suppose this has happened once or twice in radio history. Usually it goes the other way. Usually the program director picks it apart.
McCormack started Larry’s tape, and we listened to a bit Lujack had done that morning. It was reality radio. Larry was pointing out that you could hear the garbage trucks in the alley through the air conditioner in WLS’s main air studio, and he held the microphone right up to it, so the listeners could hear it too. After the bit ended, the program director turned to me.
“What do you think of that?” he asked.
“I thought that was pretty funny,” I said.
I didn’t know what I had done, but after the meeting I was walking back to the jock lounge with Larry and he turned toward me.
“Thanks, kid,” he said.
Apparently before I came in, the program director had been telling Larry he hated it, and Larry was defending it. When I backed him up by saying I thought it was funny, it defused the criticism, and Larry thought the new guy was alright.
On the other hand, not too long after that, I may have turned the tide in the other direction at least for a day. We were in a jock meeting, shooting the shit, and someone asked the seemingly innocuous question: “Who was more important to music — Elvis or the Beatles?”
“I don’t think Elvis was that great,” I said.
Well, I had no idea that Larry Lujack was a huge Elvis fan, but I found out pretty fast. Larry glared at me. And then he nearly spit the words at me, in his patented Lujack delivery.
“You don’t know anything about music, you… Phil… a… del… phia… FUCK!”
Years later I was at the station when the news came across the wire that Elvis had died (August 16, 1977). The first thing that crossed my mind was that nobody in the world would want to know this information more than Larry Lujack. (When someone calls you a Philadelphia fuck for not loving Elvis, you have a tendency to remember that sort of thing.)
So, I called him at home, and his wife answered.
“Judy,” I said, “It’s John Landecker. I’ve got something very important to tell Larry. Trust me; he’s going to want to know about this.”
“OK, hang on,” she said.
A few seconds later Larry growled on the phone. “Yeah?”
“Larry, it’s me, John Landecker. Elvis is dead.”
“Who cares?” he growled again. “I’m taking a nap.”
About Lujack’s golf game: He told the story one day about having a “golf thought” while driving (a car), and so he stopped at a driving range in Kankakee, Ill. Armed with a cup of coffee, Lujack began to swing away, until it started to rain. This was some time after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster when fallout supposedly was drifting over the U.S. And as he watched the raindrops dripping into his coffee, Lujack said, he wondered if he was being irradiated by Chernobyl’s fallout. It doesn’t look funny in print, but it was funny enough on air to remember three decades later.
WLS History has a tribute to Lujack on its home page. The site also tells a story about a DJ meeting, where Landecker would argue about the playlist, Winston would suggest at 10-minute intervals that everybody be fired, and Lujack staring at the ceiling before interrupting the program director to tell him there was a fly on the ceiling.
Lujack’s funniest regular segment was Animal Stories, which (in its “early morning rerun of the previous day’s edition”) woke me up each weekday morning at 6:45 to hear …
One of the Animal Stories that got repeated airplay was of a woman at a party who saw the host’s dog’s eating one of the hors d’oeuvres handed to her by someone, after which the person finished the food. When the woman telling the story commented about that, the food-sharer said she did that all the time with her own dog. To that, the narrator said she wouldn’t have had done that had she noticed that the dog had been previously licking his … followed by a series of tones to blot out the words every listener could fill in, followed by laughter and expressions of revulsion by Uncle Lar and Little Tommy.
Lujack and I had one interaction. (Besides my possession of a WLS Fantastic Plastic card, which was worthless in southern Wisconsin.) I helped plan a Boy Scouts trip to Chicago, and as part of it I tried to arrange a tour of the WLS studios, then at 360 N. Michigan Ave. (or, as Lujack’s colleague John Records Landecker called it, the fifth floor of the downtown Burger King). I got my letter back a few days later with a note from Lujack saying that he was sorry, but building security didn’t allow tours on weekends, signed “Lar.”)
Lujack reminds us WLS Musicradio listeners of the days when radio stations were not automated or voice-tracked, and DJs were allowed to have personalities.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 