Casey Kasem passed away today, at the age of 82.
It was neither a shock, nor a moment too soon, it would seem, for the gravely ill radio personality, but it was definitely the passing of an era. Like many Boomers and Gen X'ers, Kasem's was the voice most likely to be heard dropping tinnily out of my dual cassette, AM/FM boom box when I was a kid, counting down the 'biggest hits in the land' on American Top 40. His delivery was just a little smarmy, his vocal quality just this side of nasal, but he nevertheless, I thought, came across upbeat and sincere; he breathed life into pop music, made the countdown seem like an important thing with his earnestness and enthusiasm, made you want to wait until the end to see which song claimed the #1 slot, and led you to believe that it somehow mattered. Before I became aware of how lame it all was, before I was too jaded to give a shit, there was something invigorating about the Top 40 countdown. Something invigorating about the long distance dedications and his sage advice at sign-off: 'Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars...'
I listened to Casey Kasem in the early 1980s, 1981 - 1984, from Donna Summer / Hall and Oates / 38 Special, to We Are the World / Prince / Cyndi Lauper. In those first few years of MTV, at the very first light of the digital age, Kasem might already have been considered among the last of the 'old school' radio jocks, having started out when radio deejays were still gods...when on Friday and Saturday (or any) nights, they delivered listeners from isolation by providing music they would otherwise not hear or know about. Oh, to have been on the air (anywhere, but especially in a major market), in the 60s and 70s, radio's silver age, after the advent of rock and roll, but before huge corporate conglomerates were allowed to buy up as many stations as they wanted and standardize them, the days before clever but entirely bloodless automation techniques reduced stations to veritable graveyards with a skeleton staff comprised mostly of account execs. To be spitting copy and spinning stacks 'o wax in that time when radio deejays did nothing less than bridge the gap for many between here and 'there', when they were the Dick Clarks of their market....even (or especially) if it was a small market.
And all of the above addresses only the change in the radio industry; it does not speak to the rise of the digital age, and the changing music industry. These days, radio doesn't really mean much, would seem to be going the way of newspapers in some places, but 'countdown' shows on radio, as a way of hearing new songs and discovering new artists, mean even less. Every playlist on someone's iPod is a 'countdown', and nothing needs to be delivered anymore. A full body of music, spanning all eras and all genres all at once, is readily available on-line, legally or otherwise, and can be brought along anywhere - literally anywhere - one chooses to go. In short, we are all our own deejay, living our lives with the soundtrack of our lives playing in the background continuously. We choose what is '#1' at any given moment. We no longer need Casey Kasem to tell us. Ryan Seacrest does his best to carry the torch, and Kasem himself was doing his countdown thing right up until his retirement in 2009. But nah...I don't know of any kids among the Millennials who listen to American Top 40 (or 'AT40', as it's known today) the way we did twenty or thirty years ago, not with the same sense of anticipation and purpose.
And as for long distance dedications, they were nice back then, weren't they? I thought so, anyway. Finely misted droplets of romance Kasem sweetened with a lilt of his voice and a pregnant pause before announcing, so-and-so, in someplace or other, 'here's your long distance dedication...' I tried this once when I was working in radio, did a 'dedication' on the air...mine was complete bullshit. I just made it up, and used Smoky Mountain Rain by Ronnie Milsap. I got chewed out by the GM for this; he might not have believed it was real, but he mostly complained that Smoky Mountain Rain was way too old for a 'hot country' station to be playing. I thought it was a good choice, and I still do. Somewhere I have tapes of some of the shows from my radio days. If I could find a tape of that (and I think it might actually exist...), I'd post it here, let readers decide how convincing I sound.
But in any case, there is no 'long distance' between us anymore, really, none that bears, or warrants, the pageantry of over-the-air dedications. Text, e-mail and Skype, Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, Twitter and Tumblr, and so forth and so on, have bridged the gap of space and time. If anything, we're all up in each other's face now in a way we never were in the past. We are never given a chance to drift apart, start getting sentimental, to start longing. Too often, the past really does remain present.
Casey Kasem's perfect radio voice was also well suited for cartoon voice-overs. He provided the voice for Shaggy, from the Scooby Doo cartoons, and ironically enough, given the astonishing longevity of that cartoon's popularity with each new generation, it might be said that this will be his most lasting accomplishment, his legacy.
