There's really not much I can add to Melina's excellent post from last night detailing the Air America situation and her spot-on recommendations for finally undoing the damage of three years of criminally inept mismanagement. But what Air America has meant to me, and to people like me, over the past four years, is something that I don't think the parade of ants in suits who have marched through its offices during that time have ever really understood.
Back in the days before George Bush invaded Iraq, I used to listen to Richard Bey and Steve Malzberg, who had the WABC drive-time gig in New York. Bey is a sort of moderate, perhaps slightly left-of-center, calm presence who offset the screeching of the crazed wingnut Malzberg, who saw everything through the prism of Israel. In terms of AM talk radio, Bey was then the closest thing we had to a progressive voice in New York, except for the odd hours when you'd find Lynn Samuels ranting in her stuck-in-1969-Pacifica way. Oh, sure, I would listen to Randi Rhodes and Mike Malloy and Neil Rogers on ieAmerica or any of the other various online streaming outlets that were available to me before my employer got Websense and blocked all streaming audio. I remember Neil Rogers taking calls from Florida voters reporting strange occurrences during the midterm elections in 2002. But until there is ubiquitous Wi-fi, and an internet radio becomes what an AM radio used to be, streaming lacks the "turn it on and it's there" ease of AM radio.
Like it or not, the AM (and to a lesser extent, the FM) dial is where radio still lives.
But while the idea for Air America had been kicking around for a while, it wasn't until the network had a start date and a lineup that I started believing it would happen. Mr. Brilliant was off from work that week, and he was right there when Al Franken signed on at noon on March 31, 2004, on the new flagship station of Air America, WLIB.
It's hard to describe what it felt like the next morning, when I turned on WLIB and heard the snippet from "Can't Stop" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers that to this day and forevermore I associate with Morning Sedition. I had no idea who Marc Maron was at that point, but I knew that the play on NPR's staid morning show meant that something new and snarky was about to happen from 6-9 AM.
In those early days, Air America had a kind of "Hey, kids, let's put on a radio network!" feel to it as the various shows fumbled their way towards some kind of cohesiveness. Morning Sedition jettisoned Sue Elicott, which while it added to the unfettered testosterone of the show, allowed Maron and the staff of ferociously talented writers room to breathe and create a kind of morning zoo for snarky liberal intellectuals. Al Franken fared better with his female sidekick, Katherine Lanpher, who was the perfectly and effortly disciplined foil for Franken's tendency to ramble and whose glorious laugh fed his better efforts. But even the shows that I didn't think worked all that well, such as Unfiltered, in which Chuck D couldn't manage most days to get out of bed in time to even show up, Lizz Winstead was less funny than she was in her Daily Show days, and Rachel Maddow wasn't the relaxed, funny pro we see today, but instead was the kind of progressive utopian with no sense of humor that Marc Maron would go on to ridicule, managed to find their loyal followers.
With an on-air stable of talent that included few people with any actual radio experience, we were able to listen to their on-the-job training. This was not everyone's cup of tea, as it often resulted in things like listening to Janeane Garofalo screeching or playing out her issues with her conservative father Carmine on our time. But it was new, and it was fresh, and it was different, and damn it, it finally spoke to US -- after a decade that saw mindless grinning mouthbreathers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Neal Boortz and Mark Levin suck up all the AM frequencies.
Because Arbitron never takes into account web streaming and podcasting, it's impossible to know how many people were actually listening, but it was a lot more than the conventional meme of "Progressive Radio Fails Because No One Wants It" would have you believe.
This morning I heard Mike Doughty's song 27 Jennifers on the radio and it reminded me of the time I went into the city at 5:30 AM to catch a live broadcast of Morning Sedition at City Bakery. Doughty was the musical guest that day. It was June 2005 and the show was in a perfect groove, with Mark Riley playing the perfect Margaret Dumont to Maron's Groucho-Marx-on-Meth; Jim Earl embodying the various Milfingtons, and Kent Jones' southern dittohead Lawton Smalls bit having been honed to its perfectly and exactingly disciplined structure that always somehow felt ad-libbed. Catching Morning Sedition live was like watching the best jazz concert you've ever seen, in which everyone is in a perfect groove, they know what they want to play, but they're so together that when one member goes off into an improvisation, the other band members go off similarly, and it just magically works.
That day I saw Doug Kreeger and Jon Sinton walking around observing the crowd, and it was so clear that they GOT IT. They understood what Morning Sedition was about. They understood that while Maron can be the biggest, highest-maintenance pain in the ass in the known universe, he had clearly tapped into the collective consciousness of a sizable group of people. They knew what they had was magic. What they didn't have was the job of programming director. And when that job went to Danny Goldberg, he went about dismantling everything that people loved about Air America. The first show to go was Unfiltered, which he replaced with Jerry Springer, who paid for air time. Now I'm not one of those people who hated Springer's show. I thought that because Springer appealed to the uninformed idiots who watch trash television, having him as a progressive radio host gave him a unique opportunity to reach them. But it was a sign of things to come, because Goldberg's next move was to cancel Morning Sedition in December of 2005.
Air America has been plagued by bad management since day one, and it's the company's employees, the on-air talent, and the audience that have paid the price. What far too few of the incarnations of Air America management have understood is what a life preserver the network has been to those of us who have had our eyes open through the horror that has been the Bush years. I realize that for the suits in the executive suite, it's about delivering eardrums to advertisers, but these nimrods that have marched through this company over the past four years, stuck in an era when it's all about the AM ears, have never realized that Air America's audience has been just as much about streaming and podcasts as AM radio. They have never understood that the audience was not only far larger than they realized, but also ferociously loyal; but loyal not to "the corporation" but to the bigger concept of progressive talk radio, and to the on-air talent that brought the news, the perspective, and the funny to our ears.
This blog may have given a disproportionate amount of attention to Marc Maron and Sam Seder over the past few years, but it's rare that radio personalities make themselves as accessible to listeners as these two men have. Randi Rhodes may have always said "I love you more" to her listeners, but aside from gay men, you never really believed it. But in very different ways, Sam and Marc have crossed the 4th wall between on-air personality and listener.
Marc Maron has done it, as he has throughout his standup career, by using comedy and his radio riffs as a kind of personal therapy. When he intersperses his unique take on political issues with riffs on his anger management problems, his volatile marriage, his past drug use, his cats, his issues about weight, he's opened himself up to the people he calls his "stalkers" in a way even most of our own friends don't. Of course Maron, whose self-loathing puts your garden variety sufferer from low self-esteem to shame, seems to want no part of any club that would have him as a member, and so he has often greeted the die-hards such as Melina and I, Kristapea and her gift packages, Gypsy and her recipes, Sean the intellectual truck driver, and Brian the would-be songwriter from Everett, Washington, with a sizable dollop of fear and loathing along with the gratitude and appreciation.
But Sam Seder is another story entirely. Here is a man, a comedy writer and sometime actor previously best known as the guy who didn't swallow his food in a Sex and the City episode, who found himself playing the rational foil to an increasingly unhinged Janeane Garofalo in Air America's early days. But unlike Garofalo, who never really adapted well to radio, Seder worked hard, improved his delivery, did his homework, and created his own style and his own following via his web site. No one can ever say that Sam Seder hasn't played well with others. When they cancelled The Majority Report, he moved seamlessly to the morning slot. When David Bernstein decided that a screechy-voiced Latino libertarian from New York who was his friend should have that slot, Seder kept his mouth shut, moved to his Sunday wasteland, and took his community with him. Over the last year, SamSederShow.com has become an online community in its own right, and on Tuesdays Seder and Marc Maron do a VODcast that provides a single hour of sanity for those of us who wake up every goddamn day wishing the old Air America was still around. Sam Seder is a good and decent man who has done nothing but bleed Air America blue for the last four years. He fills in when he's asked to, often at a moment's notice. He hasn't once complained. When he had to find out via Instant Messenger that his employer had once again kicked him in the teeth by choosing someone else to keep the 3-6 PM slot warm next week, you never heard him complain on the air.
I realize that it's the corporate way to defecate on one's employees and to think that all employees are interchangeable, but the way the suits may change but the crap stays the same just shows that it doesn't matter who sits in the executive suite at Air America anymore -- they still don't get it. The guys that did, like Kreeger and Sinton, were kicked to the curb. That dilettante hack Mark Green, whose rich brother bought him a radio network, continued to dismantle the network by turning it into Air Hillary. Charlie Kireker seemed to have promise, and even has an endorsement page on Barack Obama's site, but he too is all about the Benjamins. None of these guys get that progressive talk radio cannot simply be about getting people to buy John Cammuta's latest get rich quick scheme or some cream to make your dick bigger or some other cream that's guaranteed to get rid of the bags under your eyes if you just give them your credit card number so they can charge you every month.
No, it's about the community. It's about the unique bond that these radio novices created with those who listen to them. It's a bond that makes P.J. Sauter maintain the Morning Seditionists blog and set up online chat rooms where "Maronites" (I hate to call it "fans") can get together when Maron sits in for a vacationing Mike Malloy on NovaM Radio. It's a bond that led to Melina and I, a couple of iconoclastic middle-aged chicks sitting in a hotel lobby in Chicago last summer blogging like madwomen. It's a bond that has Brian from Everett, who sounds far more coherent these days than he did when he used Air America's voice mail to compose his wacky songs, still calling when Marc Maron is on. It's a bond that has "Fernando" helping Sam Seder out with technical issues with the VODCast. It's not about money, it's about people. It's about sustaining a community in an alienated world.
It's just that when the voices of this community are silenced on radio, the community is that much harder to sustain. And as James Wolcott said when Morning Sedition was cancelled, "a world without Sammy the Stem Cell is a world that might as well stop revolving."
Morning Sedition has been gone for over two years, and I miss it every single day. Sam Seder's show often doesn't make it to the podcast till two days later. Now Randi is gone, and if there's any justice in the world, Rachel Maddow will take over for David Gregory in the MSNBC 6 PM slot. And then everyone who made Air America something exciting and special will be gone.
In the recent stories about the lawsuit against the particle accelerator to be deployed in Switzerland this summer, the doomsayers talked about the possibility of "a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a 'strangelet' that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called strange matter.'"
Air America, which was once vibrant and dynamic and entertaining, has turned into just that kind of shrunken, dense, dead lump.
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