Screwloose Saved From Drowning

Reading reviews of Criterion’s recent reissue of Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning, in which a free spirited hobo is rescued by a well-meaning bookseller who allows him to become part of his bourgeois household, has reminded me of the times that I have similarly been rescued from obscurity and been allowed to sit at the grown-ups table.

One individual stands out, in fact, as someone who consistently allowed me to express my opinion and was willing to let the chips fall where they may, even when those chips tended to land in his lap a great deal of the time.

Paul Blick was the product of an illicit affair between pop music and the radio. The old Groucho joke about Margaret Dumont being “vaccinated with a phonograph needle” would apply here. Paul quite simply lived, breathed, and slept music. Without it, one suspected that there was no Paul: it provided his brain, his blood, his will-to-live. One rarely meets people who are so devoted and in love with their chosen medium that it consumes their lives. Paul’s medium was broadcasting but, unfortunately, he was far too smart and in love with what three minutes of music can do to ever be comfortable attempting to adapt his passion to the demands of commercial radio. Which is how I found him at the controls of a local community-based station that dutifully ground out the hits on the hour. Paul, however, had other ideas.

Frustrated by the demands of the medium and a board of directors that seemed to be happy enough with the status quo, Paul was chafing at the bit to make use of the station’s potential and frequently tried to introduce material that would improve and innovate the broadcast day. For some reason that I don’t fully comprehend to this day, from the day I walked into that station, located in the basement of the local police department HQ, Paul was enthusiastic about anything I proposed and seemed willing to give me the airtime necessary to try out whatever schemes I came up with and the continuing support to work out the kinks in programming that needed to be test driven a while. In plain words, he had faith in me, my judgment, and my ability to eventually develop something that could be idiosyncratic and new while managing to retain an audience.

It was the kind of faith in my abilities that I had rarely experienced before, or have since.

So if I wanted to spend three hours mixing retro new wave with avant-garde jazz, or play half-hour remixes of one song, or do strange on-air sketches that only made sense to the people performing them (and that may be a stretch), I had carte blanche to do so. Paul was happy to let me use the airwaves as my playground, even when the other jocks would make their displeasure known in no uncertain terms.

He worked overtime to try and make this dinky station sound as good and as relevant as any other commercial station, providing concert updates, hustling for sponsors, and spreading the word about it in every way he could think of. But no good deed goes unpunished and Paul received scant appreciation for his efforts, the results of which could be plainly heard on a daily basis. I suspect, however, that anything having to do with music was hardly work where Paul was concerned: it was a joy that he channeled into project after project.

As for me, I was having the time of my life, breaking the good china and wiping my hands on the good towels of the conservative airwaves I would take over weekly. I imagine it must have sounded like someone had suddenly changed the channel when I came on. I knew for a fact that bringing me on board had not endeared Paul to the board of directors, but he didn’t seem very worried about it.

I have sometimes worried that it was my presence there that brought about the revenge exacted by the right-wing faction of the station, who went about dismantling everything about it that was interesting, distinctive, or professional. Waiting until after a particularly successful fund-raiser, during which even my show delivered a decent amount of support, they voted in a thick new catalog of rules that didn’t seem to have any practical application to any other show but mine. Much of it, one of us discovered, seemed to be cribbed from Moral Majority literature. I was eventually fired after writing a letter of complaint to a local paper about their shenanigans and that was that. My days of leaving my fingerprints on the freshly painted walls and tracking mud through their MOR hallways were at an end.

Paul went on to write and edit a local music paper and, having not learned his lesson, invited me to write a column for it. It took me about three months, I think, to lose the paper its major advertiser. Paul defended my column to the paper’s publisher and I stayed on for a number of years.

It makes you wonder which one of us really had the screw loose.

You don’t find these people very often, the ones who’ll fish you out of the river and give you something warm to drink and a place to stay, regardless of the consequences to themselves. Treasure them when you do.