Wednesday, December 24, 2003

The sound of Christmas carols in the air

By CAL BEVERLY
editor@thecitizennews.com

[Editor’s note: This column first appeared in The Citizen just before Christmas 2002.]

Here’s a Christmas carol story.

My first job was playing Christmas carols. I was hired Dec. 15, 1959 — at age 15 — for a two-hour disk jockey slot on a little 250-watt AM station not far from the bluffs of the Chattahoochee River. My first official action was to cue up Percy Faith’s version of “The Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s “Messiah.”

Some may conclude I reached the high point of my working life early. At any rate, I love Christmas music, and I increasingly miss hearing the grand old songs of the season.

The way it was in those days of local radio, Christmas tunes slipped into the record rotation right after Thanksgiving, roughly a ratio of one seasonal tune every sixth or seventh record. (Yes, in those far-off days, we spun something called “records,” thin disks of dark plastic with spiral grooves on both sides which produced sounds when a diamond needle was applied to the surfaces. They rotated on larger spinning metal platters called “turntables.”)

The closer we got to Christmas, the higher the ratio of Christmas songs to regular records. By Christmas Eve, every song was a carol, usually about three-to-one religious to secular. Christmas Day (and I worked from sign-on to sign-off several of them) we played mostly the great old anthems announcing the Good News.

Elvis was bigger than the Beatles ever would be, and his “Blue Christmas” was two years old and already on its way to classic status. Brenda Lee had been “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” for a year, and the year before, an audio engineer named Ross Bagdasarian called himself David Seville and speeded up his voice to play all four parts of “The Chipmunk Song.” Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” was little more than a decade old but already was the bestselling single record of all time.

If you turned on your radio, you heard Christmas songs. By the way, in those pre-politically-correct days, eight of the 10 most popular Christmas songs had been written by Jews, from Irvin Berlin’s “White Christmas” to Johnny Marks’ “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.” I guess those hugely talented souls lacked sensitivity training so widely available today that would have informed them that they should have been offended by the mere mention of Christmas.

Although I was a Top-40 teen, my first paycheck resulted from my playing hour after hour of Christmas music, minimum wage, a dollar an hour. Looking back, I see it was some of the most satisfying money I’ve ever earned.

By my second Christmas at WULA, we had begun recording whole program segments during the week beforehand. The idea was to allow the DJ to sit back while a 30-minute reel unwound with the prerecorded music and commercial holiday greetings — “The next 15 minutes of Christmas music is sponsored by Neal Logue Company, headquarters for all your clothing needs, wishing you a joyous Christmas and a blessed New Year.”

If it was meant to save the DJ trouble, it didn’t. But we did it anyway. Dec. 24 and 25, reel after reel of audio tape lay around the control room, in some semblance of order. (It never failed that some segment was missing, requiring us to “go live” for 15 to 30 minutes. We had a spiral notebook with stock holiday greetings and we plugged in the blanks with whatever sponsor had that segment.)

So it was that long Christmas day of 1960: low man on the totem pole, I had the afternoon, evening and sign-off shifts. United Press International had moved a teletype wire feature a few days before to be used Christmas Day: “Somewhere, far to the North, a very old gentleman lies fast asleep ....”

I was taken with the sentiment and recorded it for use as my sign-off segment. I hunted just the right background music for the piece, choosing orchestral leader Percy Faith’s “Hallelujah” album (one of those dark circles of plastic with six or seven “cuts” per side).

The first song “bed” was — I think — “Angels We Have Heard on High,” back-timed to allow the final song to conclude just after my last sentence. That last song was “Angels from the Realms of Glory.”

Sign-off was 11 p.m., so in the otherwise darkened and deserted radio station two miles south of town center, I rolled the tape at 10:57. I think the final words about Santa were echoes of that famous poem, “The Night before Christmas”: “... and to all a good night.”

It came off flawlessly, pretty good production work for a 16-year-old, if I do say so myself. I was hugely satisfied. I hit the power-off button on the transmitter and turned off the switches on the audio console.

Nothing should have remained on but the lights as I prepared to lock up and ride my bike home. But, I heard music.

Now, I was a pretty agnostic teen. It wasn’t that I believed that there was no God. It was just that I had no notion that all that stuff had anything to do with me.

But here I was, just after 11 p.m. in a radio station that had been silenced by the only switches connected to any audio sources, hearing music: Christmas music.

I remember shaking my head, as if to clear it. I remember a slight chill running up my back. I was a rational being, but I was quickly running out of checks on my checklist of audio and power sources to account for the music that floated through the several rooms of the station.

“I know! It’s that radio in the lobby,” I thought at last. We kept it turned on during the day so visitors could hear our broadcasts while they waited. “Now that we are signed off, some other station on the same frequency is coming through on our receiver.”

I found the pink plastic radio broadcasting a low level of static in the lobby. I turned it off. I could still hear the music.

I had no other explanations. All the power was off to all the audio and radio equipment. The sound was generalized, not confined to one office or area. I had no explanation for it then. I still don’t.

I turned off the last lobby lights and locked the front door and got on my old 26-inch Schwinn to ride the deserted Highway 431 to and through downtown.

I no longer heard the music now that I was outside, under the stars. I looked up at those twinkling lights in the final minutes of Christmas Day, 1960. Not another living soul was in sight. I still felt a prickle up my back, but it was not fear. It was curiously peaceful.

I pedaled home, now hearing the music in my mind, the music of voices without words, from a tune first set to guitar in a Bavarian church so many centuries before. It was “Silent Night.”

That’s my Christmas story, and I’m sticking to it.