Notes on a pirate radio station

Me and Dano were already buzzing and tipsy from drink and stumbled up the long poorly lit driveway. At the end was a small porch light and when we reached the door, a silhouette appeared. I could just barely make out a set of big shoulders on a body shorter than my own. Me and Dano were laughing at the odd situation. The shoulders moved out of the light and a face appeared, smiling and friendly.

“You must be Jim and Dano. How the hell are you?”

“Pretty drunk but manageable,” said Dano.

We all shook hands.

“I’m Scott.”

“I can’t believe we’re at a radio station. An hour ago we were just zoning out toward sleep,” I said.

“Come on up,” said Scott.

We followed him along a platform that leads to a garage door; we walked up a set of creaky stairs. When we reached the top, we walked into a well lit but pig-stye room. Budweiser case boxes were stapled all over the walls. To the left, a long couch stretched along the wall with old stains of who knows what on the pillows. On the right was a an unsheeted mattress on the floor and at each end of the mattress were arcade video games. Posters of beautiful Playboy models, Jimi Hendrix, velvet and psychedelic flags, Sharpie scribblings— personal messages and perverted one-liners. In the center of the room, a heavy dirty white table on wheels. On it were empty beer cans, vodka labels, old cassettes and playing cards, staples, cigarette butts and a marble ashtray. The place just smelled of beer. Along the back wall and centered sat a long metal table, the kind you generally use for catering food. On one end of the table, a CD player was stacked upon a cassette player; beside that, the receiver, mixing board and two microphones and then another CD and cassette player. Beneath the table ran a seemingly endless mess of wires and chords in and out of metal boxes. Everything geared toward the black box— a two hundred watt transmitter, Scott informed us, that was 350 feet above sea level.

When we had left the car, Homeward Bound had been playing on the radio but now, silence. Scott hopped behind the microphone and kicked back on the swivel chair. He turned up the volume just as Homeward Bound was coming to an end. His hand reached for the mixing board. He faded down the music and queued up the microphone at the same time. He leaned in close to the microphone.

“Hear ye Hear ye Here ye. We have with us tonight two honorable guests from out of town. They’ve come all the way to the WHDL studio just to play a few kick ass tunes, for you out there. Over here we have?”

It took a second before I realized he was introducing me, to who I had no idea. I stepped up to the second microphone. They were both mounted to the table. I grabbed it with my right hand, paused and said, “this is Jim. We’re going to bring you some real classic music tonight— and get drunk.”

“Over here we have?”

Dano leaned close and said, “this is Dano... the Doctor.” He paused for a shot of whiskey and grimaced. “Oh yeah. We’re going to crank tonight ladies and gentlemen. Yeah.”

Me and Scott laughed mightily.

“Jim and Dano, those two musical nuts. Oh well, stay tuned. We’re gonna keep on rockin’ till the old FCC comes a-knockin.’”

 He punched in a disc, cued the song and turned down the microphones. He raised the CD control switch and pressed play. The sounds of Jethro Tull livened the room and I guessed, perhaps cars or bedrooms scattered across the south shore. I sat in the other swivel chair and smoked and drank whiskey. Scott was explaining to Dano how the radio signal was sent out over the air and that a ten foot antenna was right above them on the garage.

I wondered how the hell I had come from there to here. I had been listening to this pirate radio station for about two months. My sister had discovered the station and told me about it. Most of the time it was Scott’s voice who I heard but there were others, his friends I guessed. At first they sounded like a bunch of goofballs but as I continued to listen, I started to see that they were pretty funny and they always played your song requests, if they had it. The station was in Braintree, the highlands and the signal always came in clear at my parent’s house in Randolph or Randolph in general. The furthest point I ever heard it, driving to school at Umass where it would dissolve into static air just about as I passed the gas tanks in South Boston.  

Nothing here matched my preconceived idea of what it would look like, Scott included. I had expected the radio station to be on a main street in a busy city setting and couched away in an organized, cutting edge, sound proof room; not the single man’s lair it appeared to be. After listening for two months I had built up projections— Scott’s voice, always in control and joyful, slammed it with witty impersonations of John Lennon or clever sexual anecdotes or funny commentaries on society, none of it now seemed to go with the face I saw before me. He sat beside Dano, laughing. I had pictured Scott to be a tall long haired hippy in his thirties wearing ripped jeans, a Megadeath t-shirt and a bag of weed at his hip. I even thought he might have a dragon tattoo or a skull on his arm. Yet here I was having come face to face with the voice. He was a little shorter than me, big shouldered and clean shaven with a haircut. His eyes were probing, as if he were looking for something to comment on; and the guy just loved to laugh and smile, an infectious laugh that sometimes made you laugh when in fact you had no idea what he was laughing about. He was just turned 21 and one of the guys in a Bruins t-shirt, Chinos and Nike sneakers.

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Another paper I wrote for creative writing class. I have no idea if there was a reason I chose to write about the radio station or not— maybe some appearance vs reality thing, I don’t know. It was handwritten on notebook paper and just called English C210. Anyway it was really just a journal of my first impression of Scott and his radio station and nothing more. However a funny story that was not in the journal was how me and Dano arrived there that night.

Back in 1988, Dano was living at my parent’s for maybe a week after getting the temporary boot from his house. So he was staying in my room on the couch. This particular Friday night, we had been up drinking in my room, listening to the station and as chance would have it, Scott, who was never much of a drinker, was tying one on too alone at the station. So after numerous song requests via telephone from us, it went from giving and taking requests to Scott just basically saying why don’t you guys just come here and play your own tunes. So off we went in Dano’s truck. It was not an easy place to find even sober as it’s sort of tucked away off the road. We spent some time driving around Braintree in circles. Twice we pulled over and called him on a payphone for directions and twice we must have drove right by it. Finally on the third phone call he just simply gave us directions over the air like we were listening to a How-To book on tape and shortly, his voice would guide us right into his driveway.

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