Feel the Heat - July 19 2021

 

Feel the Heat

July 19 2021

In the old days

radios were big elaborate cabinets

crammed with vacuum tubes.

They glowed warmly

behind the stylish façade,

and you could place a hand over the back

and feel the venting heat.

But took their time warming up,

and if run long enough

the acrid scent of ionized air

would leave you feeling unwell,

like a minor spell of brain fog

or the first sign of the flu.

Was this how electricity smelled?

I would lie in bed

under cover of night

and tune to faraway stations.

From my small bedroom

on a sleepy suburb's dead-end street

I could eavesdrop on the world,

straining to hear

through the static hiss

that faded in and out.

Phone-in shows.

A fire-and-brimstone preacher.

Baseball from a distant coast

with sun and swaying palms.

And for the first time, jazz.

A cool cat

from some honky-tonk or nightclub

whose whiskey voice breathed smoke

spinning bee-bop and ballads and plaintive brass,

solo piano and improvised scat,

saxophone riffs and stand-up bass

and that hot big band sound.

Along with hi-hat, conga, steel-pan

in a master class of drums.

Who knew

music like this existed?

Beer commercials

and second-hand cars.

An infield bleeder to first,

sinners condemned to hell.

And Oscar Peterson's Night Train

rumbling through the dark

to some exotic destination,

the warm light from its windows

beckoning seductively,

inviting me to hitch a ride.

This poem was inspired by this piece of short friction from a recent New Yorker. Except for me, it would have been a few decades earlier, and it wouldn't have been pop or rock, it would have been jazz. And it was a sleepy suburb in urban Canada instead of a tiny speck in northwestern Montana.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/the-buffalo-robe-and-the-radio