The spirit of radio

Memories of my father

This is a piece I wrote a few years ago. It seemed like a good idea to revisit it to celebrate Father’s Day.

The Spirit of Radio

Begin the day with a friendly voice
A companion unobtrusive

As a teenager I had a small FM radio station. Its range was no more than two hundred meters. It was one of my favorite hobbies. I remember that my cousin, who came to live with us for a while during his internship at Chuquicamata, would park my old man’s Subaru at the corner and listen on the radio to the mixes I did with some friends. I know other friends of mine did the same. When was this? Probably 1982 or 1983. I would have been about 16.

Plays that song that’s so elusive
And the magic music makes your morning mood

My father also set up his first radio station when he was a teenager. In fact, my station ran on a transmitter he built for me. It was his love of radio that led him to study electronics and become a telecommunications engineer.

He once told me that in the backyard of a friend’s house they strung up a wire to use as an antenna. The broadcasts lasted until his friend’s mom decided to hang out the laundry…

Off on your way, hit the open road
There is magic at your fingers

I also remember a long drive from Santiago to our home in Chuquicamata. Everyone was asleep in the back of the car. Only my old man and I were still awake.

With his encouragement I turned the dial, looking for a signal on AM or maybe shortwave. All we had for company was the receiver’s white noise, our silence, the purr of the engine and the light of the stars, millions of fireflies stuck to the skies of the northern desert. My father and I didn’t talk much. Our thing was listening to the radio together.

For the Spirit ever linger
Undemanding contact in your happy solitude

One Sunday, I must have been nine or ten, my dad was on shift at Radio El Loa, in Chuquicamata. We were alone. “Let’s go get some records”, he said. We went into a room that was huge, to me, and full of records. We looked for songs. My old man wanted folk music, but he wasn’t after the usual well-known tunes. We piled up the records next to the console and the turntables. He started writing down the order of the tracks. He was making up a radio show. I remember he had a book, surely by Oreste Plath, the Chilean folklorist, or about the history of Chuquicamata.

The show started, and between songs he read something from the book. My old man had a good voice, a “trained” one, as they say in radio. Juan Carlos Gil, a man from Antofagasta who later became a famous radio announcer in Santiago, taught him how to use it. He minded his diction and looked for the right words, like the old-time announcers, like Don Petronio Romo, whom he admired and worked with, recording spots and ads for the official radio station of Codelco Chuquicamata.

Invisible airwaves crackle with life
Bright antennae bristle with the energy

I don’t know how many years his Sunday show was on the air, but I do know it was a modest success. People like being told stories, and that’s what my old man did: he told them on the air. He became an expert on the history of the north and of his native Chuquicamata. He wrote the scripts for his show on an old typewriter. He barely typed, with two fingers. What would he have done today? Would he have a podcast? Almost certainly.

Emotional feedback on timeless wavelength
Bearing a gift beyond price, almost free

Mixing songs was the first step, hunting for them in my cassettes. I was pirating, because on Friday nights I taped the FM stations that played dance music, and I played it back the next day. The tricky part was that the stations added a mark: the announcer’s voice saying the name of the station, or in some cases a beep every minute. The trick to skip those marks was the console, which let me mix two or three channels.

I also managed to get original records. Once I won a contest, and the prize was a record of my choice. I went with my classmates, who had also won, to the record store. One picked an Electric Light Orchestra album, probably Discovery. I took home the vinyl of Kilroy Was Here, by Styx. The “slow songs” on that album were in high demand among my friends, especially for playing at parties. In time, some of those friends and I started playing in our own band, and I played the drums.

All this machinery making modern music
Can still be open hearted
Not so coldly charted

The Spirit of Radio is the first track on the album Permanent Waves, by Rush, which came out on January 1, 1980, so this song is the first of the ’80s, the decade of my adolescence, when I began to live my youth.

I don’t remember when I started listening to Rush, maybe in college, surely not until the end of that decade. As a drummer, Neil Peart wasn’t a reference for me yet when we started playing.

It’s really just a question of your honesty, yeah
Your honesty

We would get together to play for entire weekends. We started early in the morning, around eight, and finished exhausted, after eleven at night. We only surfaced to eat what my mother cooked for us.

My old man built us an amplifier for the guitars. We called it El Potente, “the powerful one”, and curiously it picked up the radio when you held the guitar in a certain position. The spirit of radio slipped in everywhere.

One likes to believe in the freedom of music

I haven’t played drums in years. I don’t have the time anymore. There was a time when I played Rock Band with my kids, but that game is barely a pale reflection of the pleasure I felt playing in the band with my friends.

I don’t miss those hours alone in my room, twiddling knobs, mixing songs, but it was fun and it’s a nice memory. I’m not a nostalgic person, but I wanted to remember, to remember those things, and to remember my old man. His love of radio, his passion, which may well have led him to his death.

But glittering prizes and endless compromises
Shatter the illusion of integrity

I don’t know if you know this, but those red lights on top of radio antennas, blinking like lighthouses every night. Well, those lights burn out too, and they have to be changed. Enormous bulbs, hundreds of watts each, have to be replaced by someone.

A series of unfortunate events took my father away from the consoles and the microphones. Took him away by force, really, because he would never have wanted to leave radio.

He ended up going through different jobs at Codelco, office clerk, technical draftsman, until one day he was finally able to get close to radio again, when he joined the Telecommunications Department at Chuquicamata. One of his duties was maintaining the radio station.

For the words of the prophets were written on the studio wall
Concert hall
And echoes with the sounds of salesmen

My old man was happy near the radio, and if the antenna’s beacon had to be changed, he did it. The antenna was more than a hundred meters tall. You had to climb it, hanging from the safety harness, going up on the strength of your legs and hands. They spent the whole morning climbing that iron structure. It was such hard, exhausting work that they got the next day off and, of course, were paid extra for it. I remember watching him through binoculars as he climbed the tower, and also how the next day he stayed home resting, worn out by the job, while I had to go to school.

Invisible airwaves crackle with life
Bright antennae bristle with the energy

Once I went with my father to repair a transmitter at Radio Calama. That day I learned the immense power of radio frequency. My father warned me not to go near a certain area. Although you couldn’t see them, the waves could burn me. Days later he came home with severe burns. Invisible radio waves had hurt his skin.

It wasn’t the first accident he had from fixing an antenna or doing something near his beloved radio. Once he had a very nasty fall that kept him in bed for several days. Months later he was diagnosed with cancer. He was thirty-nine.

Emotional feedback on timeless wavelength
Bearing a gift beyond price, almost free

I don’t know if radio waves gave him cancer, but he was exposed to strong sources of electromagnetic radiation because of his work. Maybe it was the accident, maybe something genetic.

My old man left when I had not yet turned eighteen.

He would never blame radio for his illness, and I won’t either.

I’ll keep his spirit, and the spirit of radio, the spirit radio had back then, the one people like my father stood for, the spirit that Alex, Geddy and of course Neil sing about.