The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin Read Free Book Online Page A

to him than his old chatter. As a consequence he began to play a different sort of music altogether, songs that were so familiar they needed no introduction, love songs nominally still, but from a different period, or rather from no period at all, songs that had always existed, in the public domain years, nothing that could ever have connected KROP with show business: “The Old Oaken Bucket,” “Alice Blue Gown,” “I Wandered Today to the Hill, Maggie.” Because they were the sort of songs no crooner anyone had ever heard of was likely to have recorded, he found it difficult to speak the names of the obscure tenors and sopranos who had recorded them, the Fred L. Joneses and Olive Patzes and Herbert Randolph Fippses who had cornered the market on this kind of thing. So he said nothing and looked instead for instrumental versions of the recordings, leaving Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties on his day off and going down to Lincoln on his own authority to the big radio station there, to speak to the music librarian and offer him money for his discards. At first the man didn’t seem to understand what he wanted, until Marshall explained that he did a request show for shut-ins, and invented for him the Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties Old People’s Home, a place, he said, where the staff used the golden hits of yesteryear as therapy, offering the invalided and senile a musical opportunity to re-court their wives, re-raise their children and re-fight their wars, the idea being, Maine said, not to pull the afflicted (he called them that) from their pasts but to push them back into them.
    Together they went into the music library, and there he found a cache of exactly the sort of thing he was looking for: “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” played by the Netherlands Deutschgeschreir Orkestra, Jerome Klopf conducting; “I Wish I Was in de Land ob Cotton,” sung by the Luftwaffe Sinfonia; Sir Reginald Shoat leading the Edinburgh Festival Orchestra in a Stephen Foster medley. There were also some fine things by the Hotel Brevert- Topeka’s Palm Court Band.
    “Gee,” the librarian said, “I didn’t know we had all this stuff.” “Yes,” Marshall Maine told him. “These will do.” The man put one of the recordings on the library console. “The quality’s not good. This one sounds strained, as if it was transcribed from the short wave.”
    “Yes,” Marshall Maine said, “that’s fine. They want that quality— the suggestion of the distant past.” “But they’re all instrumentals.” “Yes, that forces them to remember the words.” “Oh, look here, Lily Pons doing ‘Funiculi Funicula.’” “No,” Maine said sharply. “But if you had choral groups, I might take some choral groups of the right sort.” “Choral groups?”
    “It gives them the sense they’re not alone.” So he took back with him a hundred and twelve instrumentals, plus an armful of recordings by a few choral groups—rejecting, for example, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians’ rendition of “In the Merry, Merry Month of May” in favor of the Utah Military Institute’s Marching and Singing Soldiers’ version of the same song, and the Brockton Riding Academy Mounted Chorus’s “Silver Threads Among the Gold.”
    Furnished with these he returned to KROP and put them on the air. He could hear through his long afternoon record show the adulterated strains of the vaguely decomposing music he played, performances that the wind might have blown through, or the sea squeezed. Usually he no longer bothered to announce the songs. Remembering the Credenzas’ warning, he made sure that no dust stuck to the needle. He oiled the turntable, lifted the tone arm smartly when a record was finished and placed it carefully in the right groove of the next selection. Every few minutes he moved his head a precise seven inches from the microphone and gave the time and temperature twice: “It’s two thirty-five.