Below is my review of Burning Up the Air, Jerry Williams, Talk Radio and the Life In Between by Steve Elman and Alan Tolz as it appeared in the April, 2008 issue of the Sturbridge Times Magazine.
Talk show icon Jerry Williams wasn’t
a bad guy
The year was either 1957 or 1958. The
volume on my radio was low enough so that my parents could not hear
it downstairs. I was listening to early rock and roll when I should
have been sleeping. Usually, I tired quickly, turned off the red
motorola set and fell asleep. One night, not being sleepy after the
10:00 p.m. news, I heard the promo for the next show. Thinking it
might be more music, I kept listening.
It wasn’t song, it was a force of
nature. It was Jerry Williams, the man who was pioneering talk radio
in the Boston area. He can claim as much as anyone to have invented
the genre. From the mid-fifties to the new millennium he was on
Boston Radio with a few breaks for a mid-life crisis here and there.
For much of the time,Williams was the dominant radio personality in
the market.
Two of his many producers have
collected everything that could be found about the man and have
talked to everyone they could to put together a biography that is a
page turner. Burning Up the Air, Jerry Williams, Talk Radio and the
Life In Between reads as if it were a labor of love. Not that the
authors, Steve Elman and Alan Tolz, were likely to be above wanting
to throttle the man on occasion. From their tales, it is obvious
Williams could try the patience of a saint.
It’s all in the book. How he probed
callers to get a story or an answer. Occasionally, when he found
himself battling with a particularly, unreasonable caller, he would
shoot out a familiar line:“They’re out there tonight!” Later,
as he aged, and even though you knew he would do nothing else but
radio, he would vent his frustration by shouting, “I’m getting
out of the business.”
A high school drop-out, actually, a
high school flunk-out, Jerry still had an expert knowledge of many
issues. But it was not only mere knowledge, it was what he knew how
to position that information that set him apart. The authors make the
point about how he “knew how to select the hottest topics for
discussion, how to set things up in an hour, how to strike sparks in
an interview, how to smoke out and shape good calls, how to keep the
momentum going.” Today’s crop of talkers don’t really seem to
be as skillful as Williams.
There is another aspect of his
popularity that I had never thought about before reading this book.
While one may not call his voice operatic, it was pleasant and in no
way grating as are many on the radio today. Elman and Tolz discussed
his training under a mentor. Jerry had a voice described as a “high
baritone.” His acting coach, Bob Breyer, told him how to use the
voice and through training in radio plays,Williams must have learned
something.
Through the book, one can recognize the
political changes in Massachusetts and the nation such that Jerry,
uber liberal through the first part of his career, was by the end
considered a conservative by many. He never thought he went through a
metamorphosis from one political view to another. The authors
describe his outlook,“Jerry had always presented himself on and of
the air as his own man. Since the late sixties, he’d been
uncomfortable with labels of all sorts. When forced to choose from
conventional terms, he might opt for “liberal,” even when he felt
that what had come to be known as “liberalism” had moved toward
something completely alien to his feeling about the role of
government.” He was uncomfortable with Dukakis in power as he had
been with Nixon. He probably gagged at the description by a Boston
Globe writer, Clea Simon, that he had purveyed “conservative chat.”
The structure of the book is
chronological except for the last chapter. The authors intersperse a
timeline of the major national and world events that are happening
contemporaneously so one is never lost for the era. Event follows
event in sequence and the reader will be through it in no time. He
was not a perfect man and the authors present him, in the words of
Oliver Cromwell, “warts and all.” I’m not sure how it will
resonate with anyone who has never heard of him. After all, his show,
no matter the issue and the impact, was personal. The authors have a
website (http://www.jerrywilliams.org/) with a lot of audio clips
that might give a small flavor for the man.
Many folks in this area got to
experience Jerry during the campaign to stop the New Braintree
prison. There was a big Saturday on the New Braintree Common.
Williams was there as more or less MC. Next to him was a mock up of
Michael Dukakis. During a lull, Jerry all of a sudden, with perfect
delivery, said,“and now a word from Kitty (Dukakis). Pause. MEOW.”
The crowd convulsed in laughter. It should have been in the book.
One other item that should have been in
the book was that he was the only supporter of busing who ever
admitted that it had all been a mistake. He always seemed to be full
of himself, but I’ve never heard anyone else admit it. As Jerry
used to say of people he felt okay about, he was “not a bad guy.”
Of course, Elman and Tolz couldn’t
include every minute of his life. No matter, there is a lot covering
an interesting man and his times. He did not engender neutrality in
people.You either loved or hated him. I don’t know what was written
as the cause of death on his certificate, but I’m sure it was not a
dearth of personality.
Please note, the website appears to have disappeared.
