The last few days have been rough for irreplaceable radio personalities. A few days ago we lost Buck Owens, who along with being a great musician was a radio station owner (KNIX and KESZ in Phoenix and
KUZZ in Bakersfield). On Monday, longtime Chicago big-band jazz broadcaster
Mike Rapchak died at 85.
They don't make 'em like Rapchak anymore. He famously quit 50,000-watt powerhouse
WCFL (AM 1000; originally owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor, the station's slogan for many years was, "The Voice of Labor") on the air in 1965 when it switched to a rock format, only to return in 1978 for CFL's brief era as a "beautiful music" station.
In latter years, he was widely admired for his all-night show on
WGN (AM 720, Tribune Company-owned station with the dubious slogan, "The World's Greatest Newspaper"), which he hosted once a week, on Saturdays, until he was forced into retirement in 1995.
In 1978, when I was 10 and my preferred radio hosts ran more along the lines of
Larry Lujack and
John "Records" Landecker, I thought the initials "BM" should have stood for something other than "beautiful music," but by my college years, in the late 1980s, I knew better.
Many times, in the phase of my life when I could stay up till 9 o'clock in the morning drinking hard liquor and recover by 2 or 3 in the afternoon, Rapchak's tradition of spinning Sinatra's side of "One for My Baby" at 2:45 ("It's a quarter to three ... there's no one in the place, except you and me ...") signaled the beginning of the quieter after-hours portion of the weekend's revelry, when most of the time everyone else had gone home or gone to bed except for Mr. Foojang and myself, gazing contemplatively into our gin cocktails and rhapsodizing on what it meant to be happy, unaware that a few years later, Gen X hipsters were going to co-opt smooth jazz and torch song standards into a sneering, snarky, revisionist "swinger" subculture. (That was a time when we could refer to the "Rat Pack" without digressing into a windy apology of what we
didn't mean.)
Rapchak as a broadcaster was so professional, so rooted in the music he loved, that listening to his show was like receiving wisdom in a way that is now virtually extinct.
And his voice was
amazing.
Ken Nordine's is deeper, WBEZ Sunday afternoon jazz show host
Dick Buckley's smokier (and I was too young to remember stentorian legend
Franklyn MacCormack), but Rapchak's sonorous, honey-smooth style perfectly suited late nights, and the sad, easy, bittersweet songs of lost love I remember best from his show.
... So set ’em up, Joe
I got a little story
I think you oughta know
We’re drinking, my friend
To the end of a brief episode
So make it one for my baby
And one more for the road
