Last month I found Lee Baby Simms. Lee Baby ranks for me as the world’s greatest Top-40 DJ, and my opinion on that is shared by many radio insiders. He was astonishingly fast, funny, edgy, and creative within an art form where you had just seconds between the hits to establish a personality.
There were lots of great DJ’s, and many more famous than he was. Lee Baby worked for stations in 26 cities over 40 years, sacrificed job security for doing it his way, and could have used an agent. But the Baby made the others seem like they were trying too hard, screaming and sweating too much. When I was a student at Wesleyan University, running the campus station, he took over Hartford—or, as he called it Hard-up-for-it—radio against superb competition. (You can hear samples of his work on the Web site of Reelradio.) I invited him to the campus as a special guest. “Hello, Mr. Simms,” I tremblingly said to a handsome fellow just a few years older than myself. “Please,” he smiled, “you can call me Mr. Baby.”
Forty years later, I wrote him an e-mail, shyly, like a baseball fan addressing Babe Ruth. Amazingly, Lee Baby wrote back in a very generous and personal way. We are now in frequent and delightful contact as I actually begin to write a book on Top-40 radio. I cannot tell you how much an e-mail from Lee Baby lifts my budget-wearied spirits. But you are probably wondering why I am telling you all of this in the pages of what is not, after all, Billboard or Broadcasting, but The Chronicle of Higher Education.
It’s because I have been thinking a great deal lately about what led me to academe and how that might provide clues for engaging our students.
I began by thinking about teaching itself. Many faculty members at Drew University, where I am president, hope to establish a learning-and-teaching center, and teaching has always been central to our agenda here. That has brought to mind how much Lee Baby and radio in general had to do with my finding a teaching style.
Then too, my very interest in the heightened language of poetry began with the lickety-split rhyming of the early Top-40 DJ’s, their delight in making words rock and roll.
Finally, my renewed acquaintance with Mr. Simms—Mr. Baby—suggests to me that we would do well in higher education to think more rigorously about our relation to the popular interests of the young, way beyond clichés about Facebook and Twitter. Those of us who were not born into the intellectual life found it for ourselves, and often not in school. Think about your own path to the classroom, the library, or the lab, and extrapolate what we might propose as a first-year college experience from that—not from the dreary assertions of “what students need to know.” Start with love.
My own teaching started, instead, with emulation, and the reason I felt lost in the classroom had to do with trying to be someone I wasn’t. In fact, I was trying to be Jim Wheatley, my late, great teacher at Wesleyan (who then moved to Trinity). Jim was not a crowd favorite. But he completely converted a few of us each year to the study of literature. His classroom style was extremely meditative. Long moments would pass as he would think out loud, muse, raise a question, wait. I loved it. It was like watching Thought itself, unpretentious but earnest, mulling complex mysteries in an unselfconscious manner that was totally new to me.
And that is what I wanted to do for my students, help them experience the conversion that Jim Wheatley had unknowingly made possible for me. Maybe it was the “unknowingly” part that I got wrong, because he was just being who he was in a classroom, while I was trying to be him. In fact, one of the reasons I didn’t go into radio had to do with never finding my own voice—I was always a poor imitation of Lee Baby, or Russ (Weird Beard) Knight, or Jack (Your Leader) Armstrong, or Arnie (Woo Woo) Ginsburg. And now I was failing in the same way in the classroom, modeling the anxiety of influence just after Harold Bloom had written the book.
Until one day I realized why the Wheatleyan pauses in my classroom made me so miserable. They were dead air. The radio part of me was still somewhere in that postgraduate brain and it was shouting No! as I tried to allow for contemplative silence.
Soon a far happier classroom Me developed, more from my radio exposure, by far, than from any experience I’d had in undergraduate or graduate-school courses. My classroom persona came as a surprise even to me. He was emotionally open, garrulous to a fault, motor-mouthed, capable of engaging interest and dialogue (the early DJ’s, after all, were masters at taking phone calls), ready for humor, and available to high rhetoric. “I feel I really know you,” a student said to me after class one day. “It seems so formal to call you Dr. Weisbuch.” “Please,” I said to him, “call me Dr. Bob.”
Now that persona via Top-40 radio was not an unalloyed joy, for I had become exactly what I so distrusted as an undergraduate, a crowd pleaser. But I pledged never to pander to the reductive—the thoughts I was expressing could remain honestly rigorous even if the manner was informal. To tell the truth, the discovery of this version of me was so gratifying that it swept away some of my self-distrust. OK, I would never be Jim Wheatley. I might not singlehandedly convert a student to the study of literature. But I could be helpful to the many and true to a self that I had discovered in motion.
Who is our teaching self anyhow? It is never just our unalloyed everyday personality but must be, in part, a created thing. Is it simply a fiction against which we pose that far more mixed everyday self who takes out the garbage, suffers through family dramas, and usually lives as less of a cultural model than some admiring students might suspect? Is the classroom self, in other words, a counterfeit, a phony?
I once told a friend: I wish I could be more like that person I am in the classroom, instead of who I really am. But you are, he responded. Your classroom self is who you have chosen to be, and this anxious, shadowed guy is merely a result. Whether or not that was so, I have held onto his simple statement, and it has been key to that portion of my life that is happy.
What we teach—in my case literature—is deeply involved with who we become in a classroom. Why did people listen so enthusiastically to Lee Baby, a rebel in the radio line that begins with Fred Allen and extends to Howard Stern? There was the element of the unexpected—he would let the mood of the particular evening lead him—and the mad hopping around the ledges of language. But there was something else, and he explained it best in an e-mail a few weeks ago.
“I loved music,” he recalls. “But I could not sing, and I could not play. What I could do was tell,” and when a friend suggested a job on a radio station, it made immediate sense.
I had a desire to tell, too. Put that together with a playfulness with language, and it is no great distance from a love of radio patter to a love of words in poetry and fiction.
You may know the Lou Reed song, "(My Life was Saved by) Rock ‘n’ Roll.” It’s really more about rock-and-roll radio:
Jenny said when she was just five years old,
There was nothing going on at all...
One fine mornin’ she puts on a New York station
And she couldn’t believe what she heard at all
She started dancing to that fine, fine music
Her life was saved by rock and roll
Despite all the amputation
You could just dance to that rock and roll station
And it was alright, it was awright
Lou Reed, who, on occasion, mentioned the pioneering Buffalo disc jockey George (Hound Dog) Lorenz in his concerts, is telling not just Jenny’s story but his own and that of many others. My (academic) life was also saved by rock ‘n’ roll radio. What was it for you?
