EAGLES: Fly Me, I’m Vacuous

The sun has spread a fluorescent haze over the highway’s monoxide cloud-drifts. We’re three hours on the road and four hours from Manhattan, and my fingers are already calloused from punching the AM radio buttons, striking them with a fury usually reserved for lonely candy machines that gobble change at deserted subway stops. Whenever a good tune is found, the station is allotted its own punch-button, but as New London fades into New Haven, and as various top-forty stations fade in and fade out, it’s continually brought home that it’s all the same — a dozen tunes played until the grooves finally wear down our patience and leave us slamming the buttons from Elton to Paul to Olivia. Recognizability is the key, I realize, as I muse over the rationale for such boring radio: the limited attention-span audience wants to hear something they know and can hum along with. So give ’em anything, just so long as they don’t punch the button before the song fades into hypedup pimple commercials. And the capitalist in me accepts the rationale with all the demographics which make the radio audience look like so many stupid Big Macs, and I’m left in a puzzle as to who is to blame for this sad state of pop music. Is it those pig station owners or the people in the next car who accept this pabulumization of their culture?

An errant turn leaves us stuck and sweating in the sprawling flats of Queens, our throats parched for a beer and our ears hungry for a dish of Springsteen. Dan Ingram, WABC afternoon drive-time jock since I was a kid, is carrying on with 50,000-watt professionalism and the slickness of the next Elton John single, and I keep rapping the buttons. And then, snarling with a hard rock fervor equalled only by New York’s 90-degree swelter, the Eagles rise out of the dashboard: