Voices From The Air

On Watching the WZZQ Movie

After forty-five years, I really thought I could watch MPB’s WZZQ movie without dredging up painful ancient memories. It didn’t turn out that way.

Everybody believes their childhood was either the worst time in history or a sweet spot where everything was perfect. Mine may have been split. The sixties were not a good time to live in Mississippi. Just in the few days around when I was born, one man was assassinated, not murdered, but a political assassination, and an attempted assassination was done on another man just for supporting the first one. The president and his brother were assassinated. The Russians put missiles loaded with nuclear weapons in Cuba, close enough to strike Jackson, Mississippi, and almost certainly the port of New Orleans.

The seventies, however, were the calm after the storm. Congress overturned the draft, and Nixon was hounded out of office. Our landing on the moon cowed the Russians, so much so that by 1987, an American president was emboldened enough to say, “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” This was the very same wall my father watched with microwave radar, lest the Russians start a third world war.

Jackson, Mississippi, was at the height of its economic and social power. We adopted the name “The Bold New City,” and with newfound wealth and two stable and well-funded banks, we began a program of reshaping our downtown, tearing down the old, and building up the new. The racial mix in Jackson was 60% white and 40% black, with vast new opportunities available to its black citizens, opportunities considered impossible ten years before. The only serious problem was that a forced integration of the public school caused panic among the white population, and everybody who could put the money together sent their child to a private school, leaving the public schools around 80% black and friendless when it came to raising money.

We had a movie theater with six screens, three malls (plus whatever you want to call Highland Village), and our very own progressive album rock station. Recently, Ann Ford decided to put together as much as she could of the original team and make a documentary on WZZQ and its impact on Mississippi. Everybody I know was anxious to see it.

Watching the movie brought back many sweet memories to me. WZZQ created my musical sense as it exists today. Except for the Hans Christian Anderson album I had as a child, every record I owned, I peddled my bicycle down to Maywood Mart and bought at BeeBop Records because they played it on WZZQ. They played “Tales of Mystery and Imagination,” so I bought it. I bought Steely Dan’s “Pretzel Logic” at BeeBop and Steely Dan’s “Aja” I bought on a class trip to Washington, DC, because WZZQ played it the night before we left. Chicago “Transit Authority,” “Chicago II,” and “Chicago IV” were all bought because of WZZQ. Cat Stevens, “Tea For the Tillerman,” and “Teaser and the Firecat” are all albums I listen to today, albeit in digital format, all because they played them on WZZQ when I was becoming a teenager.

At night, they played “King Biscuit Flower Hour”, “The Shadow,” “Monty Python,” and Cheech and Chong. They played the “Dave’s Not Here” bit so much that even today, I can repeat it verbatim. Everybody I knew had a WZZQ T-shirt and bumper sticker. I don’t think you could even buy them. Everybody just called in to win them or mobbed the “magic bus” at the State Fair to get one.

There’s no question that for my hometown, WZZQ represented an unassailable good and a genuinely kind memory for my entire community. For me, though, memories of WZZQ bring back some pretty painful memories along with the good.

I became aware of WZZQ about the same time that I became aware of my oldest brother’s dramatic change of lifestyle and personality that stemmed from his drug use. On the one hand, I really enjoyed learning the new music the station he listened to played; on the other hand, he was becoming a different person and the person he used to be started slipping away.

WZZQ brought with it counterculture. I’m a proponent of counterculture generally, especially among young people, even today. Counterculture helps us shed the sins of the past so that we can make all new sins. Counterculture permits young people to have different ideas from what their parents had.

We don’t entirely understand the effects of drugs on the adolescent mind. I can’t prove that there’s a connection between the drugs my brother was taking and the intense schizophrenia that developed a few years later, but there’s a growing body of scientific evidence linking the two together.

In particular, scientists link the use of cannabis, cocaine, LSD, and amphetamines in adolescence with the early and intense onset of Schizophrenia. In the 1970’s at Jackson Prep, these drugs were freely available. One of my brother’s closest friends nearly died when he tried to eat the wrong red mushroom. He was sixteen.

I can’t be hypocritical here; I used all of those drugs myself. I didn’t care for Coke and amphetamines, but the others I used maybe once a month, sometimes more. My brother and I both had ADHD and Dyslexia. Who knows what would have happened if I moved my drug use to an everyday habit like he did? I can’t link my chronic depression with my use of cannabis and LSD in high school, but my psychologist and psychiatrist both asked about it, particularly how much I used.

Clearly, it didn’t happen to everybody. I know plenty of people who got high three times a day and are still waiting to turn schizophrenic. I suspect some brain conditions are more likely to make the connection. Your frontal lobes control your social functions, and they also control ADHD and reading problems. The frontal lobes are also being looked at as the seat of autism. Your frontal lobes are where the effect of hallucinogenic drugs do their work at changing your perception from what your senses tell you.

That makes sense to me. Drug use is a very social thing. I very rarely used drugs alone. I very rarely drink alone. The only drug I ever used when I was alone was tobacco. My brother went from two or three friends smoking pot in his room to one friend smoking pot in his room to him smoking pot by himself nearly all day.

In our house, there was enough room to get away with this. My father was gone all the time, and when he was home, he mentally tuned out any noises coming from upstairs. With three boys, I think you have to. Daddy was against the prohibition of any drugs. He grew up with prohibition against alcohol in Mississippi, and you see how that worked out.

His point, one that I adopted as an adult, was that everybody you know tries to do everything they can to stop their children from using drugs, and none of them are successful. A child makes their own decisions about drugs. You can have one sibling using all the drugs they can find and another sibling who refuses to try any of them. If you can’t stop your child from buying drugs, wouldn’t you rather they buy them from a licensed producer and distributor rather than buy drugs from the back of somebody’s car?

Chief of Police Jim Black believed Wayne Harrison, owner of BeeBop Record Shop and DJ at WZZQ, was the source of the drug problem in Jackson, including the LSD my brother and his friends were buying. He could never make a case against Harrison, but he kept a close watch on the record shop and the radio station. He and others in the community would approach Daddy and other management types at Lamar Life to rein in their rogue radio station or get rid of it. Daddy was against the idea of a bunch of ministers clutching their pearls and telling him what to do. So was Bob Hearin and others involved with Lamar Life and First National.

When you think about how Wayne died, Daddy’s point about prohibition becomes pretty clear. The woman with Harrison wasn’t killed, but she could have been, and none of it would have happened if there was a legal way for Wayne to buy drugs that night. The prohibition against drugs didn’t reduce the number of drugs consumed any more than the millions of gallons of beer consumed in the forties at Crystal Lake just east of Commerce Street was slowed down by the fact that it was all illegal. I’ve always been of the opinion that if you legalized drugs, some people wouldn’t want to do them anymore.

Daddy was on the board of Lamar Life, like his father and uncle before him. Lamar Life began as an offshoot of First National Bank until the feds decided to make new regulations that prohibited banks from owning Life Insurance Companies. The Board at Lamar Life remained almost the same as the bank board, even after the change. They used to say Capitol Street was the only thing that separated Lamar Life from First National Bank—between the troubles with the WLBT license and all this counterculture stuff and drugs involving WZZQ, Lamar Life eventually started feeling that they should divest themselves of this division as soon as possible, which they did. I honestly believe what happened with WLBT had more to do with it than anything else since the TV license made so much more money than the radio license.

My brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia during his first year in college. We all noticed a marked change in him before that. He started refusing to socialize with the family, his hygiene went bad, and he began talking to himself. What followed was a painful series of hospitalizations, arrests, incarcerations, and more hospitalizations, all ending with him moving back home. Home where I was. This went on until the day he died thirty-five years later.

Before schizophrenia took over, I loved living one door over from my brother. Once his life became consumed by his illness, living one door over was sometimes terrifying. Not all schizophrenics hear voices. He did, though. He heard them quite often. Sometimes, they would tell him pleasant things; sometimes, they would tell him horrible things. Sometimes, they made him very afraid. Sometimes, they made him very angry. Sometimes, they said nothing at all, and he tried to live his life, wondering when it will all start again.

Listening to the radio and listening to the voices in your head seem like a similar experience. They’re both voices in the air—voices in the air without bodies. They both represent communication but without a second body present. They both simulate social interaction. It’s a simulation though; you’re not interacting with another person, just your own mind. Whatever happens in your frontal lobes that make listening to the radio work, it also makes imaginary voices work. Your brain makes it seem like there’s a person there when there isn’t.

My parents put in a second phone line when I was maybe eleven. My grandmother used it during the day, and my brothers and I used it at night. While I mostly used it for girls, my brother used it to communicate with the DJs at WZZQ. Perez, I know, talked with him quite a lot. He seemed clued in on what was happening with my brother and was kind to him.

Sometimes, I could hear my brother shouting at the DJs. Some conflict between what the voices in his head were telling him and what the DJs were doing made him agitated. One night, Daddy got a call from the Station Manager about my brother's argument with one of the DJs. I don’t know that he connected Lamar Life owning the station and Daddy being on the board before the call, but he did afterward.

I’d always listened to WZZQ on my brother’s stereo through the wall separating our bedrooms. As his illness progressed, it became distressing to hear him ranting at night. For Christmas, I received a Weltron 2001 AM/FM 8-track player. I plastered a WZZQ sticker on the back. It had a headphone jack, so I bought a nice set of stereo headphones from Radio Shack and began wearing that at night, listening to the same station as my brother but not punctuated by the sounds of his illness. I built an imaginary wall between me and what was happening in my house and mourning the loss of my brother as he was before, in my own way.

I never really realized how much I was associating this radio station that I loved with my brother’s illness. How much I’d harbored that association in my mind for forty years.

Sitting on the bleachers with my friends at St. Andrews High School, someone said, “Did you hear what happened to ZZQ?” It went off the air in the middle of the night, and when it began broadcasting again in the morning, it was a country station.

While my friends were rending their cloaks and pulling their hair about what they would listen to now, I said, “Good. I’m not gonna miss it.”

Everyone looked at me like I was an alien. I didn’t care. Someone asked if I wanted to go to the rally at Riverside Park to bring back WZZQ. I said I had to work out.

The end of WZZQ didn’t end my brother’s struggles or pain. That carried on for another forty years. In my mind, I conflated the radio station I loved with the loss of someone I loved. What happened to my brother was the first really serious loss I ever had. I struggled to find ways to place and alleviate how it made me feel. You can’t blame a radio station, the counter-culture, or anything like that for what happened to my brother, but in my mind, they were linked. Watching the movie, I realized they’re still linked.

Watching Ann Ford’s movie was blissfully bittersweet. There were so many wonderful memories and so many faces of people I loved, but the ghosts of my past came with them.

I write about my struggles and the struggles in my family because I know other people are dealing with the same thing. There’s a video where, on the campaign trail, Joe Biden meets a woman with her young son. He sticks out his hand for a big handshake from the young man, and the mother says, “He may not speak. He stutters.” That’s when the president of the United States dropped down on one knee to tell this little boy about his own struggles with stuttering and promised him that, with time, it would get better. He knows it gets better because he went through it. A lot of people don’t care for the job Biden is doing as president. I’m not interested in trying to change anybody’s mind about that. What he did with that little boy, though, is important. Tens of thousands of little boys who stutter will see that video and have hope.

That’s what I’m trying to do. I’ve been through all these things, but I’m still here. Life may seem like it never gets better, but then it does. Life brings pain, but it also brings healing, and even the most painful memories can become sweet. That’s how I felt watching the ZZQ movie.