Everyday Magic: Mexican Radio Station XERA
Music on the border (between reality and science-fiction)
Another short read this week. Tune in next Friday for the ludicrous saga of the man who founded the radio station in question, J.R. Brinkley of XERA. (I’ll be broadcasting not far from the Brinkley Mansion in Del Rio, Texas, for Thanksgiving next week.) For now, the following meditation on ‘magic,’ tech and music, adapted from an aborted book intro, serves as a partial introduction to the medical quack who steered the course of American popular music in the first half of the twentieth-century—by implanting goat testicles in humans.
Seriously.
Fans of Martin Scorsese, friends of The Band, and Robbie Robertson—don’t miss Thanksgiving’s weekly recommendation:
Steven Hyden’s “‘The Last Waltz’ Is The Best Thanksgiving Movie Ever Made.”
And now, some practical magic…
The Magic Fence
Science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke famously claimed that, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
That is true enough of rock and roll, which repurposed military communications technology into art. Magnetic tape, such as you would find in an eight-track recorder or cassette deck, was confiscated by American G.I.s behind Nazi lines, where it was invented. The vocoder, another World War II relic, (the robotic vocal effect behind the Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic”), was used to disguise transatlantic conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt. The emotional immediacy transmitted through German engineer Georg Neumann’s condenser microphones, was employed by vocalists with motivations as disparate as Der Führer and Der Beatles.
Like a hippie in a Volkswagen bus, rock and roll took vehicles of war and turned them into talismans of peace and social reform. So the legend goes.
(If this sort of thing interests you, consider reading this guy.)
The 500,000-watt signal of clear-channel border station XERA, broadcasting country music from coast to coast, and from Mexico to Canada for the first time, was so powerful it could be conducted through a chainlink fence, which served as a de facto combination radio-antenna and speaker-diaphragm. Receiving the signal like an antenna, the steel chainlink then vibrated such that country music could be heard, emanating from the fence itself, in the front yards of Del Rio, Texas—just across the border from XERA. Music in the air, seemingly out of nowhere, and not a speaker cabinet in sight. The sounds of gospel, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family haunting the lawn. A concert on the concertina wire, that’s one kind of mid-century magic.
Local ranchers claimed XERA’s signal was powerful enough to turn on car headlights, make bedsprings hum, bleed into telephone conversations, and be picked up on dental appliances.
But the power to imagine something, make an artistic representation of it, communicate it, and watch society realize it, is what I’m really driving at with ‘magic.’ It made Arthur C. Clarke “the prophet of the Space Age”— audiences watched 2001: A Space Odyssey a year before they watched the moon landing on TV (they also watched HAL go haywire, four decades before humans began to grapple with the dangers of A.I. in the new millennium).
The power of suggestion, sympathy, and imitation is what anthropologists mean by ‘magic’—symbolic wishful thinking, or imagination. Sometimes, thought becomes reality.
Before the Jim Crow color line was crossed in the courts, it was crossed quite literally on the dance floor. It came down with the velvet cordon separating “black and tan” swingers at Kansas City’s Sunset club in the 1930s. It was crossed invisibly over the airwaves of Memphis radio station WDIA in the 1950s. And it was crossed, for better or worse, by American blackface minstrels in the nineteenth century, imitating an Afro-American trickster named “Jim Crow.” It was a long time coming, and it’s been a long time going. But at many points along the way, for millions of people, the sound of crossing-over that racial border was nothing short of spellbinding.
As far as human culture goes, music has always been a spiritual exercise, in one form or another. And it’s always been a form of communication, “the universal language of mankind,” as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it. At times, it’s nothing less than spiritual and emotional telepathy.
"Conducting is the only evidence I've ever had that telepathy does exist. And I think the best conductors are really telepathic."
—Jack Brymer, Royal Philharmonic clarinetist
At others it can be quite annoying, even torturous, or drive people insane. There’s always been an erotic element to music as well. Whether or not that eroticism is sexual, music has an attractive quality akin to birdsong; it brings bodies together. That “border blaster” radio station in Mexico that played through a chainlink fence in Texas? Sara Carter located her long-lost lover and future husband out on the West Coast, and married him a few weeks later, after he heard her sing a song for him on XERA in Mexico. Pulse rates and brainwaves adjust to a shared frequency when exposed to the same beat—physiologically, not metaphorically. Even martial music is intended to unite one faction or another together, in lockstep. It’s invisible, but you can touch it—or rather, it can touch you. Even if you’re deaf, you can feel it. At the right frequency it can cure disease, or put out fires. It can make an infant sleep, a crystal shatter, or even, as Nikola Tesla knew, topple a skyscraper. It is rumored to soften rocks, bend the knotted oak, and sooth the savage beast (or breast). Conducting it, which Leonard Bernstein described as “communication,” requires a special wand.
What else do you call that?