It didn't take a genius to grasp from J.T. Wright's radio shifts that he felt right at home mulling about on the airwaves (see Watch me unravel I'll soon be naked). Wright, the unholy air name for Nat Bernstein, always gravitated to the rock shifts. His outside schedule initially precluded him from the choice weekday rock shift he salivated over; thus he settled in for the long, weekend drive of the Road Trip (see And I'm dying at 90), which allowed him to chatter to an even smaller audience than we had on weekdays. Substituting in other formats wasn't really worth his time, as he felt he was strongest surrounded by "his" music. Whatever.
To be fair, he did know his music, though it was often to the level that suggests you might want to come up from air now and then. Nat was...scratch that. J.T. Wright was all about show-prep (see Boy, you can't play me that way), seeking out news and gossip about the bands or topics remotely associated with the songs. Granted, this was the sort of thing that student management advocated – the ability to ad-lib – and Nat met the prerequisites. But that's all he talked about outside the studio; it was as if he life was run by Hollywood and whatever other entertainment news there was.
Without a doubt, his familiarity and comfort level in the studio led to some strange sounding DJ shifts, mainly for the one-off shout-outs to...well...things. Let me explain that one: I vividly remembering listening to one of his shifts. I was seated with a few other people in the main office. Nat was backselling and going on about the "twenty minutes of today's music" (or some other silly slogan) that our station was preparing to play. Shortly before he ended his spiel he suddenly blurted out the words "Care Bears" in mid-sentence. What did Care Bears have to do with anything? Well, nothing, he explained later, "Care Bears" was just today's word. Eventually we learned the truth: Nat's friends would call him up when he was on and give him some word or phrase to work into his shift - which was, on that day, "Care Bears." Other call-backs to the previous decade included “scratch and sniff stickers,” “He-Man,” “Charlie Brown,” and “Rubik’s Cube.”
The group Dishwalla brought up Charlie Brown, too. Their song, Charlie Brown’s Parents, likens trying to understand part of a relationship to trying to understand how the adults spoke in the animated Peanuts specials, usually in the form of a trombone (like the beloved Miss Othmar). The song got some airtime on our station but it didn’t seem to garner much attention like Dishwalla’s song about blue cars. The trombone, while not pertinent to this part of the story, did figure into the next chapter of J.T. Wright’s adventures.
Funny how that happens....
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Charlie Brown's Parents
(Scott Alexander/Rodney Browning/Kolanek/George Pendergast/J.R. Richards)
Dishwalls
From the album Pet Your Friends
1995
I can't hear
What you're saying
What you're doing to me
Can't you see
It would take the jaws of
Life to pry open your words...
So pry open your words
I don't want to talk about Elvis
No I don't want
To go on pretending
Because it feels like I'm talking to
Talking to Charlie Brown's Parents
It feels like I'm talking to
A lonely man without a vision
Stuffed his mouth with indecision
Why he's a lonely man without a vision
Stuffed his mouth with indecision
Ooh
Cause I can't hear
What you're saying
What you're doing to me
Can't you see
It would take the jaws of
Life to pry open your words
I don't want to talk about Jesus
And I don't want to go on converting, no
Because it feels like I'm talking to
Talking to Charlie Brown's Parents
It feels like I'm talking to
A lonely man without a vision
Stuffed his mouth with indecision
Why he's a lonely man without a vision
Stuffed his mouth with indecision
Ooh
Why he's a lonely man without a vision
Stuffed his mouth with indecision (2x)
Cause I can't hear
What you're saying
What you're doing to me
Can't you see
It would take the jaws of
Life to pry open your words (repeat)
