Keep reaching for the stars, #@*% it

BY WAYNE WOOD

Casey Kasem isn't counting down the top 40 any more. The distinctive voice that told listeners on the first American Top 40 in 1970 that Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me (Not to Come)" was the number one song in the land signed off last month by informing listeners that that week's number one was "Hey Ya!" by Outkast.

There were a lot of number ones in between.

When Casey began counting down the top 40, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix were alive, the Beatles still had a new album on the charts, and the members of Outkast hadn't even been born yet.

Even if you, unlike Andre 3000 and Big Boi, were around then, it's hard to remember how hard it was to get information about songs and performers in 1970. There was no Internet, of course, and no cable TV channels devoted to music, for the very good reason that there was no cable TV. We had the music show Hullabaloo for a couple of years in the mid-'60s, American Bandstand on Saturdays, and from time to time a good singer or band would show up on a network variety show, but not very often.

Rolling Stone existed, but was hard to find unless you went to record stores or head shops. (Really, there were retail establishments called head shops--kids, ask your mom or dad about them). There was very little coverage of music in the mainstream press.

And here came Casey and American Top 40. For three hours on Sunday nights (I heard him on Great Radio Station WNOX, 990 AM, in Knoxville) he would count down the hits and not stop until he reached number one. And along the way he would drop in anecdotes about the artists and about the history of music. (Did you know that the only act ever to have a record debut at number one and then never chart again was the Hollywood Argyles with their song "Alley Oop?")

Casey had other jobs. He would do commercial voice overs, and he will live in perpetuity as the voice of Shaggy in the Scooby Doo cartoons. When he wasn't doing Shaggy, he may have had the most perfect voice in the history of radio. It was smooth, rich, mellow and friendly. It was like having a preternaturally smooth-voiced neighbor who happened to know a lot about music visiting every week and filling you in on what was going on.

It was that friendly tone to his voice that makes the single most famous incident in Casey's career really stand out. This incident was never broadcast, but, unfortunately for Casey, it was never erased either, and was first passed hand-to-hand among radio people, and then put on the Internet.

It's from a taping of American Top 40, and Casey is about to do a "long distance dedication," his version of that radio staple where somebody requests a song and dedicates it to somebody else. As the tape picks up, Casey is coming out of a peppy record and is about to read a letter from a listener in Cincinnati who wants to dedicate a song to his recently deceased dog, Snuggles. Casey tries to downshift the tone of the show from the fast record to the sad tale of Snuggles, but it just isn't working.

And Casey loses it. He pitches a fit. He is angry, profane and possibly deranged. I tell you, it's great.

"I want a [common profane phrase] concerted effort to come out of a record that isn't a [bad adjective] uptempo record every time I do a [same profane phrase again] DEATH dedication" Casey rants. "I want somebody to use his [same bad adjective] brain and not come out of a [there's that profane phrase again] record that's uptempo and I've got to talk about a [same bad adjective again] dog dying."

It goes on for a lot longer than this. The longer he talks, the madder he gets, and the funnier it is.

(You know, I'll bet that if you go to Google and type in "Casey Kasem tantrum" and nose around a little, you can probably find this. I am certainly NOT suggesting that you do this at work).

I think this clip is so funny because normally Casey's voice sounds so controlled, and there is such a huge contrast between what we normally hear that voice saying and his dead canine-themed explosion on this tape.

But, as he retires from American Top 40 at the age of 71 (he'll still do a couple of other, shorter countdown shows in other formats), I want to remember Casey not as a guy who one time lost his temper in front of a hot microphone. I want to remember that every week, after playing whatever record was number one "from the sandy beaches of Hawaii to the rocky shores of Maine," whether that record was pop, rock, folk, disco, or rap, Casey would do his classic signoff line of more than three decades: "Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars."

Corny as can be. And magnificent.