Some kinds of monsters

Last night was Dungeons & Dragons night, and the gaming session was satisfying if unspectacular. That’s not a knock on my players or on myself, it’s just that sometimes role-playing games are like that: you set up a story with certain elements and you want to resolve all of them logically, and you hope those resolutions always come with a certain amount of flair but once in a while you’ll have to go through a less-than-thrilling Point B to get to much-more-thrilling Point C, because going from Point A to Point C would defy suspension of disbelief and suck out most of the thrills’ fun. Or at least that’s a true enough formulation for the linear-thinking continuity-obsessive geek types of which I am the Alpha dog. (Need a nerdier pack mammal for that analogy. Alpha gnoll, I guess.)

I took a long hiatus from role-playing starting around the time my son was born – obviously everything other than infant-rearing was on hold during the maternity/paternity leave phase, but when my wife went back to work my new schedule involved picking up the boy from daycare certain days, including Wednesdays, the weekday when my wife works the latest and sometimes doesn’t get home until close to 10 p.m. Wednesday night had traditionally been our group gaming night, and of course the group kept it going in my absence (and rightly so), but a few months ago I suggested throwing in the occasional weekend afternoon as a better schedule fit for me. And that was all well and good for a while but a lot of people had frequent weekend conflicts, so now there’s a new plan. The whole group (except me) still gets together more or less every Wednesday. Occasionally, the Wednesday session shifts to Thursday for those who can make it (including me, as it’s always one of my wife’s days off). And also occasionally, there will be a weekend game for those who can make that – and those are hosted by me, as opposed to Wednesdays and Thursdays which are hosted by my buddy.

The reason I bring all of that up is because it had really been forever and a day since I had driven home from my buddy’s house around 11 p.m. on a weeknight, but as I did so last night after the game I was delighted to encounter something that had not changed in the intervening eternity: 97.9 FM (98 Rock) still plays MANDATORY METALLICA in that timeslot.


I try so hard not to fall into the traps of growing older that involve resenting progress and harboring delusions that everything was better when I was a kid, but man, if I think too much about how FM radio has changed since I was 13 it brings me down a bit. I was a huge radio-listener back in the day, and so was my dad, which meant I heard a lot of top 40 (Z-100!) in my room and a lot of classic rock (WNEW) in the living room, the family car and the garage. I liked the randomness of my radio station; in hindsight of course I know they had a very tightly-controlled playlist but at the time I enjoyed feeling like I didn’t know what song was going to come next from their vast library that dwarfed anything I could ever amass. But over time I started to gravitate towards Dad’s classic rock because the DJ’s were more knowledgeable and concerned with saying something germane than in love with the sound of their own wacky catchphrases. And they had weekly shows like “Ticket to Ride” which did a different facet of the Beatles’ career every Sunday morning, or “Deep Cuts” late at night, playing songs that I really, truly had never heard before (and might never hear again) because they were album tracks never released as singles.

I didn’t listen to much radio in college, and when I did it was campus radio primarily because one of my friends was DJ’ing. But that was the early 90’s era of the mix tape and the multi-disc CD player with shuffle feature, and I was listening to whatever everybody else was listening to which covered a lot of musical ground. Immediately after college, when I relocated from the New York markets to the D.C. markets, I discovered the local alt-rock station WHFS and I loved it. My tastes had parted ways with the top 40 and I had heard all the classic rock I felt I needed to hear and HFS was exactly what I was looking for (even though it turns out by the time I got to Virginia HFS had already sold out and switched formats from truly underground music to MTV-friendly mainstream-alt) and that was true for almost a decade, but in 2005 the station flipped to – I swear – tropical Latin music. Hey, if that’s what pays the bills, fair play to you, but I was pretty crushed. In the mean time the rest of the FM rock stations around here have gone pretty safe with ultra-repetitive classic rock or “today’s hits” where the implied value of “today” is 1995-ish. And they’re probably all slowly hemorrhaging money and going extinct as satellite radio and iPods squeeze them out.

Yet somehow 98 Rock, with their commitment to the midnight-black hard rock/heavy metal band of musical spectrography, is still broadcasting and playing three or four Metallica songs – including, oh yes, some very deep Metallica cuts – every weeknight from 11 to 11:20 p.m. or so. It made me happy to ear-witness that last night. I won’t tune in every night, in fact I won’t be consciously aware of it except for those rare Thursday night drives home, but I’m happy now just knowing that it’s out there. Rock, rock on.