Friday, April 27, 2012.
Jazz Festival Begins, But I'm Working On The Golf Course.
In the early years of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the organizers were pleased to have radio stations broadcast live from the Fair Grounds. For many years, I was out there, mic before me. Then, one year, we were informed that all the radio stations would henceforth be relegated to a ghetto on the periphery of the main action. I thought it had to be a mistake. Getting food vendors to talk on the air became difficult, because few of them had the time to walk clear across the grounds. Some couldn't find us.
After the second year of this, the radio station management decided to blow off the Fair Grounds broadcasts. We haven't done them since. The Jazz Festival people seem not to miss us. It was theorized by some that the reason for the change is that the Jazz Festival has its own radio station--WWOZ, whose broadcast booth was right in the middle of things. But it's a non-commercial station, and that seems fair enough anyway.
I think is the real reason for radio's departure is that there are too many radio stations. When I first became aware of radio (and enthralled enough by it to want to do it for a living) there were only ten radio stations in New Orleans. It's a measure of what a radio geek I was in my pre-teens (and still am) that I can cough out all them without thinking hard:
WWOM 600
WTIX 690
WWL 870
WYLD 940
WJMR 990
WNOE 1060
WBOK 1230
WDSU 1280
WSMB 1350
WNPS 1450
All were on AM. (There were a handful of FM stations, but nobody listened to them because nobody had an FM radio in the early 1960s.) Now you can hear at least forty radio stations in the New Orleans area. All of them would likely be at the Jazz Festival if it were easy. I can understand why the organizers came to the conclusion that the broadcasts might be more trouble than they're worth.
I wasn't at the Jazz Festival when it opened today. I will be next Friday, when the New Orleans Booksellers association invited me to come by their JazzFest tent to sign books.
Instead, I accepted an invitation Tommy Cvitanovich (he of Drago's). The long-running golf tournament formerly known as the New Orleans Open--now called the Zurich Classic--has grown popular enough that it has a major hospitality aspect. The Acme Oyster House has its own pavilion seating about a hundred people. Inside the adjacent tent, the Acme's staff shucks oysters, fries shrimp, dishes out red beans and gumbo, and distributes beer. People pay $75 for this privilege, which also gives good views of three holes. It sold out this year.
Even more alluring is the Champions Club, where a septet of first-class restaurants (Galatoire's, Drago's, Arnaud's, Mr. B's, Ruth's Chris Steak House, NOLA), plus Outback Steak House were serving up food. Yeah, that was a little dig at the Outback, but it's to keep me from losing my credibility when I say that the best dish at the Champion's Club was actually the Outback's terrific seared, pepper-crusted tuna. I downed two orders of it. That's saying something with the competition from Galatoire's shrimp remoulade and crabmeat maison, Drago's char-broiled oysters, Ruth's filet sandwiches, Mr. B's seared scallops. . .
Our radio engineers were all busy with this weekend's NFL Draft Fest, so if I wanted to do the show I had to use my own equipment. The noise level was pretty high during the first half of the show, reaching a pinnacle when Bubba Watson--who won this tournament last year, and the Masters a few weeks ago--took a shot right in front of the Champions Club. (It was a long fairway shot that landed in a sand trap.)
The strangest thing I witnessed was that whenever a golfer was about to take a stroke, some moderators of the crowd called out for quiet. It reminded me of my dad, who loved golf. We were all watching a tournament on television (this was long enough ago that it was black and white). We kids were making our usual din when one of the golfers was about to putt. "Shhh!" Daddy said. "You have to let him concentrate!" We thought he was joking, but he wasn't.
When the radio show ended, almost everything else had, too. Mary Ann joined me for the show, but we were in separate cars, so we saved each other the pain of grumbling during the twenty minutes we were stuck in traffic on the US 90 approach to the Huey P. Long Bridge.
