MICHAEL RADOW

Mary Woods’s remarks for Mike’s celebration, June 25, 2023, NYSEC

 

Mike always loved this quotation by Mark Twain and cited it often to me: “History

doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” And the stories and memories of Mike you all have shared today don’t repeat but they often rhyme.

 

Before I turn to Mike’s images and music, I want to share a recent Mike story with

you. After covid Mike always went to shop at his Gristede’s market late at night.

But it was more than his grocery store, it was his clubhouse. Mike often shared tips and advice with fellow shoppers as I could hear when he called me from

Gristede’s. And the store had great and free wi-fi. Mike knew all the staff and they

knew him. And he was the guidance counselor and life coach of the young cashiers there, encouraging them to go back to school and bringing them books, magazines, cd’s, and newspaper cutting in his seemingly inexhaustible supply of yellow Gristede plastic bags, those filled bags of treasure that he also gave to so many of us too. One night the manager came over the public address system and said: “Mike can you please bring your items to the front of the store and check out. We need to close the store and go home.”

 

Sound and music, voice and words were always at the core of who Mike was,

what he was about,and what he always will be for me. Mike was a legendary

raconteur who taught, enthralled, delighted, and intrigued with real and imagined stories. His stories created worlds and his worlds created stories. Before Mike and I met in person, we began our story over many long phone calls. Through his voice I fell in love with Mike: his mind; wit; passions; generosity; curiosity; charm; and playfulness. His voice and laughter, which I still expect to hear whenever I answer my phone, transcended separations of time and distance between us. Mike will always be for me the many soundscapes he created and inhabited.

 

From an early age Mike was a musician (a saxophonist) and avid ham radio

operator. He was also a great whistler, a talent he later contributed to films where

he worked as a union recording engineer and cinematographer. But he first

captured words and music as an engineer and on-air host at WKCR, Columbia

University’s radio station. #2 Then he worked at A & R Recording, the fabled

midtown studio where Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Paul

McCartney and, most importantly, Bob Dylan. Jim and Andy’s Bar (Jim was the

owner and Andy was his cat) was the A & R clubhouse. Mike was an omnivorous radiohead, listening to jazz (from big band to bebop to cool), Afro pop, Indian ragas, Doo Wop, folk, gospel, bluegrass, and the great American song book. His passion for electronic music came from having worked at the pathbreaking Columbia- Princeton Electronic Music Center. He loved talk radio too listening to Brian Lehrer and even Rush Limbaugh, the latter Mike said got him going in the mornings by raising his blood pressure. He tuned in almost every day to WNYC, WBAI, and WFUV. As “Mike from Manhattan,” he was a frequent caller, phoning WNYC, WBAI, and WKCR in his last days. We often argued over the radio: I said “turn it off I have to concentrate,” and Mike replied “turn it up I have to concentrate.” Aptly Mike bought me my first and last boombox. What I didn’t know until recently was, he sister Laurie told me, that Mike was a Bob Dylan fan.

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For this new Mike I just discovered here are Dylan songs and poetry intersecting,

I think, with Mike’s life stories. Mike said he was one of the students who

occupied the president’s office during the Columbia protests in spring 1968. But

is this also Mike broadcasting live across from the occupied Low Library in one of

WKCR’s pop-up 24- hour news bureaus. When Mike sent me D. A. Pennebaker’s

trailer from the Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, I thought it was because he

admired Pennebaker for whom Mike had worked. Now I see Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” heard on the trailer as the soundtrack for the

Columbia protests and Mike’s social and political engagement. Mike hated

romantic mush so I hope this is one love song he could tolerate “If Not For You”

with Dylan’s rasp, simple lyrics and rhymes, and grating, to me, harmonica

undercutting any sentimentality. Finally “My Back Pages” with Dylan and friends at the 30 th Anniversary concert in Madison Square where Laurie says Mike might have been in the audience.

 

Mike on Essex Street That version of “My Back Pages,” looks back not in

sorrow or anger but with joy and exuberance in each other as we do today in this

celebration and remembrance of Mike.