Keener 13

Hollywood has always thrived on spectacle. Its streets and hills are littered with architecture that wears its fantasies on its sleeve, Egyptian temples, Chinese pagodas, Spanish haciendas, all vying for attention beneath the unblinking California sun. Yet, among this feverish jumble of styles, one of the city’s most enduring landmarks is a model of restraint: a modest concrete-and-glass cylinder capped by a slender, needle-like spire.

For nearly seventy years, the Capitol Records Building at 1750 Vine Street has been as integral to Hollywood’s identity as the brass stars embedded in the sidewalk below. With the passing of its architect, Louis Naidorf, at ninety-six, we are reminded that even in a city built on grand illusions, some of its most lasting icons began as the work of an untested hand.

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Naidorf was just twenty-four when the project came to him, a junior designer at Welton Becket Associates, still green enough to accept an assignment without recognizing the weight of it. Legend has it that he envisioned the world’s first circular office building as a playful homage to a stack of 45 rpm records, with the spire doubling as a turntable spindle. In the retelling, it’s a piece of narrative serendipity worthy of the movies.

But Naidorf himself was quick to deflate the myth. His design, he insisted, was born of calculation, not whimsy: a round building reduced the cost of exterior walls and air-conditioning, while a central core neatly housed elevators, stairwells, and plumbing. At the outset, he didn’t even know his client was a record company. Capitol’s president, Glenn Wallichs, recoiled at the shape, fearing it was too gimmicky. Ironically, it was the lender who recognized the marketable novelty.

By the time the building opened in 1956, the “record stack” had become a happy accident, a beacon of mid-century optimism rendered in the streamlined exuberance of design. Its circular floors, shaded by cantilevered concrete sunshades, seemed to hum with perpetual motion, an office tower that looked ready to spin. And from the first day, the red light atop its spire pulsed “Hollywood” in Morse code, a subtle, continuous broadcast from the heart of the dream machine.

Inside, the building doubled as an instrument. Funded in large part by the success of Nat King Cole, hence the moniker “The House That Nat Built”, it housed subterranean echo chambers designed by Les Paul himself, capable of producing a five-second reverberation that bathed recordings by Frank Sinatra, the Beach Boys, and countless others in a cathedral-like glow. The Capitol Records Building was not merely the site of music-making; it was part of the music.

For Naidorf, the project was both triumph and trap. To create something so instantly iconic so early in one’s career is to be permanently tethered to it, every later work measured against that first, perfect statement. But architecture is a long conversation with time. Buildings outlast their makers; they accrue new meanings with each generation that encounters them. Naidorf’s opening remark to the future was a circle, a form both efficient and poetic, that became an accidental emblem for an industry and a city. Now, the architect’s needle has lifted, but his record plays on, spinning still in the Hollywood sun.

This week in 1965, amid the burgeoning folk revival and the first tentative stirrings of folk-rock, a band named The We Five emerged from San Francisco to claim a sudden and fleeting place in the pop landscape. Their single, “You Were On My Mind,” hit number one on the WKNR Music Guide. It would become both a defining anthem and an enduring enigma: a one-hit wonder whose resonance outlasted its creators’ brief moment in the spotlight.

The song itself was not originally theirs. It was written four years earlier by Sylvia Fricker, half of the Canadian duo Ian & Sylvia, in a modest hotel room in Greenwich Village, where the bathroom , ironically the only roach-free refuge , served as the incubator for what would become a quietly anguished meditation on memory and loss. Fricker’s lyrics, simple, spare, and suffused with a plaintive longing, caught the aching aftertaste of a heart half-broken, half-hopeful. Yet it was We Five’s interpretation that transformed the song into something altogether new: brighter, sharper, tinged with an electric edge that heralded a change in the musical winds. Continue reading “You Were On My Mind” →

For those of us who grew up addicted to broadcast radio, with its open mics and closed-door politics, “WKRP in Cincinnati” offered both affection and satire. And in that sound booth of a sitcom, no one held the frequency quite like Loni Anderson, who left us this weekend at age 79. As Jennifer Marlowe, the station’s receptionist, gatekeeper, and quiet oracle, Loni brought an impeccable poise to the role, turning what might have been just another dumb blonde into a strategic triumph, a lesson in misdirection, elegance, and the sly power of feminine competence.

Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1945, Loni Kaye Anderson’s rise was not meteoric but calculated, the result of careful self-shaping, and a determination to redefine the narrow lens through which American audiences viewed beauty. When “WKRP” debuted in 1978, it was Anderson’s turn not only to perform but to reimagine what it meant to be a woman in the workplace—on screen, yes, but also behind the scenes.

Jennifer Marlowe was a triumph of composure amid absurdity. In a workplace full of buffoons and blowhards, Anderson’s character was a fixed star—cool, efficient, unflappable. She didn’t chase the spotlight; it adjusted itself around her. She may have been written as set dressing, but she directed the room, calibrated the tone, and ran the station with the arch of an eyebrow. Her performance was a study in balance, glamour with wit, strength in stillness. It was a new archetype for a new age: the receptionist as CEO-in-waiting.

Her impact went beyond the laugh track. In 1980, Anderson renegotiated her salary, publicly and unapologetically, a quiet but seismic assertion of professional value. In an industry where women were often ornamental, she refused to be background.

Her off-screen life, of course, played out in full view of the tabloids, particularly her high-profile marriage to Burt Reynolds. Their romance was box-office gossip, punctuated by “Stroker Ace,” a cinematic misfire that could have tanked lesser stars. But Anderson emerged, as ever, with a sense of timing—comic and otherwise. When the marriage ended in 1994, she handled the divorce with a kind of practiced grace, turning personal upheaval into another moment of public poise.

Later in life, Anderson shifted focus. She embraced family and advocacy, trading scripts for causes. But her legacy was already inked into the cultural DNA. Jennifer Marlowe, with her icy-cool detachment and quiet command, had helped rewrite the sitcom woman, less sidekick, more anchor.

Loni Anderson made it look easy, which of course meant it wasn’t. She moved through the business with a rare blend of self-awareness and sparkle, a performer who understood the machinery of the image and knew how to quietly steer it. Her blonde hair became a Trojan horse for the kind of wisdom that doesn’t announce itself, but leaves a mark.

In an industry still prone to confusing sparkle for substance, Loni Anderson was a reminder that the two could, in the right hands, be the same thing. Her presence never needed to shout. It simply adjusted the orbit of the room.

By the time we heard of Ozzy Osbourne’s passing at seventy-six, it felt less like the end of a life than the closing of a parable we’d been reading out loud for decades, unsure whether it was tragedy, farce, or miracle. His death on July 22nd was met with the kind of double take that only Ozzy could provoke: not he’s gone, but he wasn’t already? For most of his public existence, Osbourne seemed to teeter in a permanent twilight between collapse and comeback, a man whose biography was written in tabloid headlines and guitar feedback. That he lived as long as he did felt less like good fortune than a cosmic clerical error.

Osbourne’s improbable journey began in the soot-colored cradle of Aston, a working-class district in postwar Birmingham where the air smelled of iron and prospects were measured in shifts. From this gray terrain, he and his bandmates, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward, conjured a sound that mirrored the environment: Black Sabbath’s music was loud, lumbering, and claustrophobically heavy. It wasn’t just rock; it was doom with a backbeat. Where the Beatles (Ozzy cheered Paul McCartney as an influence) had sung of submarines and revolutions, Osbourne intoned about war, madness, and Lucifer himself. If the hippies promised transcendence, Sabbath warned of what lay beneath the acid dream once it curdled.

Ozzy’s voice, piercing, nasal, untrained, unforgettable, became a clarion for the disenchanted. When WKNR-FM listeners discovered, Black Sabbath, it wasn’t the prettiest sound in rock, but it might have been one of the most honest. Ozzy’s vocals didn’t soar so much as haunt, like something channeled rather than sung. It was the voice of someone who’d seen too much and somehow lived to talk about it, though barely.

Offstage, Osbourne was often a contradiction wrapped in chaos. He could be feral, ridiculous, sometimes terrifying, and yet curiously innocent. Stories of his debauchery read like apocrypha, snorting ants, decapitating bats, urinating on the Alamo, yet the man himself rarely seemed malevolent. Instead, he often resembled a child who’d wandered into a horror movie and decided to stay. The world called him the Prince of Darkness, but anyone paying attention could see the fragility under the theatrics. He wasn’t the devil; he was the boy in his thrall.

The solo years, improbably, gave us the most refined version of the Ozzy myth. Teaming with guitarist Randy Rhoads, whose virtuosity elevated Osbourne’s raw power, he released Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, records that not only cemented his legacy but also redefined what metal could be: grand, melodic, even beautiful in its brutality. These were not the desperate gasps of a fired frontman but the confident roars of an artist in full voice.

Then came the turn no one saw coming. In 2002, MTV’s The Osbournes reframed the singer’s life as sitcom. Here was Ozzy, not summoning Satan but mumbling through domesticity, mystified by technology and ankle-deep in dog waste. If Sabbath was an exorcism of industrial despair, The Osbournes was a meditation on entropy, what happens when the monster grows up and settles into a gated community. It was either the death of mystery or its next incarnation.

In his later years, Osbourne’s body betrayed him. A near-fatal ATV crash in 2003, followed by a Parkinson’s diagnosis and multiple surgeries, turned the once-indestructible rocker into a cautionary tale about gravity. And yet, he persisted. He kept showing up, on red carpets, in recording studios, occasionally on stage. Even when his spine seemed to fold under the weight of decades, he refused to bow. His final performance, a July 5th reunion with the original Black Sabbath in Birmingham, was a gesture of defiant symmetry: the beginning and the end, fused in one last ritual. He sang from a throne, regal and wrecked, a monarch of mayhem making peace with his kingdom.

Ozzy Osbourne’s legacy is inseparable from the contradictions he embodied. He was a carnival and a confessional, a terror and a teddy bear. He gave us music that made darkness a thing and showed us, through bumbling vulnerability, that monsters can be human, too. In the end, he didn’t just survive the wreckage of metal rock and roll, he became its patron saint, burned and bent but never buried.

His life was a noise, a spectacle, a sigh. And now, finally, a silence.

On the seventh of July, a Monday, amidst the unassuming hum of a world carrying on, Richard Starkey, saw his eighty-fifth year. The name he would later adopt—Ringo Starr—needs, of course, no introduction, yet it is the given name that feels more appropriate for the quietude of the occasion. If the Beatles were a singular, four-headed marvel of the twentieth century, then Ringo was its circulatory system—unshowy, indispensable, and possessed of a swing that was as intuitive as a heartbeat. Continue reading “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Ringo” →

On the Fourth of July weekend in 1970, America was still catching its breath from the cultural detonation of the previous decade. A new program came to life on just seven radio stations. “Here we go with the Top 40 hits of the nation this week on American Top 40,” the voice intoned. “The best-selling and most-played songs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico.” It didn’t sound like revolution. It sounded like reassurance. Continue reading “AT 40 at 55” →

By June 24, 2025, the world had fallen silent—not with the frenzy that once trailed him, but with a gentle stillness. Bobby Sherman, the sweet-faced teen idol of the late 1960s, died at 81, his final days marked by the same modest grace that shaped his life. Continue reading “Bobby Sherman – A Quiet Finale” →

To hear a Lou Christie song on Keener for the first time was to experience something more than sound—a kind of pop exclamation mark hurled through a world of four-part harmonies and teenage platitudes. In a musical landscape dominated by the earnest chin-stroking of folk singers and the tight, syncopated machinery of Detroit’s Motown, Christie’s voice arrived like a lightning strike, cutting clean through the Keener airwaves. It was a helium-soaked, heaven-scraping falsetto that didn’t so much sing as spiral—vertiginous, improbable, and entirely unafraid of absurdity. It sounded less like a young man’s croon than the internal monologue of adolescence itself: dramatic, operatic, always on the verge of a glorious crack-up. Continue reading “Lou Christie – The Voice That Pierced the Sky” →

When Beatlemania exploded on Keener, it wasn’t just a cultural phenomenon, it was a marketing war. On one side of the Atlantic stood EMI’s Parlophone label, helmed by producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick, who shaped the Beatles’ artistic journey with a balance of studio innovation and British sensibility. On the other, Capitol Records, EMI’s American subsidiary, played the hits game with a nose for profit. The result? Two Beatles discographies: one curated by the band and their producer, the other chopped, shuffled, and rebranded for U.S. ears.

And those differences? They tell a deeper story about the transatlantic tug-of-war between artistry and commerce. Continue reading “The Beatles’ EMI vs. Capitol Albums: How America Remixed the British Invasion” →

It was a rare moment in time when Steve Schram and I were in the same place without anyone demanding our time. We were both independent agents with a lot more resume paragraphs ahead of us. As was our practice during the days when we roomed together in college, we were sifting through my collection of 45s and reel to reel tapes. Around 3am on June 3, 2002, I threaded the PAMS Clyde jingle demo into the machine and turned up the volume. Continue reading “Keener Today – June 3” →

Today in History:

• 1844 – Samuel F.B. Morse gave the first public demonstration of his telegraph by sending a message from the Supreme Court Chamber in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. to the B&O Railroad “outer depot” (now the B&O Railroad Museum) in Baltimore. The famous message was, “What hath God wrought?” Continue reading “Keener Today – May 24” →