On and off the air, he enjoys making fun of his looks and often describes himself as ugly. Berg is nothing if not a pop shrink.ĭecember 1982: I spend a couple of days in the studio with Berg during his show, and afterward we talk. The process is, of course, what psychiatrists are paid 75 dollars an hour for. It takes listening to Berg, and having his emotions riled, to get him to admit it to himself. Most of the time, the man says, he realizes that he is angry with himself for something he has done or not done. Or alone.”Īnother listener tells me that Berg makes him angry but also helps him examine his feelings. Even when I’m driving my car, he makes me respond. Although I never call his show, I always talk back to the radio. He’s so alive, in ways that many people aren’t He makes me think. In November, a woman who has been listening faithfully to Berg for six years tells me about her relationship, via the radio, with the man: “I get mad at him, but I always come back to his program. The exchange between black and white is brusque. Apparently, no one, least of all a white man on the radio, has taken his ideas to task before. Berg is fed up and tells the man to quit jiving him. One afternoon Berg launches into a black man who has called to tell him that there are certain things he will never experience or understand because he isn’t black. He appears to be one of the few public figures I have come across who is living now, in this decade, not in the past, not in the Sixties or Seventies. He makes terrible fun of our confusion and limitations. Berg is a clown, yet he has grasped how everything–everything from buying lettuce to making love–has become politicized.Īnd this is funny, too: people aren’t as good, they aren’t as enlightened, as they thought they were a decade or two ago, and they are worried and frustrated by the discovery. He says his name is Alan Berg.įall 1982: I catch one or two snatches of Berg’s program, and I am struck by his sense of humor. His words bother me, because I know what he is saying, however provocative, is true. I have never heard anything like it, on radio or on television. At any moment, I think, the microphone will go dead, and he will be jerked off the air. I am certain the man on the radio isn’t sitting at a desk but standing over a microphone and pointing at the studio walls, flailing his arms like a psychotic. You’re anti-Semitic, and you know it, and you’ve got real feelings about this, and I want to find out what they are.” I want you to call me and tell me why you don’t like Jews. “I know there are anti-Semitic people out there among you gentiles,” the man on the radio is saying, his voice like sandpaper. It is Yom Kippur: for Jews, the holiest of days, a day set aside for prayer and fasting and the atonement of sins. A radio junkie for 25 years–in New York and Chicago, in Kansas and Texas–I think I have heard everything the medium has to offer, until today. September 1981: My first month in Denver, I flip the radio dial to KOA, the largest station in the Rocky Mountain region.
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