THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, December 26, 1994 TAG: 9412260044
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
Boring along the interstate in the darkness long before dawn to watch children come downstairs to the Christmas tree, the Lab asleep on the back seat for company, a single car ahead, occasionally, and the headlights, now and then, of one behind and no other traffic at that hour, I should have been content.
What distracted me was the car radio fabricated in a foreign country where there is a conspiracy to drive Americans out of their minds with dashboard technology that outdoes the complexity of a spacecraft's control panel.
After an astronaut has finished training and is ready to go for the stars, Mission Control ought to seat the graduate at the wheel of a foreign car and order a drive around the block - a final test of the ability to cope with the untoward.
One reason I won't part with the battered old convertible is that Lee Iacocca, to cut expenses, had it designed minus a mass of electronic gadgets on the dash and armrests to frustrate the motorist.
The controls are all manual so fools like me can drive the car without being thrust unexpectedly, screaming, into outer space.
The windows crank up and down by hand. Only two controls are on the radio, one knob to turn it on and off and control the volume; the other to shift to stations around the dial. You can do it without even looking at the face of the dial.
The steps to dial the radio in the resplendent new rental car proved so abstruse as to make the dialing of it a traffic hazard.
Landing upon the call numbers of a far-flung station in West Virginia - Wheeling, I think - I let the dial rest there and had to listen to 200 miles of country-western Christmas music. It was merciless.
Ordinarily I'm a country music boy. I like the audacity of the themes, all our basic emotions expressed straight out, reduced to the commonplace, unrelieved by subtleties.
I enjoy the swinging style of some pieces, the whining and moaning of others. If Walt Whitman had heard a country music station, he would have said, ``I hear America wailing,'' instead of singing.
It has humor, some of it intentional, and pathos, much of it bearable. There's the patriotic statement offering insights into the moods of a sizeable segment of citizens from which come many of our finest soldiers. To listen to country-western is a way of keeping in tune. It makes the miles pass, usually.
But a day dedicated to country style Christmas music is too much. Singers are overcome by the solemnity of it all. They don't flirt with the tune. The notes, both vocal and instrumental, are pounded out, as if by a hammer. One by one.
Only once was there relief when Nat King Cole's cool, sweet, sophisticated phrasing wafted to listeners: ``Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . . ''
And that chestnut of a song became as sweet as the first time it was sung.
Give me a day of Nat King Cole.
Or Patsy Cline. by CNB