"A very cold little jukebox."

"The iPod is a very cold little jukebox. It's a little digital marvel, but it's not radio." So says Cousin Brucie. His real gripe is not with the iPod, but with the so-called "Jack" radio format that sounds to him like an iPod on shuffle.

Radio, properly practiced, he said, is a theatrical art. "You have to have a persona," he said, "that transcends those tubes and transistors and wires and reaches into somebody's heart. When that light goes on and says 'Brucie, you're on the air,' my stomach turns warm and I know I'm with my friends on a giant telephone, having a party line conversation."

In recent years, Cousin Brucie has done the Oldies format on WCBS-FM, which is putting him out of work by switching to the Jack format. Jack is really Oldies too. It just only goes back as far as the 1970s.

I listened to Cousin Brucie in the mid-1960s when he was in his prime on WABC (AKA "WA-Beatle-C"). Those were the days before there was rock music on FM, and you only heard singles on the radio. Everyone in the NY area listened to Cousin Brucie in those great days of popular music. I can see how he's put off by Jack, and not just because it excludes his once-all-powerful voice. It deliberately cuts off the music of the 60s, the best music ever.

I can see why a format that does that is popular: people who arrived after the Boomers have plenty of reason to be sick of all our pop culture stuff. Forgive me if I get nostalgic about that 60s place once again, but it really was fine back then, with Cousin Brucie playing the new music, when the new music was the Beatles. Once an hour or so, he'd play an oldie, and in those days "oldie" meant a song from the 1950s or very early 60s, like "Peggy Sue" or "A Little Bit of Soap."

I remember how odd and disorienting it felt the first time I heard a Beatles era song called an "oldie." I considered it a misnomer. Jack seems to represent the same kind of feeling: my songs are not "oldies."