Bob Bailey: Not One of the Guys Elvis Costello Was Talking About
If you stick around long enough, good times with friends are multiplied over and over again. But as the years dash by, we find that too many of the old friends are no longer with us. It hardly seems fair. Those friends made the world a better place. We needed them.
We think back to 2019 when we lost Bob Bailey, a longtime Atlanta radio personality whose voice conveyed calm, civility and good times. If you were Bob's friend, an easy thing to be, there's a void in your world. We can't afford to lose guys like Bob Bailey.
I first met Bob in the summer of 1975. He would visit Peaches Records and Tapes late on Friday nights after doing his show on new releases for WRAS. Peaches was the place to find the new releases, but for a guy like Bob, a musical sage beyond his years, a recording from two or three decades back might interest him more.
Bob was the music director at WRAS, the GSU student station, way to the left on the FM dial. WRAS was the station in town for introducing new music, mostly in the rock idiom. Bob picked the music the station would play. That made Bob a sought-after and popular figure in the city's growing music scene. However, Bob gave that little thought. He didn't need the attention. Glad-handing and schmoozing with the promo guys at the record labels wasn't nearly as much fun as talking about the music he really liked and why. A field trip to the Ponce de Leon Krispy Kreme in the wee hours with Ort Carlton and others in the Peaches gang was also more fun. Bob Bailey didn't need to be wined and dined, but a cup of coffee and a hot cruller would hit the spot.
Bob's visits to Peaches became so frequent one might have thought he was a store employee. Given that we always needed one more knowledgeable person to help our customers, management made it official: Bob Bailey was on the Peaches payroll. He joined a cast of characters with so much personality that our 6,000 square foot building could hardly hold it all. Needless to say, Bob was a good fit.
Graduation Day at GSU was coming and one could only buy so many crullers on a record store salary. Still no one worried about Bob being able to make a nice living as he was blessed with the tone, timing, and delivery made for radio. Why the city's radio program directors weren't jamming the store's aisles to hear for themselves was a mystery. That didn't worry Bob. In fact one night a fellow WRAS alumni, Jim Morrison, then at WQXI-FM, was visiting with Bob, talking shop. Bob allowed that he may not want a job on the radio after all. Morrison was incredulous. "What? With that golden throat of yours? That's crazy, "Morrison replied.
Jim was right. It was crazy. Bob's talent was unique. His voice was smooth, breezy, friendly and informed. It's likely that as a newborn, he was recognized by doctors in the maternity ward for his fluid and congenial crying. So, yes, Bob would go on the radio.
Former wife and lifelong best friend Cathy Thomas joins Bob at Manuel’s Tavern for a high school reunion.
Bob got a gig at WKLS-FM, more widely known as 96 Rock. The station had struck a chord with most of the metro area's rock fans. Its following was immense, but rock purists, as most of us Peaches people were, disliked the station. 96 Rock was slow to catch on to the bolder and more innovative rockers, even taking months after the release of Born to Run to play Bruce Springsteen. A program director at the station told me that a focus group (or whatever those groups were called then) decided Springsteen would not go over well in Atlanta. The fact that his albums were selling so well at the city's most popular record store was deemed an aberration. But whatever, we were friends of Bob Bailey and we were glad to hear him on the radio again.
Around the time Bob went to work for 96 Rock, a lot of us who were on to Springsteen early on quickly took notice of Elvis Costello. The guy could rock. The guy could swing. He could craft melodious love songs. He could lay it out simply, punk rock style, or he could impress you with his vocabulary. The guy had attitude. Elvis Costello was the antithesis of AC/DC, Foreigner, Rush, Boston, REO Speedwagon and the other bombastic so-called rockers heading for the fall-out. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and other rockers who were to their genre what Duke Ellington was to jazz were still being played at stations like the consultant-driven 96 Rock, but on the same playlists with those gutting out machismo to the accompaniment of buzz -saws. The skinny guy with the skinny tie wanted the 96 Rocks of the world to play his songs, but he saw what was happening to American radio. On his second Columbia Records album, This Year’s Model, the song, “Radio Radio,” explained his feelings perfectly:
And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
Tryin' to anesthetize the way that you feel
The trouble was that vast numbers of young Americans were listening to rock music that celebrated mediocrity. These weren’t the serious listeners who could acknowledge the influence of John Coltrane on the Allman Brothers Band. No, they were the type to go to concerts and yell “Free Bird!” even if Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t on the bill. Some of the kids who grew up listening to Grand Funk Railroad didn’t grow up after all, but stations like 96 Rock connected with them. That was a market waiting and willing to buy. 96 Rock and its listeners had a partnership. The listeners bought 96 Rock tags for their cars. The tags were ubiquitous in the Atlanta suburbs. This was a very shrewd marketing ploy by the station which made its money from playing an endless stream of commercials between music sets. Still, 96 Rock was the only station in town that would play The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who regularly. That compelled many of us to tune in, hoping newer acts influenced by Lennon, McCartney, Richards, and Townshend would get some airtime. They even played Costello’s “Accidents Will Happen” for a few weeks in early ‘79, but that was only a slight reprieve. The ‘80s were coming, and with them, Def Leopard and Iron Maiden.
Like many who would provide due diligence for their employers, Bob Bailey would give it 100%, coming across as a friend to whoever was listening. It wasn’t the greatest situation, but Bob knew what was happening in American media and whenever possible, he’d add as much intelligence, humor, and respect for his audience as anyone on the air in Atlanta. For that, Bob earned every cent of every paycheck.
As a teen in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Bob Bailey was like a lot of guys who wanted to spin records on the radio. The radio had introduced them to the music they loved. They wanted to be on the radio for the next generation, sure that gifted artists not yet discovered would be featured on their programs. Even with the break-up of The Beatles, the rock scene was still blooming with a plethora of styles that was influenced by various musical genres, some from centuries past with innovations for the-time-it-is-today. Guys like Bob Bailey had to be excited.
Jazz was actually Bob's first love. Though he could speak with confidence about most any musical genre when working the aisles at Peaches, it was in the jazz department where Bob delivered erudite critiques to customers wishing to know the differences between McCoy Tyner and Oscar Peterson. And the words flowed in such friendly fashion. Bob was no elitist. He was just happy to share what he had learned from such great music. The people listening to him were glad he did.
When it came to music, Bob would dig deep. He’d spend hours every year looking through the Peaches cut-out department that Greg Biggs lorded over, always looking for more space in the aisles. One album that made it into our cut-outs department was The Ship, a 1972 album presenting a journey through contemporary folk music. Released by Electra, The Ship’s album flopped and was available for just $1.98 at the growing number of Peaches stores across the country. Greg ordered a lot of them, and at least in Atlanta, he had Bob Bailey, who loved the album, to talk it up to anyone who came within ten feet of the album.
The '70s gave way to the '80s. The original parent company of Peaches Records and Tapes went bankrupt and much of the original crew from the landmark store on Peachtree had gone on to other pursuits. Yet despite the changes in our lives, those of us who worked together for 2-3 years maintained that fraternal spirit. Walking into a restaurant and running into Bob Bailey, Al Compton, Brenda McCord, Tony Paris or any of the others made for a happy day.
There was a period in the mid to late '80s that I'd run into Bob at any number of places in the Midtown neighborhoods. You didn't just stop to exchange a few pleasantries with Bob. You might find a corner in Wax 'n' Facts and talk for an hour or so. Such good times. Several times over the years while returning late from an errand, my wife, Gena, would ask what had taken so long. "I ran into Bob Bailey," I told her. She understood.