The Casey Kasem we know was a creation of the baby boom. American Top 40, his signature show, went on the air in 1970, and Kasem had his biggest impact in the '70s and early '80s, counting down hits by Grand Funk Railroad and the Bay City Rollers. (Oh, and voicing the character of Shaggy in the Scooby Doo cartoons.)
The ratings were sagging when Kasem first left the show in 1988 (he would return a decade later), and when he announced his sudden retirement last Saturday from the radio franchise he helped create, it felt like the end of an era that had actually ended 10 or 20 years ago.
The funny thing was, Kasem sounded old-fashioned from the start.
In the mid '70s, when I was an American Top 40 devotee, you already could be mocked for listening to him. His this-land-is-your-land patriotism and weekly shout-outs to Armed Forces Radio were out of tune with the times; his practiced sincerity and his adherence to the Billboard pop charts were uncool; and couldn't he have made up a better name? (That last part, of course, was unfair to the man born Kemal Amin Kasem.)
But back in the day, there were good reasons to listen to Kasem. For one thing, as bizarre as it now seems, millions of people didn't know what the No. 1 song was each week until they heard that drumroll on American Top 40.
And the show stood out for other reasons. As square as it was, by playing the entire top 40, it gave many people a greater variety of music than they could get from listening to their local radio stations for a week.
It also pioneered a genre that wouldn't come into its own for another decade or two: celebrity gossip. The tidbits of biography and trivia that Kasem and his team, including writer Don Bustany, sprinkled through the show might have been corny, but at the time there was practically nowhere else to hear them.
All of these functions became less important, or even irrelevant, with the advent of nightly entertainment news and then the Internet. The profile of American Top 40 shrank, though it benefited from a burst of publicity when Ryan Seacrest took over as host in 2004.
So what kept Kasem counting down the hits for decades and continues to keep his creation on the air? Kasem is known for being a perfectionist — clips of his profane outbursts when things didn't go right in the studio are popular on YouTube — and I suspect that a related feeling, a demand for order, may explain his show's longevity.
The welter of information and choices we now confront, a condition that has affected the music and radio industries more profoundly than most, may be democratizing, but it can also be demoralizing, and the Top 40 is something to hold on to — a life preserver in the digital sea.
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