Mere Duchess

ConTesh

Summer adventures have led to a lot of late night car rides for me—up and down 91, criss-crossing the beltway of highway 90. 

I’m big on the scan button; always looking for a sound to narrate the default cultural nostalgia I’m after.  On American radio now John Tesh is the man of the night.  You can scan your way in any direction you want, but if JT’s on one channel he’s on two, and you will hear about the dangers of fibbing on your resume, ten flavorful ways to get more acai berries into your diet, why more attractive people get ahead in the workplace.  The segments are called “Intelligence for your Life”; dictated in his assured megavoice that sounds like the microphone itself.  In few places have I felt the Word of consensus/consumer reality babble out more freely than from IFYL.  It is the source.  It’s what it must have felt like, at one time, to delve into a copy-rich ad for Lysol in the back of a woman’s magazine.  A distant, authorial voice—dumb but full of conviction—both reprimanding and soothing: a version of puritanical rightness that paired nicely with Jell-O recipes back then, the sounds of Maroon 5 now.

What a figure John Tesh cuts across the landscape of recent history.  When I try to summon a face for him at night in the car, it’s a mustard-colored blur of head and hair, hovering over a 1991 sportcoat faintly glowing in the blue magenta glitter hue of that era’s Entertainment Tonight. 

I’ll often trap myself into the Tesh show during a run of something like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” “What Goes Around Comes Around” (a standard for Tesh), Fine Young Cannibals “She Drives Me Crazy.”  Adult contemporary as it’s been for 30 years, but within all the ‘Intelligence’ it’s this other object; all-of-a-piece as if the night itself were an inky billow of wife Connie Sellecca’s Pantene Pro-V mane.  A tableaux of KFC/Taco Bell combos, highway signs for rest stops, diesel gas; the spearmint gum you’re chewing—it’s all a seamless narrative under Tesh, under an Intelligence bit about a study that found soda dispenser spouts in fast food restaurants were major locations for housing microscopic bits of fecal matter. 

It’s in part his back-from-the-dead quality—radio should be a demotion from his past lives but in this role he’s more authoritative than ever.  He’s all three Full House father figures in one man, but a dad beyond eye-rolling: it’s morning over the hills of San Francisco and no you will not rebuff the great harmless embarrassment of listening to the times.