The microphone is passed
Chicago’s longest running radio program, ‘The Midnight Special,’ is getting a new host
The year was 1967. Marilyn Rea, then a sophomore at Thornton Fractional South High School in suburban Lansing, came down with mononucleosis and was too sick one Saturday night to attend a basketball game against rival Thornton Fractional North. She was too sick even to watch TV.
So her mother flipped on the radio. “And this amazing, fun song in another language came on,” she remembered. “I said, ‘What’s that?’ ”
The song was “Guabi Guabi,” an infectiously bouncy children’s number from Zimbabwe sung by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a friend and contemporary of Woody Guthrie. The program was “The Midnight Special,” a quirky potpourri aired on classical station WFMT-FM 98.7, and she was instantly hooked.
“From then on, on Saturday nights, my friends and I would always tune in,” she said. “You never knew what they were going to play, but it was usually something new, refreshing and alive. And I remember thinking that’s what radio should be.”
The year was 1953. Mike Nichols, a WFMT announcer fresh from the University of Chicago, had been given permission to experiment once a week with offbeat recordings and in-studio guests at a time when the station was usually dark. That June he named his project “The Midnight Special,” after a Lead Belly song, and promised listeners “folk music and farce, show tunes and satire, odds and ends.” Ultimately, “odds and ends” gave way to “madness and escape” in the show’s slogan.
Nichols left the station a few years later and went on to become a comedy star with stage partner Elaine May and an Academy Award-winning film director (for “The Graduate”). Announcers Norm Pellegrini and Ray Nordstrand took over “The Midnight Special” and claimed to be the first hosts to introduce American radio listeners to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, John Prine, Harry Belafonte, Steve Goodman and many others.
The year was 1983. Evanston native Rich Warren, who had also become fascinated with “The Midnight Special” as a teen in the 1960s, was working as a production assistant at WFMT when Pellegrini invited him to join the rotating lineup of hosts. He went on to take over the program full time in 1996.
The year was 2014. Warren and I were having an off-the-record conversation at the Northwest Side WFMT studios where I’d just finished co-hosting an episode of “Sweet Folk Chicago,” an additional show of his that ran for six years and allowed guests to play their favorite songs for an hour.
He was in his mid-60s then and told me he felt it was time for him to retire from “The Midnight Special.” Yes, it’s just a three-hour show from 9 p.m. to midnight on
Saturdays, but auditioning new songs and artists, planning and producing both the local and the shorter internationally syndicated versions of the program and dealing with the associated paperwork make it a big job. He wanted to cut back and focus on producing “Folkstage,” a live WFMT concert series he oversees.
But he said he didn’t want to leave until he could name a suitable replacement — someone with the energy and eclectic tastes to continue presenting the free-form mixture of music and comedy that had made the program the most durable institution in local media. And all the leads he’d pursued so far had been dead ends.
The year was 2018. Warren was still on the hunt for a replacement and Marilyn Rea, now going by her married name Marilyn Rea Beyer, was living the Boston area with her husband, Rick Beyer, an author and filmmaker, whom she’d met in Chicago in 1981. After graduating from TF South, she’d gone to college at Purdue and grad school at Northwestern, become a teacher, moved east and worked in public relations, technology and as voice-over artist. But the flame lit by the spark of “Guabi Guabi” had not gone out.
In 1995 she’d landed a daily, on-air hosting gig at WUMB-FM, a folk-oriented public station operated by the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she later served as music director.
But she’d left WUMB in 2014 and she and her husband were ready for a change. Their two children were grown and gone. So they decided to move back to Chicago. She sent a note to Warren, whom she’d gotten to know at annual Folk Alliance International conventions, saying she was coming back home and it would be nice to get together and catch up.
They met for dinner.
The year is 2020. An email news release from WFMT arrived Wednesday announcing that July 25 will be Warren’s last “Midnight Special.” After 24 years without missing a single week, he’ll cede the host’s chair to Beyer. Her first show will be Aug. 1.
“I found the right person,” he told me. In a newsletter to listeners he wrote, “It’s time to let someone with fresh ideas take the microphone ... (Beyer) ... cherishes the tradition while voicing exciting ideas for the future. I’m leaving the program in the best possible hands and voice.”
In a separate interview, Beyer told me, “My tastes are maybe a little quirkier than Rich’s. But from the beginning this show has always had an adventurous group of listeners, and I think they’re ready to go on new adventures.”
Sounds perfect. But, I asked, given that she and Warren are roughly the same vintage, isn’t it already time for her to start the search for her own successor?
“I have plenty of gas in the tank,” she said. But, “that said, a wise occupant to any position always has her eye on rising talent.”
Founding host Mike Nichols died in 2014 at age 83, but in a short statement on the occasion of the show’s 30th anniversary in 1983 he wrote that “‘The Midnight Special’ ... goes on past individuals. It will go on forever.”
He’s been right so far.
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