Bob Marklein
Mary Beth Marklein (right) with Harry Rag.
WORT-FM DJ Harry Rag, left, died on Jan 21. He instilled his love of rock 'n' roll in his sister, Mary Beth Marklein.
I’m sprawled on the living room carpet, one ear cupped to the hi-fi. “Last Train to Clarksville” is spinning on the turntable when both my brothers come barreling in. “Shhhhhhhh!” I snap. “I’m trying to hear the words!”
They wave a pair of songbooks in my face. Piano music for the Monkees album — and for the Beatles, too! Lyrics included! All in all, a grand day.
This is the moment to which I trace the start of my rock-and-roll education. I was 9, tops; my brothers no more than 11 and 12. Everything I love about rock and roll is thanks to them. And it all started some 60 years ago when my oldest brother happened upon a rain-soaked album by The Ventures in an empty lot.
You may know him as Harry Rag, a reference to a Kinks song about a guy who badly needs a cigarette and the moniker my brother adopted when he began DJing at WORT-FM 44 years ago. In December, Harry announced he was hanging up his headphones.
Harry had told our family several weeks earlier that his body was no longer responding to medical treatments, so we knew this was coming. On Facebook, he thanked his doctors for doing a great job and said he wanted to end his WORT run on a high note.
The outpouring made me teary. His listeners noted his talent for tracking down obscure oldies and digging up hidden gems. They said he knew how to put on a show — “the perfect flow of the best music w/detailed liner notes and crafty sound efx + surprises along the way.” They depended on him.
“Harry Rag, I don't even know your real name,” another Facebook friend wrote, “but I feel I know your real spirit.”
To which Harry replied: “Harry Rag is my real name once I walk through the doors at WORT.”
My brother, who died Jan. 21, was always cagey about his identity, and I won’t divulge anything here. But I will tell you that he enjoyed a full life beyond Harry. He lived in our hometown of Janesville and joined our dad and uncle in the home-building business after he finished college. He admired Frank Lloyd Wright’s work since his teens. He fell in love with a hometown girl whom he met while walking to his mailbox. They raised two daughters and now have two sons-in-law and two granddaughters. I want to gush more, but Harry, were he here, would put the kibosh on that.
As one of his four younger siblings, I can also tell you that Harry gave our family a spectacular soundtrack, by turns joyful, wistful, raucous, haunting, weird, hilarious, challenging — something for every facet of the human condition.
It was all there in his impeccably curated final shows. Of course, Neil Young’s “My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue).” Of course, The Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” He closed with the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” and a brief nod to The Beatles. His voice cracked a little as he bade farewell.
Listening at home, I found myself back on that jubilant day in our living room, when I witnessed what I now think of as the nascent glimmerings of a true rock-and-roll believer. I was a teeny bopper into loveable boy bands; he was after something deeper. As we paged through our new songbooks together, he pointed to the author credits for each group: “See how Lennon and McCartney actually write their own music?”
For a while, I picked up on things as any little sister would. If Harry’s first act of adolescent independence was to move his bedroom downstairs, his second was to place a hand-written sign atop his state-of-the-art stereo system: Do Not Touch. OR ELSE.
One night, as I lay in bed, my mom’s voice sounded sharper than I’d ever heard before, and it was aimed at my brother: “Why can’t they put a nice vase of flowers on the cover?” Eventually (years later, possibly), it clicked: She was objecting to The Beatles’ Yesterday and Today album, the original one with the doll parts on the cover.
Another time, a paper for English class found its way to our front hallway. In it my brother had analyzed George Harrison’s “Piggies,” and I began to see rock as a platform for social criticism. Soon I was sneaking downstairs to devour his Rolling Stone magazines when he wasn’t home.
In sum, my brother was cool. It made me feel cool, too.
And then he was off to UW-Madison.
When I joined him three years later, our conversations became more sophisticated. He offered his take on the genius of Joni Mitchell, the gauzy ambiguity of R.E.M. He introduced me to Paradise Records (and, later, B-Side), to Merlyn’s, and to Spooner. He gave me his Springsteen tickets for a Coliseum show after he scored even better seats as “first caller” in a WIBA-FM contest.
It’s hard to pinpoint where all this came from. Ed Sullivan may have prompted mom to buy Meet the Beatles in 1964, but our parents’ tastes otherwise skewed toward country and western.
I think he got hooked on the thrill of discovery. Not everyone would take a chance on a piece of vinyl that, in the days before streaming, was hard to hear until you bought it. And at some point, he couldn’t keep it all to himself.
One day in 1980, my brother told me about New Needles, a new alternative rock show on WORT hosted by a DJ who called himself Reasonable Facsimile. My brother was working up the courage to visit the station on Winnebago Street. He and Reasonable Facsimile became fast friends; one thing led to another and in August 1981, Harry Rag was born.
I moved out of WORT’s programming reach not long afterward, but the cassettes and then CDs Harry made over the years transformed long drives into opportunities. When I got married, he made a wedding CD that played in my car for more than a year.
A few years ago, I moved back to Madison and now live just blocks from WORT. One of my favorite things to do was to grab a bite with Harry at the Echo Tap before his show; sometimes, I would join him in the studio. There, behind the DJ’s chair, hangs a reminder of Harry’s legacy: all his WORT T-shirts sewn into a quilt by our sister-in-law.
I’m going to miss those Friday nights. But I will follow Harry’s lead and end as he did, with the Kinks and on a high note:
… I don't feel afraid
As long as I gaze on
Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise
Mary Beth Marklein is a longtime journalist who counts her interview with Neil Young on his tour bus as one of her most memorable.
