FTV: Bob Reitman

 

     Who is Bob Reitman?  Until May of 2026, the answer for me was, “I do not have a clue.”  Then I got an email from our old friend Gary Tanin at Daystorm Music in Milwaukee asking if I would have time to listen to an extended interview he had done with his dear friend Bob.  Gary has funnelled so much interesting music our way over the past decade or so that, even though I didn’t know anything about the man, I knew that it would be worth taking the time to have a listen.  The set piece they are promoting here is a spoken word / music album Gary and Bob have been working on called The 12th House which is a followup to a previous collaboration they did called The Eleventh House.  The interview provided the historical context I needed to understand why Gary was so passionate about what amounts to Bob’s final recording.

     Bob Reitman became a foundational member of the Milwaukee music scene in the days when FM was expanding the boundaries of broadcast music.  Interestingly, his association with music began with poetry.  He explained to Tanin that it was his elementary school science teacher who opened the door to the poetry lounge in an unexpected way.  Bob was summoned to see the teacher after hours for committing the young man’s sin of flirting with a girl in class when he should have been paying attention to the subject matter.  Reitman expected to end up with a month of detention but instead was assigned the task of copying a poem on the blackboard.  The poem in question was The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service.  That one stone tossed into the pond sent out ripples that never stopped expanding Bob’s world.

     Reitman’s father was an FBI agent who was given orders to head to Hawaii in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  When his mother went into labor, his father’s orders were changed and he returned to Milwaukee where Bob was born ten days after the attack.  Post war, the family moved pretty much around the country as a result of his father’s FBI assignments, but eventually they ended up back in their hometown of Milwaukee.  It was during this fertile time period when popular culture was evolving into the rock and roll era that Reitman’s future began to take shape.  He was in the right place at the right time and the spark that started his motor running was poetry.  

     That first exposure spurred him to write his own poetry.  When Bob heard there were poetry readings taking place at the Avant-Garde Coffee House, he gathered his works together to join the party.  He got there only to find out the person running the readings was a no-show that night.  When the same thing happened the next week, Bob volunteered (uncharacteristically, according to him) to run the readings.  The owner readily agreed.  Reitman remembers the moment as one of the first times someone said ‘yes’ to him and it offered him a chance to learn something new.  The second ‘yes’ came when he was asked to do a poetry radio show on the University of Wisconsin –  Milwaukee student radio station WUWM.  After a while, the station’s manager asked if he would be interested in playing music on Sunday nights.  At first, Bob hesitated but he again accepted the challenge to do something different.  Years later, Reitman found out it was the manager’s kids who were responsible.  They complained the educational station never played music so the GM opened the door, Bob walked in, and another creative front appeared with seemingly no strings attached.  “It was just fun,” Bob said, “I got to play whatever I wanted to play.”  Reitman returned to the ‘people saying yes’ theme many times in the interview.

     WUWM was an educational station, yet people tuned in to hear what they were playing in sufficient numbers to have the station register on the ratings chart.  Reitman told Tanin, “Enough people wanted to hear The Grateful Dead, Airplane, Dylan and stuff like that.  There was so much stuff and we showed up in the ratings.”  One thing always leads to another.  The owners of a floundering FM station (WZMF) approached Bob about doing a radio show as a way to up their revenue.  They offered him $150 a week.  Reitman was employed at the time at a cemetery.  His initial reaction was, “These guys are going to pay me to play the music I want to play on the radio?  Have I died and gone to heaven?” He took the job, the station made money (as would every station he would work for in the years that followed) and radio became the next great adventure for Reitman.

     Bob’s insights into how music is imprinted upon each generation are interesting.  From the time he reached puberty up to his high school graduation in 1959, he was there as music transitioned from post World War II big bands into the precursors of Rock and Roll.  Reitman hits the nail squarely on the head when he points out that the music one discovers in their formative years makes an indelible mark on teens.  The music of Glenn Miller did it for one generation – the next generation was lit up by Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, and a bunch of other early R’n’R artists.  I can relate to this because that is how music was ingrained in me.  I liked the early Beatles and Beach Boys records, but was too young to understand the complexity of it all.  The songs that gave me a big push were the ones I started to play along with as I learned my way around a drum kit.  

     When I started buying 45s to add to my practice routine, pretty much everything from The Music Explosion’s Little Bit of Soul on rocked my world.  Every record brought a different sound and beat into the mix and one thing led to another.  Singles played on AM radio gave way to LPs by everybody from The Monkees to The Doors to Hendrix to Led Zeppelin.  I distinctly remember not liking some of my older sister’s records until I began playing the drums along with them.  As I grew older, my appreciation for ‘older’ rock music increased, especially when I got to play it live with various bands.  My ‘Bob Reitman experience’ was very much the same as his, just a decade or so later.  ‘Music as the soundtrack of your life’ is a pretty universal theme and the cornerstone music one starts with is only the beginning.  One tends to move both forward and backwards from the music that provides the time stamps of your adolescence.

     Bob Reitman’s musical views were shaped by Elvis, et al, but his poetry and musical world view collided when he heard Bob Dylan.  According to David Luhrssen (the Managing Editor of the Shepard Express and a longtime fan), it was Dylan, “Who became the touchstone for Reitman’s idea of what rock could achieve as music that delivered poetry to the widest audience.”  Bob was at the center of what Luhrssen calls, “the focal point of bohemian counterculture on Milwaukee’s East Side in the ‘60s.  By the ‘70s he was already known all over town for spinning records on radio, soon enough with a prime-time program, The Eleventh House, on WQFM.  Bob Reitman was the articulate voice of FM rock in 1970s Milwaukee as he carried the creative programming of ‘60s free form FM into the new decade.  He introduced Milwaukee to Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, and the Velvet Underground, and was Bob Dylan’s most fervent apostle in the city.”  The next natural step was to collaborate with a dozen or more Milwaukee musicians to record a batch of his poetry for an LP called The Eleventh House.

     During the interview, Bob touched on a wide range of topics.  His story of asking Chuck Berry why he wouldn’t play a show until he got paid up front is great.  Bob confesses he didn’t understand it at the time, but as he learned more about how artists like Chuck Berry were ripped off and abused by promoters and record labels, he finally understood.  When they got on to the subject of music making the transition from carrying around ‘bins of records’ to the million songs he can now tote around on his cell phone, Reitman had two thoughts.  One was the loss of the ‘tactile’ experience of buying and playing records.  The other was the ease of finding literally anything on his phone – no matter how obscure the song, services like Spotify finds them.

     Bob said, “I hope music is still an important part of people’s lives,” but he also acknowledges how the landscape is changing.  He had his turntable repaired by a man who had been doing the work for years.  As the repairman is contemplating retirement, Bob wondered who would still have the skill to do such work.  Music stores are disappearing and yes, one can buy turntables at Amazon, but the culture of music is so much different in the digital age.  “How do young people put value on music that their generation is basically getting for free?” became an off-shoot of their discussion.

     When he learned that Spotify plays only 1/1000th of a cent per play, Reitman shook his head.  When the discussion turned to AI creating an artificial Bob Dylan or Taylor Swift song, he again shook his head as they pondered things like:  Who would own it?  How would it be licensed?  These are questions that have no immediate answer, but perhaps the resurgence of interest in vinyl records gives a glimpse that not everyone will settle for ‘knock off songs’ even if they are free for the taking.  That and the fact that the human factor in writing and experiencing music can not be replicated by AI.

     So how is it Bob Reitman finds himself doing a sequel to an album he did in 1972?  There were a number of factors.  He mentioned when he began looking over the volume of poetry he had written then and since then, it was kind of fun even though he was naive back then (and still is, he claims:  “I am consistently naive.”).  Having a friend and producer who would honestly tell him if something was good or not was also critical.  Tanin told Reitman that his role in recording a spoken word album like this was no different than any other project he had worked on in terms of how topics presented themselves to be worked up. 

      Gary reminded Bob that another side of a bookend project like this frames his legacy:  “I said that?”  Reitman asked, “Like my headstone?  The reason we are doing the album?  I told people, ‘I have been a really lucky guy.  I do know how lucky I have been.  I never thought about going into radio…things showed up in my life at the right time.  I just wanted everybody to know that sometimes good things happen and sometimes they don’t…I regret mistakes I have made, that is part of my story…I want everybody to know the whole story, the good, the bad, the ugly…I guess everybody has a life like that, I have been lucky, and Rock and Roll.”

     What I find the most interesting is the vast array of topics Reitman can riff on with his poetry.  The disclaimer here is that I have never been much of a poetry person.  As far back as my sophomore year in high school, I found one had to have the right stuff to do poetry justice.  When our speech class got around to doing poetry readings, many of us gave what I can only describe as flat performances.  Then Sue took the podium.  It is probably a good thing she came up last because she took on Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells.  She put so much energy into it that she was literally foaming at the mouth when she finished.  Our instructor said nothing.  She didn’t have to.  We were humbled because we took the easy way out as most of us mumbled our way through much less inspiring works.  Sue took us to a higher plane.  Ever since then I have had a lot more respect for both those who can write poetic verses and deliver them with such emotion.

     After hearing Bob’s melodious voice telling stories about how he became a big Dylan fan, his interactions with music fans of many generations, and rubbed elbows with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, I could not wait to hear his poetry set to music.  The all-star cast of musicians Gary lined up to provide the background music for The 12th House made Reitman’s last record even more exciting.  Tanin himself added keyboards and drums to the mix and many of the musicians he recruited are familiar to us via the music Daystorm has sent our way.  The cast includes Sam Llanas (guitar and wordless vocals) and Jack Spann (keyboards).  John Hoier, another Milwaukee producer and a member of the 60s band The Messengers also provided music that became backing tracks on some of the 12th House tracks.

     Luhrssen sums up Reitman’s work perfectly: “He reflects on music, pop culture, and occasionally on politics, turning fleeting memories into sharp recollections.”   Of the sixteen tracks assembled for The 12th House, three are re-recordings from The Eleventh House.  The collection covers several decades of Reitman’s life.  The final track reaches back to the first thing he ever wrote in 1958 and is presented on the 12th House as The First One.

     I am looking forward to hearing the final mix of 12th House.  Hearing Bob Reitman reflect on how music and poetry shaped his life and knowing what a gifted producer Gary Tanin is, I can’t wait to hear what their collaboration produced.  I will wrap up this From the Vaults with David Luhrssen’s description of Bob’s career:  “On the radio, Bob Reitman never filled the silence between records with inanity.  His voice, smart and good humored, was filled with curiosity and gratitude, a sensibility amplified by the words of his poetry.” 

     We got a late note from Gary Tanin stating, “Prior to official retail availability there will be a limited number of albums available via mail order by making a donation of $40 or more to WUWM.  Call the WUWM development department at 414-270-1225 for details.”

Top Piece Video:  As the man who introduced Bob Dylan to Milwaukee radio, this seems to be a fitting tribute to Bob Reitman!