Casey Kasem announced this past weekend that he’d immediately be resigning his post as the host of radio’s “American Top 20,” and, from where I'm sitting, there’s several things wrong with that statement. First of all, I thought Casey Kasem was dead. Second of all, he was the host of the very popular Sunday afternoon program, “American Top 40,” when I was in high school back in the Seventies, so what happened to the other 20 songs? And third of all— they still make radios?! The last time I switched one on, I’m pretty sure I was eating a bowl of Quisp cereal. Or was it Quake?

I imagine there are people reading this right now who have no earthly idea who Kasem is, and that’s just crazy. In a nutshell, he was a velvet-toned deejay who’d spend what felt like upwards of 17 consecutive hours discussing and playing the 40 top songs on that week’s Billboard Magazine singles chart, starting at number 40 and crawling like a gut-shot hound dog all the way to that magical number 1.

Number 1 often turned out to be a Barry Manilow song, which was akin to climbing Mt. Everest only to find a big shining turd at the peak. But, just like today, there was no accounting for the American public’s taste in popular music back in the 70s. Rest assured that the only reason Mariah Carey wasn't number one was because she was still just a big dumb baby out in Long island.

Interspersed throughout “the countdown,” as Casey repeatedly called it, would be bits of useless trivia about the performers, as well as “long distance dedications,” in which listeners would write letters to the great man, asking him, for instance, to play Edison Lighthouse’s “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” for a girlfriend named Rosemary who up and moved to fucking Colorado. Casey would read each letter with the same levelheaded gravitas you might apply when telling someone they’re probably going to lose that leg. (More on the long distance dedication later.)

Frankly, I couldn’t get enough of it…at least, from about 1977 until 1979. At the time, I was Catholic (note the past tense, Pope), and I would slap the headphones on the minute the rest of the family and I got back to the house after Mass. Then I’d sit there and listen to virtually every song until my mom was done cooking our traditional huge Sunday lunch of roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, and green beans. If we were lucky, there’d also be a vanilla Pepperidge Farms cake.

It took a while to get a spread like that together, so I was able to hear the first 15 or so songs before I had to cut out for about 30 minutes to eat. Then it was back to the headphones. Sometimes the rubber would give me a rash around my ears.

I don’t know why this was so important to me. Did it really make any difference if “Hot Child in the City” was number 17, falling three places from last week’s number 14? Could it have possibly mattered that Fleetwood Mac was back in our countdown, checking in at number 32 with “Dreams?”

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I became a music fan while listening to Casey Kasem, although the vast majority of what I wound up obsessing over was a direct reaction to the twaddle he was so often forced to play. He was nothing if not consistent. If the masses bought it, Casey would play it and act like it was worth buying, week after week after week after week. He knew, as they say, upon which side his bread had been buttered. He wasn't likely to say, "Jesus Christ, not the Little River Band again!"

I read in the paper today that Casey started hosting “American Top 40” on July 4, 1970, then left the show between 1988 and 1998, by which point I couldn’t have cared less. To give you an idea how long ago July 4, 1970 was, I’ve included a publicity shot of Casey dated several years after that: