Photo by Sara A. Finke
I didn’t know Bob Reuter, but like so many other people, I was inspired by him.
I first became aware of him through his work as a photographer. His photographs of some of South City’s favorite denizens in South City’s favorite haunts were at once contemporary (especially if you knew his subjects) and yet seemed to come from a different time. In the era of digital cameras, Photoshop and its ubiquitous Unsharp Mask, Reuter’s grainy, high speed, low light, after hours portraits were decidedly analog, all the way down to the sprocket holes of the negatives showing in the prints. His work harkened back to the street reportage of Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks Sr.
From Bob Reuter – St. Louis Photographer and Performing Songwriter on Facebook
One day, channel surfing on the radio, I heard what sounded like a lunatic screaming over a gospel record. He was going on about what a glorious day it was and how he had been blessed by the healing powers of music! Halleluiah! He sounded like Dr. Johnny Fever from “WKRP in Cincinnati.” At first I thought he was just doing an intro over an instrumental at the top of the song, but he kept going. It started to get annoying. I wanted to hear the song. As a student of communications, it was offending my delicate sensibilities; the DJ doesn’t talk over the record! Then I was charmed by his sheer audacity; he seemed determined to testify over the entire song. Then I realized that the things he was saying were beautiful, poetic and sometimes hilarious. The song ended and in a voice both gruff and melodic, he said, “This is Bob Reuter… and you’re listening to Bob’s Scratchy Records.” Hmm… so the photographer was a DJ too.
I started listening every week, both to hear what he would say and what he would play. At the time his show was aired back-to-back on Fridays with Sherri Danger’s “Dangerous Curves” on KDHX 88.1, the best hours of local radio ever produced in my humble opinion.
My Fridays went like this: Howard Stern on the drive to work, NPR until the end of “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, and then I turned to 88.1 to get a musical education. I’d listen with a pad and paper beside me to jot down songs and artists I wanted to look up later. I signed up for Reuter’s weekly playlist newsletter. Most of the songs he played sounded familiar and yet I was unfamiliar with most of the songs and many of the artists. It sounded like rock & roll and soul hits from the 50s, 60s and 70s, but these songs were not hits. These almost classics had somehow fallen into the dust bin of music history for Bob Reuter, with this encyclopedic knowledge and impeccable taste, to unearth for a new generation of listeners. I once commented on his Facebook page that I was a much cooler person for having discovered his show, to which he responded, “Hey man, you can’t blame that shit on me!”[Which, oddly enough, seemed to mirror a scene between John Cusack and The Swanky Modes in the 1988 film, “The Tape Heads.”]
One year, I was celebrating my birthday on the patio at Atomic Cowboy. There was great 70s funk and R&B playing. It reminded me of a tiny little hipster club I’d been to in San Francisco that played lots of Stevie Wonder and James Brown, but nothing popular, nothing that had been released as a single. I looked at the DJ booth and saw an old gray-haired white man and thought, as soon as he starts his set and whatever awesome Sirius Satellite radio channel this is gets turned off, I’ll go back inside the bar. Well, the music stayed good and with each new song I checked the DJ booth to see what was taking the old white guy so long to get started, until finally my ageism and racial prejudice gave way to the fact that it was the old white guy who was spinning all this good shit. Who was this dude? I took a good look and realized it was Bob Reuter. I had never seen him in person before.
I met Bob Reuter only once, when my documentary “The Roof is on Fire” screened with a documentary about him called “Broken and Wonderful.” Mine was a feature and his was a short, which put me in the very unenviable position of having to follow Bob Reuter. After the screening, we shook hands in the lobby of The Tivoli and I congratulated him on the film. The film had been the first time I had heard his original music. Luckily, sometime after, a friend invited me for a drink at Mangia Italiano, neither of us knowing that Bob Reuter and Thee Dirty South had a gig there that night. Their set was everything I expected from Bob based on what I knew of him. It was broken and wonderful. But mostly wonderful.
Alas, Howard Stern moved from terrestrial to satellite radio, KDHX moved Sherri Danger from Friday to Monday, KWMU (in the most bone-headed programming decision in the history of public radio) moved Terry Gross from noon to 9 p.m. and now with the untimely death of Bob Reuter, the Golden Age of my Friday morning/afternoon radio listening has officially come to an end.
I became familiar with Bob Reuter at a time in my life when my friends were starting to get married, have kids, buy houses and move out of the city; all the things I wasn’t doing. Perhaps it was a midlife crisis, but looking at Bob Reuter, more than 20 years my senior, still kicking ass as a photographer, musician, radio personality and club DJ, gave me hope. It meant that getting older didn’t have to mean becoming normal. I once said that Bob Reuter was the best argument for living past 50.
His was a life well lived that ended too soon. Just in the few years I knew of him, he shared so much beauty with the world. He was a true inspiration. He will be missed.
From Bob Reuter – St. Louis Photographer and Performing Songwriter on Facebook