“Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.”
- Martin Scorsese
Some of us grew up with the ubiquity of Casey Kasem's American Top-40. Every Saturday or Sunday, there it was, in all of its corny wholesomeness. It began on July 4, 1970 and Casey hosted it continuously until 1998. Those were the days when the Top-40 had some cultural currency. Because listening options were fewer, the Top-40 had a way of bonding us. We all more or less knew what the popular tunes were, or at least the ones record companies told us were popular. Even horrible songs were part of our collective conversation. We could hate them together as a people…The Pena Colada Song, anyone?
So, once a week, there was Casey with his warm hug of a voice, counting down the hits. He would intersperse genial introductions of the artists along with heartwarming long distance dedications, like, “Now, here's Love Will Keep Us Together for Sally in Omaha all the way from Dave in Helsinki, Finland.” It was all a cozy affair. One fun thing was when a song that was completely outside the typical mainstream variety would sneak its way onto the chart. That's when you got to hear Casey say something like, “And now, up from number 32 to number 25 this week, here are the boys from Hanover, Germany, the Scorpions with Rock You Like a Hurricane.” That was the best.
When I was in Japan in the Marine Corps in 1979, the American Top 40 was a life line for us. We were hearing the same tunes the folks back home were. We didn't have many other musical options. We'd get it a week late, but still, it kept us connected. There was always ongoing debate and back and forth about what was good and what sucked. Twenty-year old Marines have strong opinions.
No matter how you feel about it, Casey's Top-40 is part of our cultural history. But here's something I learned recently that I thought was…interesting It's not that Casey was the voice of Shaggy in Scooby Doo. I think that's pretty well known. No, this had to do with his final years and beyond. He died in 2014 at the age of 82.
This comes from the book, Where Are They Buried?:
In 2007 Casey had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system similar to Parkinson's disease. When Casey's health had deteriorated to a point where he was unable to care for himself, a bizarre feud between Casey's second wife, Jean, and the children of Casey's first marriage emerged as Jean prevented any contact with her husband by anyone for months. Over Jean's vehement protests, in May 2014 a court granted Casey's daughter Kerri conservatorship over him, which included the right to make medical decisions on his behalf. The only problem was that nobody knew where Casey was as Jean had spirited him from a nursing home days earlier, saying only that “he was no longer in the United States.” Days later, however, Casey was located in Washington State, though it hardly mattered, as he was unresponsive by then and died two weeks later.
Then things got really weird. A judge granted Kerri a restraining order to prevent Jean from cremating Casey so that an autopsy could be performed, but when Kerri went to hand deliver the order to the funeral home, she learned that Jean had had Casey moved to a Canadian funeral home, where the restraining order fell on deaf ears due to lack of jurisdiction. Finally, for completely unexplained reasons, Jean had Casey buried in an unmarked grave at Oslo Western Civil Cemetery in Norway, a country where Casey had no relations, ties, or heritage, and that, in fact, he had never even visited. He lies alone there today in the cold ground, where he will most probably spend eternity. The whole thing makes one wonder.