So I noticed something when my alarm went off this morning – the sky appears noticeably darker when I wake up. This morning, it immediately brought to mind that it was August 1st. August 1st was a significant annual event in my youth as it was the day the AM radio station in town signed off at 8:30 instead of 9:00. Sharing a channel with a ‘clear channel’ radio station in another country, it was only allowed to be on the air from dawn until dusk. Most every evening in the summer, you’re sitting their listening to the ball game and suddenly the announcement of ‘this concludes our broadcast day’. My understanding is that these days, the station is allowed to broadcast at night at greatly reduced power, but is playing Southern Gospel Music.
Why listen to AM radio growing up? It was almost a necessary evil. I lived less than a mile from 50,000 watt FM station that played… wait for it… elevator music. ‘Beautiful music’ is what they called it. ‘Hell’ is what I called it. Just about everywhere on the dial… e v e r y w h e r e… you heard this station playing instrumental after instrumental designed to put anyone under the age of thirty into a coma. Those above 30, like my parents? They sang along. Imagine, if you will, being a thirteen-year-old kid lying in bed with the knowledge that the snow was piling up outside and desperately wanting to know if school was on the next day and having to endure the agony of ‘beautiful music’ while doing so. It almost wasn’t worth it. There was a reason growing up that I continually stated that I was in the ‘<radio station call letters> Death Z0ne’.
Living where I did growing up, our idea of fun, once we reached driving age, was driving somewhere we could listen to some decent music. A mere mile away from my house, you could start hearing pop music stations, but that isn’t necessary what I was looking for. Being in an area that was quite rural, country stations abounded, but I never have and never will develop a liking for that crap – Rock and Roll was what we were looking for. Evenings like those involved finding a secluded spot on the top of the hill where we could sit in the car and listen to a station sixty miles away for an hour or two. As we grew older and bolder and more able to secure ‘adult beverages’ we located a hill twenty miles away where we could listen to radio from the big city eighty miles away while drinking ourselves into a semi-stupor. That was the saying in my home town: ‘There’s only two things to do in down – drink and <blank>.’ You can probably fill in the blank.
For the record, I grew up with three television stations… four if you count a really fuzzy one. When my kids tell me they are bored, I absolutely have to laugh.
I recently went back to my little town. The Rock and Roll station I listened to growing up can now be heard quite well most everywhere in town. The ‘beautiful music’ station cleaned up their signal and changed to rock and roll shortly after I moved away, but has now joined the legion of country stations in the area. All of this matters not today – you can listen to anything you want at anytime you want courtesy of mp3s and the internet.
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