Pressure Night

When the sales rep first handed the radio station’s rate card to the client, he burst out laughing. The rep sat there mortified, and her mortification got even worse when the client called to his partner in the outer office, “Come on in here! You’ve got to see this!” She thought they were laughing because [...]

Top 5: A Music Massacre Montage of Something Else Beginning With “M”

(Edited to add a link.)
What makes old record charts endlessly enchanting to me is how they can be viewed as a montage of people, places, and moments. Take the chart from WGRQ in Buffalo, New York, dated October 1, 1973:
2. “Heartbeat–It’s a Lovebeat”/DeFranco Family (holding at 2). What radio people call the “news sounder” is [...]

Can’t Get Enough

All my life, there’s a sound I’ve associated with early fall. It’s the trilling of the tree frog. I have never actually seen a tree frog—in fact, I don’t even know if the sound is really made by tree frogs, or if it comes from something else. But my mother always called them tree frogs, [...]

Backstage Pass

A backstage pass is one of the most sought-after totems in rock—but it’s also one of the more overrated. You expect tables laden with food, liquor flowing freely, and dissipated rock stars cavorting with scantily clad groupies. Maybe that happens with acts like the Stones or Van Halen, but in my experience, backstage is mostly [...]

There Will Now Be a Short Intermission

I’m taking the day off today and letting some of my favorite bloggers do the heavy lifting instead.
–Any Major Dude With Half a Heart recognizes the greatness of early 70s soul.
–At Bloggerhythms, Charlie picks 10 lesser-known/underrated Beatles songs.
–Barely Awake in Frog Pajamas welcomes you to July 36th.
–SHHH/Peaceful breaks down the American Top 40 broadcast from [...]

Distant Whispers, Rockin’ Hard

Many people reading this blog never listened regularly to music on AM radio. The generation born after 1970 got its first music fix either from FM or MTV, and therefore has little use for AM, unless they’re looking for talk shows or sports play-by-play. A few AM stations are still playing pop, soul, or country [...]