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 [...]

Jock Around the Clock

One of my Internet pals posted a link yesterday about the history of radio in Arkansas,  including a few paragraphs about the legendary KAAY and its most famous show, Beaker Street. But it was something else in the article that struck me as I read it this morning: “[Future Stax Records executive] Al Bell learned [...]

Top 5: Glory Days

When we look back on the summers we remember best, most of them come from when we were in school. That shouldn’t be news to anybody—once we enter the working world for good, we lose the sense of summer as a discrete season unlike the rest of the year. With little to separate it from [...]

Insert Your Own Title Here

When whiteray and I got together last weekend, he asked me if I ever worried about running out of things to write about. Well, not until today. Pending the next bit of inspiration, here’s a selection of this and that from here and there.
Whiteray and I also talked about the concept of music as memoir—relating [...]

Arrivals and Departures

Odds and ends in the wake of the weekend. . . .
First: I met the newest program director in our group yesterday: John Sebastian. No, not that one—the other one. The radio John Sebastian is one of the great programmers in the industry, with stints at KHJ in Los Angeles and KDWB in Minneapolis during [...]

Up to News Time

One of the many skills radio jocks used to have (a skill not needed much anymore) is the ability to back-time. In days of yore, stations often carried a national network newscast at the top of an hour—say 12 noon. Listeners would hear the last record of the hour end within a few seconds of [...]