"Wanna get down in a cool way? Picture yourself on a beautiful day...big bell bottoms and groovy long hair, walking in style with a portable CD player...NO! You would listen to the music on the AM radio...you could hear the music on the AM radio."
Those words were forever immortalized by Art Alexakis, the lead singer of the band Everclear, in the song he penned, released in 2000, entitled "AM Radio". If you ever want to hear it, it's off the band's album "Songs from an American Movie Vol. 1: Learning how to smile". It's a great tune.
Alexakis reminisces about growing up in southern California, during the 1970s listening to Top 40 music over an AM radio, which most broadcasters today find blasphemous, if not downright laughable. The most celebratory note of the song is a jingle from the legendary KHJ, played at the very beginning, followed by a static-ridden sample of 70's soul diva Jean's Knight's "Mr. Big Stuff", which establishes itself into the song.
It didn't seem that long ago when you could still find Top 40 music on an AM station. You still can find such stations, albeit in smaller markets and in much smaller numbers.
But stations broadcasting over the AM band have been shrinking over the past decade, giving way to FM and other forms of electronic media.
I'm not in favor of giving up on the band. At least not yet. Though I now consider myself retired from the business, my career, like those of many others, began on AM radio.
WACB in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, was known as "The Ace of Entertainment" in the late 1980s when I first joined the staff in May 1988. Satellite-delivered formats were emerging since the first half of the decade, but WACB remained live and local, with jocks on-site playing their music in real time, rather than engaging in the practice today known as 'voice-tracking', often involving jocks from other markets across the country, infamously mispronouncing town names.
We played real records. You know, the kind that are mostly black vinyl discs that can skip if they're not handled properly. What wasn't on records was played from cartridges, called 'carts' for short. They operated on the same principle as an 8-track tape, but without the four program separation.
Records skipped. Carts wowed or snarled. Both happened on the air. And sometimes it even happened during the 'restroom records'. This was a list of songs that every rock jock knew that were long enough to assure a non-rushed bathroom break.
"Light My Fire" by The Doors. "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Anything other than "Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin. "MacArthur Park" by Richard Harris. And there was the granddaddy of them all..."American Pie" by Don McLean. There's many others, but those are the ones immediately coming to mind as I'm writing this.
Good times.
And we more or less programmed our own music. We followed the music clock (most of the time), but more often than not, we skipped over song titles we didn't like printed on the 3 x 5" index cards and kept going until we found one we did.
And it didn't matter to the majority of our listeners.
We were allowed to be creative and chatty. But as the years progressed and FCC ownership and operational rules were relaxed, in came the multiconglomerates swallowing up signals, mostly high-powered FMs, automating them, and any AM's that were included were either switched to syndicated news/talk formats, also automated, or turned off altogether.
The number of AM's has shrunk. It will continue to shrink.
It has to.
Most of the stations that have disappeared are low-powered with complicated and expensive directional antenna arrays, and are too close to major population centers to really be missed by the overall majority, as broadcast television and city newspaper can provide local news in a much more superior manner, thanks to the advances made in modern technology.
I for one, am not ready to give up on AM radio, but a leaner, trimmer band is necessary to assure the band's survival. It has become the proving ground for up and coming radio talent. If these 'farm clubs' are allowed to die, where is the next generation going to go for spring training?
And that's a whole other argument to be featured next week.
Pardon the pun, but stay tuned.
NEXT WEEK: Retirement from Radio
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