Surfin' the AM waves............

When I was a kid I remember radio being a blast, plain and simple. AM was the standard, and FM was something that we really didn’t know all that much about. FM was out there, kind of mysterious, it was kind of like the UHF on TV, which was channel 32 in Chicago. Weird stations doing strange things.

AM was where the music came from. The Beatles, Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, The Troggs, The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, all the stuff that is heard on the “Oldies” stations now. And not surprisingly a lot of what I still listen to today. When I first heard it, it was coming from a small counter top radio, tinny, and a little scratchy.

There’s a station in Phoenix now, 1480 AM, which is playing a lot of that again. What’s really cool about it is that for someone my age (do the math!), hearing “She Loves You,” coming over the AM airwaves again is the way I first heard it. A little tinny, and a little scratchy, and there’s something calming about that.

Last week my wife and I, and Hobie (the best dog in the world), took a quick overnighter to Payson. A chance to get away for a day and spend some much deserved time with each other. I take a small radio with me (they used to be called transistor radios), and when I’m relaxing, I’ll put on the headphones and cruise up and down the AM dial, looking for something fun to listen to.

Payson has a station that was doing something I haven’t heard in years. They were running a buy, sell, trade show, where listeners would call in with what they had, or what they were looking for. It was one of the things that local radio stations did before going conglomerate. It’s nice to know that some of that still happens.

Listening at night to AM during the winter gives me a chance to pick up stations from quite a distance. Years ago there was an evening when I picked up KOMA in Rocky Point, Mexico. It would fade in and out, but it was there. I remember sitting on top of a cabin one evening, KOMA tuned in, listening to Sundown (Gordon Lightfoot), while watching the sun go down over the Sea of Cortez. That is golden.

One of these days I’ll go into my nearly career in radio. Forks in the road take us in different directions. Sometimes willingly, sometimes kicking and screaming. I was talking with a friend of mine recently who’s been in radio his entire working career. He pointed out that you can either be a jock, or flip burgers, it’s merely variations on the same theme. I ended up on the burger route, for the time being.