Old Time Radio

A few weeks ago, I was talking to someone from the Buffalo Broadcasters Association about a story. The group tries to preserve the area's broadcast history; it has a Hall of Fame induction dinner every year, and is currently trying to save some television news film from the Sixties and Seventies.

He made a remark that has stuck with me a bit. He said that no one wants to be in radio anymore.

And that's something of a shame.

Ever get an old-timer going on the magic of the radio? The role of imagination for the listener? The thrill of hearing a great song on the air for the first time?

Radio has gone through a few phases over the years. When it first became a commercial product in 1920 (many of our readers no doubt stayed up late to hear the Harding-Cox election returns on KDKA in Pittsburgh that year), it quickly became an important part of daily life. I guess it resembled network television in its mixture of entertainment and news.

When television came along for good in the Fifties, radio had to adapt. And it did so brilliantly, catching the wave of the music revolution that was just coming in. The disk jockeys seemed hip, and the music they played seemed to explode out of the speakers of your car radio or of that "tiny" transistor radio you carried everywhere.

But Top Forty radio essentially blew up in the early 1980's. The idea of everyone listening to the same music -- more or less -- became antiquated, and the audience fractured into several pieces.

The landscape today isn't so pretty. AM radio is mostly news/talk, with callers and hosts providing more heat than light (in Bob Costas' phrase). The news aspect of the business is disappearing quickly, except in cities big enough to support an all-news operation. Over on FM, music is still played, but most people can only stand the format of a station or two. And overshadowing it all is the relentless cost-cutting of station ownership, which has brought satellite programming to many stations and thus eliminating any local flavor entirely.

Someone once told me in the mid-1980's that anyone who could get out of radio did so by the time they were 30. There are a few mature voices still on the air, thankfully, but they are difficult to find.

I still listen to the radio in the car. A local alt-rock station keeps me a little bit current on music, and a baseball game at night still sounds good while driving. But I do wonder if radio will have a third act of relevance in the near future.

Old friend

I spent a little time recently with something of a long-lost friend: The World Radio-TV Handbook.

You have to be a radio hobbyist to get the reference. The WRTH is the best book out there for telling what's on radio and television internationally. It's for those who like to listen to the radio to hear distant stations, as it is full of program listings, addresses and other information. If you want to write to Trans World Radio of Bonaire (Netherlands Antilles) or Radio Prague, that's the reference source.

I bought the book through a discounter, Hamilton Books (http://www.hamiltonbooks.com/). It took me instantly back to the early 1970's, when I used to listen to such stations. I was in high school then, and a friend down the street was heavily into radio. Not only was he a ham operator, but he had a big radio and listened to as many stations as possible -- AM (medium wave, as it is called internationally) or Shortwave, mostly. (Distant FM and TV stations are hard to receive on a regular basis, although it can be done.)

He got me interested, as I was already doing some listening to out-of-town shows and sports events. I quickly fell into the hobby, an I in turn convinced a couple of friends to follow. We had a nice little group there for a while. We even took a tour of a local radio station one Thanksgiving; as I recall the chief engineer seemed happy that some teen-agers seemed to care about what he did for a living.

I used to stay up until all hours, hoping stations would sign off so I could hear the stations behind them come through louder and clearer. In hindsight, I'm surprised I don't have hearing problems. After hearing the station, I'd send details of my reception and the station would send back a QSL (letter or card) saying essentially, "That was us." In hindsight, I wonder how many people checked -- I only got a couple of letters out of a few hundred that said "not us." The mail usually was pretty exciting, as it often had material from foreign countries. Heck, Radio Havana sent a 5x7 of Fidel Castro. AM station receptions would be reported to the International Radio Club of America (IRCA), a group of hobbyists that compared notes, essentially.

Well, I went off to college, AM stations continued the trend of staying on all night/every night (making it difficult to hear bunches of them), and the big radio and antenna disappeared frm my room one day. (Insert a Puff the Magic Dragon reference here if you like.) I don't even remember selling them, but I certainly did. I still listened to out-of-town games once in a while, but I was generally out of touch. My only contact came when traveling, when I could rattle off a couple of AM stations in a given city. Seattle? "Honey, put on KOMO, 1000."

The WRTH was only $5.95 for the 2006 edition -- I think it is $29.95 normally -- and it surprised me how much I recalled and how much things had changed. When did Radio Moscow change its name? When did Trans World Radio reduce its power to 100,000 watts? When did the AM band go past 1600 kilohertz? That doesn't even include the Internet, which makes it easy to hear distant radio stations at all hours. I put on the Voice of Russia the other day on line; it's almost as boring as it was as Radio Moscow back in the Seventies.

I e-mailed my friend about my experience, and he's at the same stage I am. As he put it, he doesn't listen to the radio anymore, and he doesn't get the neighborhood together for pickup football or basketball games. Sometimes things go away without telling you they aren't coming back.

But at least the WRTH is on my bookshelf again. We'll see if it gets opened again.

Less than classic

I recently attended a concert of one of my favorite bands, a group that has been recording together for more than 30 years. It was a fine time, as usual, but the show serves here as an introduction to a relatively easy target: classic rock formats in radio.

The concert was co-sponsored by the local classic rock station. OK, nice to have it help out. The show featured the usual mix of new songs off the latest CD and the greatest hits, more or less. After the show, when we got in the car for the drive home, we turned on the radio for the traditional "concert replay." Sure enough, it was there.

But a funny thing happened during that replay. Nothing that was recorded after the mid-1980's was included. It was almost as if nothing musically had happened in the past two decades. Since the band played nine songs off the new CD, you might guess correctly that this shortened the concert replay considerably.

It's pretty typical of classic rock stations, which aren't quite conservative enough for Mitt Romney's tastes. There's never any risks taken on these stations. You almost never hear a song that you haven't heard a few thousand times before. It's the same old/same old, hour after hour. It won't make you turn the dial with an objectionable song, but it won't lure you in to hear something new either.

Now, this goes against a long tradition of rock music's roots, which challenge conventional thinking and expanded horizons. But I'm not naive enough to think that something like that will happen on stations anxious for any sort of ratings. Heck, there's money involved here.

Still, would it kill this station to play new music from bands they are playing anyway? Would it be better to play "Lonesome Days" or "Open All Night" by Bruce Springsteen once in a while, rather than "Born to Run" for the 90th time this month? Maybe "Magnification" from Yes rather than "Roundabout"? "We Got a Hit" by the Who instead of "Won't Get Fooled Again"?

Classic rock is comforting in big cities when traveling, because at least it's familiar and usually doesn't require a major search when navigating Interstates. Otherwise, I prefer to take the time to find something a little more adventurous.