This one's from my formative years and that's pretty much all I wanted to be - an all American boy. Meaning I played baseball, rode my bicycle and then as I grew a bit older transitioned from bicycles to motorcycles and hot rods. And, of course, there was the music and the discovery of girls. I was a little young for the start of rock and roll and the hot rodding movement but like most guys my age I was certainly influenced by it.
We all have a soundtrack to our lives. I was heavily influenced by Chicago radio back in the sixties. WLS and WCFL were the two biggies for rock and roll. WLS had Clark Weber - in fact I was a Weber Commando. WMPP - "Where the Brothers Are" - played R&B. All three of these were AM stations. Later FM stations became the go-to with WSDM, "the station with the girls" and WXRT coming on at 3:00 in the afternoon at first and then going full time. WXRT became my station of choice for years. I've still got a button tuned to them on the truck radio.
Starting on Saturday nights I'd listen to the Prairie Home Companion, Mike Flynn's Folk Sampler, Fiona Ritchie's Thistle and Shamrock, and later jazz programming on WBEZ. If I stayed up real late I'd catch Word Jazz - an acquired taste but interesting just the same. Sundays were Piano Jazz and then Dick Buckley playing "the good old good ones", His traditional jazz selections always seemed to reflect the weather of the weekend. If it was a beautiful spring afternoon he'd be swinging. A gray early winter day would be more subdued ballads. The selections were always good, however, coming from his own extensive collection of records. Hard to find any jazz music on the radio any more. I listened to a lot of jazz programming when I had Sirius Radio but they never played the variety that Dick Buckley did - Philly Joe Jones, Bix Biederbeck, Red Nichols, Louis Armstrong and all the other greats from 30s to the 50s.
As I told Surly in a comment the other day, I've got a turntable to convert my LPs into digital recordings. I've got at least 300 albums that I can draw from - jazz, blues, rock, country - to get my own soundtrack playing out in the shop. I need to take an evening, pick out a few of the ones I haven't heard in a while and start converting them. What I'd really like to do is start that low wattage radio station I've thought about for many years. Radio Free Kersey right Kevin?
Stay safe and keep on a rocking!
4 comments:
I still talk to people about WRFK - Radio Free Kersey. I wish we would have been able to figure that project out.....
I'm sure we would have been able to if we'd gotten a bit of support from above. I did enjoy our release time day to look into it. Sure beat sitting in the auditorium listening to Olga for the third time or whatever else was scheduled that day.
WSDM, smack dab in the middle of your dial! first time i came across patti hayes, followed her for a long time.
tvi
Yvonne Daniels was the one I listened to the most - she worked the evening shift as I recall.
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