Pop Music And Memories

Radio – it is a term that means different things to different generations. To my grandparents it was home entertainment before television. To my children it is something largely irrelevant in an era of streaming music. But to me, I still think of radio as a place to listen to music.

It as been a long time since I regularly listened to the radio. Until recently, that is. Part of the problem was me: it was around 1972-73 that I drifted away from the hits being served up by the music industry and in favor of a lifelong deep-dive into vintage jazz and big-band music from my parents (or even grandparents’) generation. And part of the reason for my change in tastes was because I wasn’t really crazy about the new music that was coming out.

I would occasionally find a radio station that played old stuff, but those were short-lived affairs caused by format changes at small AM stations that were trying to find (and keep) an audience that advertisers would put up with. The last station that played anything even remotely like jazz went away in Fort Wayne in the late 70’s (WGL). But a couple of times in later years I would make a dive into rock & roll oldies stations for a palate-cleansing change of pace. Sadly, as I have continued to age, those stations have dried up and blown away too.

But recently, I found myself surfing the radio dial when setting up the radio in a new-to-me car. I came across the weak fringe of an FM signal playing some random song from my childhood. At a station break, a DJ identified the station as WNAP. I did not grow up in Indianapolis, but knew about WNAP by reputation. Starting in the late 1960’s, WNAP was the call signal for a station at 93.1 FM in Indianapolis. It became the hot hits FM station in the late 60’s through much of the 1970’s, and was known for the nickname it gave itself – “The Buzzard”. And for those not from around here, the call letters were a play on an old-time nickname for Indianapolis – Naptown.

I had known that the old WNAP changed its call letters/ownership/format(s) decades ago and thought the old station was in that thing known as the dustbin of history. Then, at some point, the call letters were recycled for a small radio station in Muncie, Indiana that plays an all-oldies format. In what they call “The Buzzard Radio Network”, the proprietors have patched together a small number of low-output FM station in central Indiana and one of them is kinda, sorta available in my area.

The game-changer occurred during the fade-out of the signal as I drove. I had remembered looking up the station online when I first found it, and recalled that it also broadcasts online at http://www.wnapfm.com. With a strong streaming signal (and with the ability to link my phone to the radios in my personal car and in my work truck) I have once again listening to real, live DJs spin the hits.

This station claims to play nothing newer than 1979, and also claims to play not the same 350 songs that most other stations play, but the full 4000+ songs that make up hit radio from the beginnings of the rock era (which most will say was 1955) through the 70’s.

It is amazing how music can take you to a time or place in your past. As I listened to the amazing array of songs being played, a few stood out.

“Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley, 1956. I had a fascination with record players and records from when I could first remember. For reasons I cannot fathom, my mother let me work the family phonograph, which I did with some frequency. It was probably in an effort to preserve her own records that she facilitated a donation of outdated 45s from the next door neighbor’s much older children. One of them was “Hound Dog”, which I probably played about fifty million times from the time I got it as a little tyke until I got much older and quit spinning 45’s. This song dredges up many memories of time spent with my first best friend (and next door neighbor) Kevin Bordner as we both played the records we had been given by older kids.

“Sherry” (The Four Seasons, 1962), “Splish Splash” (Bobby Darrin, 1958) and “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini) (Bryan Hyland, 1960) are some others that make me recall those sessions where the little RCA Victor 45 rpm record player (also from Mom) kept Kevin and me out of our mothers’ hair for hours at a time.

“Walk Away Renee” by The Left Banke, 1966. It is a scorching hot day in the late summer of 1966. I am riding in the back seat of my mother’s 1964 Oldsmobile Cutlass. The dark green vinyl seat, that kind that sticks to the exposed skin on my shorts-wearing legs, sears a new patch of skin every time I move. Mom’s AM radio is tuned to WOWO in Fort Wayne, as always, and this tune is on the radio. I don’t really like the song, the singers seem kind of whiny. I wonder when the station will play something good again, like “Wild Thing” (The Troggs), “Black is Black” (Los Bravos) or “Mother’s Little Helper” (The Rolling Stones). That last one may have been the first 45 r.p.m. single I ever bought. Though perhaps not with my own money, because I had not yet started the first grade of school. “Walk Away Renee” will eventually become a favorite song of mine, and will buttress my opinion that 1966 was one of the best-ever years for pop music on the radio. It may not be an opinion you share, but that just means you are wrong.

“Ma Belle Amie” by Tee-Set (1969). It is the late winter or very early spring of 1970 and my mother, sister, grandma and I are visiting my aunt, uncle and cousins in Saginaw, Michigan. It must be a Saturday because my Uncle Bob has offered to take we younger kids sledding. There is a fair amount of snow on the ground and we all pile into Uncle Bob’s maroon 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 to head for the sledding hill. The aging Ford fires up. The radio is already on, and out comes this tune which is completely new to me. It sounds so “mod” with its heavy organ content, and I wonder if this is only something played in Michigan because I have never heard it at home. I am wrong about this, of course, and eventually find out that it might have sounded odd because it was a band from The Netherlands. I am not sure I have heard this one since the end of maybe 1971. The funny thing is, I don’t like the song all that much. But boy does it ever evoke a specific memory.

As does “Indiana Wants Me” by the one-hit wonder R. Dean Taylor from later in 1970, which I remember playing on the radio in the house as I was getting ready for school one morning. Or “The Tears Of A Clown” by Smoky Robinson that I recall playing in from the car radio on a rainy fall day on the way to a meeting during my brief career in the Boy Scouts.

The unique thing about this station is that it is listener supported. Although the DJs will periodically hit listeners up for some operating cash, the station is blessedly free from the annoying commercial breaks – and from the annoying advertisers who no longer care about those of us who are too old to pay much attention to what they are selling.

How long will I keep listening to the anonymous volunteer DJs who all use “Buzzard” as part of a pseudonym in an effort to keep oldies radio alive? I don’t know – although I do know that sooner or later I will become sated on the stuff being being played there and will dive back into my finely aged meat and potatoes where all of the basses were upright, the instruments were unplugged and where the records spun at 78 rpm. But until then, I will let the Buzzard unlock some more memories from the dustiest corners of my mind. And if you are in a mood to sample some (or more than some) of the tunes of the 1960s and 70s, you can stream them right along with me (by clicking on the link).

Lede graphic: c. 1976 logo for the old WNAP 93 FM.

For more about the reincarnation of WNAP, here is a 2022 profile written about the station’s rebirth. As of early 2025 it is still here and bigger than ever.

63 thoughts on “Pop Music And Memories”

  2. Hi there. You list some great songs. Walk Away Renee, for instance, never gets old. I live in southeast Pennsylvania. I’m amazed by the large number of AM and FM stations around here. You’d think most of them would have passed away by now, but somehow they haven’t.

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  3. There’s an independent radio station where I live that plays a great mix of “classic rock.” Big hits and lesser known bands/songs. Much better than the iHeartRadio, etc., stations.

    It’s my main station, along with the local public radio classical station.

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  4. Never heard of Walk Away Renee before, is it a regional hit or did I just miss that? Can’t say it’s made a good first impression.

    Interesting how you’re about 5 years older than me, but you pop music exposure is about 15-20 years different. No popular music at my house growing up, and I didn’t take notice at all until my later high school years.

    Music radio is a bit of a wasteland, a game I play with myself when commuting is to scan the stations and see if I can find a song I like before arriving at my destination. Sometimes I don’t reach the goal in a half hour.

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    • My area (as an adult) always had limited choices in radio, so it has been mostly a wasteland for a long time, and I seldom listened. Only when I was forced into setting the preset buttons on a car radio (something my German-raised background says you simply HAVE to do because those are the rules) did I run up and down the dial a few times. I have played a variety of your game where I run through my six presets in a row and see if there is something on I can take. My kids got me a music streaming subscription for Christmas, so I will probably not do a lot more radio in the car. In my truck, however, WNAP it is a great low-attention streaming option that bombards me with music (some of which is better than others) and doesn’t keep wasting my time with commercials.

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  5. Believe it or not, I actually owned Walk Away Rene by the Left Bank on vinyl, recently given away with the rest of my vinyl to a young lad with a high end turntable and a lust for the past.

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    • I’m trying to remember if I own it too. I went on a thrift shop/garage sale spree in the early 80s to pump up my collection of 60s stuff (to put on cassettes, of course 🙂 ). That may have been one of my finds. You are ahead of me on the clean-out phase of life.

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      • BTW, there is also a killer version of this by Rickie Lee Jones, on a vinyl 10” EP I also had (and gave away), called Girl At Her Volcano. It was actually her third release at the beginning of her career, on the market around 1983, and a record of all covers, including cuts of songs by Julie Christy, Julie London, and a relatively little heard Lani Hall cut (Lani of the Sergio Mendez Brazil 66 band, and Herb Alperts wife!).

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  6. Found this on YouTube–love listening to it: Alan Freed’s “Moondog Show” on WJW in Cleveland (also heard in Newark NJ), April 6th 1954. This is like “pre-Rock & Roll”–in fact Alan was the first person to use that term on the radio. This is like rhythm & blues and jazz morphing into rock & roll. Virtually no one else was playing this stuff on the air at that time. I picture all the “hoods”, “tough guys” and “bad girls” tuning in on their car radios or consoles at home, and digging it (and their parents hating it!)

    This is music that you would have to go to black clubs in “bad areas” of Cleveland and Newark to hear otherwise, and Alan Freed was now exposing it to a mass audience. Even today, I have never heard most of these numbers, as oldies stations and DJs always start at December 1955 with “Rock Around The Clock”.

    Alan Freed is such a great announcer that even his commercials are interesting. The products advertised say a lot about the demographics of his listeners: Erin Brew Beer (which I heard is terrible, but cheap); Sulphur 8 for your hair; Horn’s offering hydraulic brake adjustments at low prices; gospel concerts at black churches, etc.

    Thanks to YouTube I can be a member of the Moondog Kingdom, 71 years later!

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    • That recording is a lot of fun! Music really changed after the war. Jazz turned inward and became like a closed club. Pop music became progressively duller, and left a huge void for something new. As you note, the change from R&B to rock and roll was not as clean as most think.

      The early 50s was also a fascinating time for radio, that was looking for a survival path after television took off. Guys like Alan Freed provided radio with a lifeline that would last for the next 25 years.

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  7. Wow, did this bring back memories. I grew up in a house across the street from a top 40 AM station in Springfield, IL (WCVS). Spent a lot of time at the station, to the point of being an annoying presence I’m sure. Had I received a modicum of guidance, I probably could have parlayed my interest into a job and who knows, perhaps an entirely different career, but I was just a stupid kid then.

    In my teens I got a multi band radio and spent hours listening to AM stations across the country, to name a few: WOAI – San Antonio, WWWE (3 double U E) Cleveland, KAAY – Little Rock (Beaker street), WWL -New Orleans (the evening “Road Gang” truckers show), and of course WLS -Chicago (morning Animal Stories and evening ‘boogie check’). Yes, I was a loner and a bit of a nerd. What’s worse I guess is that I can remember all that in minute detail!

    Thanks for helping me go back in my mind to a much simpler time in my life.

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    • WOWO (1190 AM) in my home town of Fort Wayne was a big 50,000 watt clear channel broadcaster in my youth. I heard many stories of people who could pick it up from halfway across the country. By the time I was in my teens though, FM was displacing AM for music.

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  9. You’re so totally right about how music (and I would argue smells and even tastes) can trigger deep and powerful memories. Clearly something about how the human brain is wired.

    Walk Away Renee…one of my favorite songs too. As much as I love and associate the original Left Banke (with the “e” just to be different) version with AM car radio from a long time ago, I have to say that I’ve grown partial to the Linda Ronstadt version from what I think turned out to be one of her last recordings about 10 years ago. But Linda Ronstadt can be a bit polarizing, so I guess ones love of this version has something to do with what one thinks of Linda Ronstadt.

    I also have tremendously associative memories of Indiana Wants Me. This I recall being played absolutely endlessly during the summer of 1970. Even reading the name now instantly takes me back to a roadtrip my family made from Maryland to Downeast Maine that summer in a rented, purple, Dodge Polara. Our 1961 Plymouth had been deemed too unreliable to drive to Maine, and I guess my dad was trying out newer MoPars…as we wound up buying a 1971 Chrysler wagon the following winter. But that song…and my sister being continually car sick in the back seat next to me…that will always say Summer of 1970 to me.

    Finally, it is sad that there’s nearly no live-DJ jazz on the radio any longer. One station that I do listen to nearly daily and where at least the broadcast is live with a real DJ at least during most of the 7am to 5pm weekday span is WGMC in Rochester, NY. I listen streaming. A lot of standards, some big band (there’s a particular show for that and they mostly devote Fridays to it), but wonderfully live. It streams at jazz901.org

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    • Indiana Wants Me stuck out to a kid who lived in Indiana. Then (as now) entertainment revolved around the coasts, with some Chicago and some Nashville thrown in. The fact that a big record star sang about Indiana was both strange and thrilling to me. And wow, who could ever forget sitting next to a carsick sibling in a hot, purple Dodge!

      That sounds like a great station to try.

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  11. I more or less gave up on radio years ago. The classic rock station in Colorado Springs seemed like it was 90% commercials and ZZ Top.

    We recently moved away from that sprawling urban hellscape, and I’m once again listening to radio. It doesn’t play anything risky: all the stuff you know, nothing that’s not on a greatest hit CD. But… it’s kind of nice.

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    • That’s one of my gripes about radio. Once they hit on a format, the song selection is, as you say, nothing but “greatest hits”. WNAP goes beyond those confines and digs deeper into the old pop charts. They play the Beatles (at least one per hour) and the Stones, but also play The Archies and Nancy Sinatra.

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  12. Your post struck a chord with me — well, several of them, actually — because of my lifelong interest in music and in radio. I grew up in the rarefied environment of a family where the parents, a college professor and teacher respectively, were interested in classical music almost exclusively. In addition to my father’s record collection, we were treated to regular parties where musician friends came over to play chamber music in our home.

    In 1966, however, I was given a Get Smart Pen Radio, a creatively packed crystal set, and quickly gained an interest in picking up radio stations both distant and local. Some of the easiest to receive were the San Francisco Top 40 stations KYA and KFRC. I soon was able to listen to them through a speaker when I was given a hand-me-down General Electric table radio (AM only), which gave me electric shocks the one or two times I touched the back of it.

    I enjoyed the pop music of the time, however schlocky, and I became a Beatle fan, regularly buying their albums up until the White Album, at least. I remember the record store owner telling my worried mother, “he’ll grow out of it.” And grow out of pop and rock I did, by the time I was 18 or so. One reason was that those chamber music recitals had planted the seed for a lifelong interest; another reason was that I was a very unpopular, bullied child who was “on the spectrum” before they knew about such things, and rock was the tribal music of the oppressors.

    Post-retirement, I’ve had more free time to discover new (well, new-old) music and have also become more forgiving. I’ve even purchased some classic rock albums (Queen and Rolling Stones, for example) and admitted that they aren’t half bad. But more important, I’ve also been steadily consuming more and more jazz. My father had introduced me to Basie and Maynard Ferguson to some extent, and of course I’ve explored more and more ‘50s and ‘60s big band, but also moved more back in time to revel in Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and so many more. My wife and I are now Glenn Miller groupies and don’t miss a chance to attend concerts by the current GMO whenever we can.

    The point I’m slowly leading up to is one you’re probably aware of. Namely, there’s a surprising number of radio stations programming jazz these days. Many more, even locally, than when I was a kid. And a wealth of them on the Internet. I listen to them nightly and have ten or more as presets. If one of them starts playing a genre I don’t like — Latin jazz or be-bop for instance — I can switch to another almost instantly.

    Although the Internet brings these incredible riches, I can’t help but grieve for the state of AM radio. Always a radio buff, I still have a number of nice sets, but DX-ing is no fun any more when all the stations are playing the same syndicated, and usually rabidly right-wing, talk programs.

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    • Thanks for sharing your varied experiences! I have an appreciation for classical (that I have not indulged as often as I should) and a deep love for vintage jazz. But my recent radio oldies hits immersion has been satisfying too. There is so much out there for someone who is inclined to look for it.

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  13. Not to contradict Jeff Sun, there IS jazz radio available, it’s just a question of streaming them and finding out who actually has DJ’s. I’m absolutely sure there’s more than a few. Of course, the closest to me is WDCB, in Glen Ellyn, an x-urb of Chicago. Too low power to get on a radio, but easy to stream. Another is Blue Lake Public Radio 88.9 Grand Rapids Michigan, and a station I can actually pick up when the weather is “right”, as they say, “on the skip”, with the signal bouncing between Lake Michigan and the ionosphere! Great DJ’s on this. My local college radio stations do DJ announced and curated jazz radio a few programs a week, and WMSE has a DJ (announced and curated) Sunday morning Big Band show between 9am and Noon that’s been going on for over 32 years!

    I’m unlikely to stay where I am now, for the rest of my retired life, and as a search parameter, I started by using the following WIKI list that covers cities that have full time jazz stations. I am NOT a proponent of streaming, as I believe that it’s a real negative to live someplace that can’t seem to get quality broadcast stations of various genre’s you can play over the air. Even the city I live in now, had full time jazz radio, with paid DJ’s, for years until about 2006, then they went to satellite, then quit jazz entirely. I consider this to be a negative change that is a red flag for why I don’t need to be here any longer. No more information outlets for jazz events in my town.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jazz_radio_stations_in_the_United_States

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    • This is great info. We get a little bit of jazz on the radio with the station that broadcasts from the University of Indianapolis (WICR, I think) but their tastes are more modern and hard-bop oriented than mine are.

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      • JP, I was a long time WICR listener when I was in Indianapolis and it was great to find a station like that that was still a local broadcaster! It was similar to stations about 40 years ago, that had both a jazz and classical listenership; in this case, playing jazz from noon to midnight (with smooth jazz from noon to 3pm), and classical from midnight to noon. Of course, like most of these today, owned by a college. I also listened to WITT out of Zionsville/Broad Ripple, that had “open” programming, which is rare in this day and age. Not unusual to get into my car to go to work, with WITT on the radio, and hear Pavoratti, Chicago Blues, and British Invasion 60’s rock before I got to work!

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  14. Thanks for the list, Andy. (I specially endorse WDCB, whose “Jukebox Saturday Night” I listen to every week.) And the cool thing is, it isn’t even complete. I didn’t see, just for example, WLIW in Southhampton, NY, where Ed German plays a curated, live jazz program for three hours every weeknight. (He’s something of a local star and can even be viewed doing his thing in the studio via webcam.)

    You sadly mentioned that you “don’t need to be here any longer.” But I must kindly ask, unless you have a time machine, where are you going to go? The shift from local broadcasting to the Internet is pretty much everywhere (I have a vintage receiver and high-end tuner pretty much gathering dust), and from what I’ve been able to determine, jazz stations in every other country are not as good as what we have.

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    • Jonathan, I’m going to start researching those cities on that list! There’s some pretty interesting mid sized cities on there that have full time jazz radio! That’s my starting point. I can even move closer to WDCB and get in on the radio like when I used to live in Chicago (too crazy to actually BE in Chicago now).

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  15. A great stroll down memory lane! Thanks.

    I use Spotify almost exclusively and have about 15 playlists now. Mostly 60’s and 70’s music but each playlist has a different purpose. The best part is being able to listen to it while at the gym or on daily walks. Without the music, I would probably have abandoned an exercise program long ago!

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  16. I loved the radio in those days. Sitting up in my room in central Wisconsin I could get a couple of Chicago stations and even a trucker station from Tennessee. My uncles owned about a grillion 45s and we listened to them all the time. I can’t really argue about 1966 because I was only 6 years old. I did have a radio already, then, plus I had permission to use the portable phonograph and sing along with Elvis, “I sent you a tie-clasp, but that was just a line…”

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  17. Very nice post! I love oldies and know all the songs you showcased. Walk Away Renee was a favorite of mine as a love-sick eleven-year-old who liked boys, but they weren’t interested yet. My mother bought all the popular music of the day, so we had loads of 45s. Thanks for the link. I’ll definitely tune in!

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  18. Wonderful old songs. I used to sing Hound Dog for the amusement of others (I think they were laughing at me but I thought I was cool imitating Elvis). I still listen to radio station music in my car. We don’t have radios in the house so I tune the television to the channels that play music.

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  19. Interesting to see the covers of Walk Away Renee, as I was already planning to recommend the Four Tops version.

    Walk Away Renee

    I definitely see some parallels here. I didn’t ignore the Rock/Pop of the ’80s, but at the age where you dove into Jazz, I discovered the local “Oldies” station, so although a decade younger, I am very familiar with all the songs you mentioned.

    Although local radio is certainly not what it used to be, for some reason Mid-Michigan has always had a surprisingly good variety, and I still listen to more stations than my car stereo has presets.

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    • I wish WNAP played more pre-1965 and less post-1974, but we take what we can get.
      A great thing about oldies stations when they were still on AM, was that you could briefly and occasionally re-create the era of an old car you were driving.

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  20. Well JP, after all the years of following you, I finally know every song in a music post. 🙂 You know I am no jazz afficionado, but I do remember those golden oldies from the 1960s on. I like how you associated memories with these songs. I listened to each of them and remember the words, almost verbatim. I clicked on the station to save it to my Favorites bar and just sang along to The Beach Boys’ “Help Me Rhonda” and knew all those words, but I have seen the Beach Boys four or five times when I was younger. As a preteen, every weekly allowance meant a trip to the S.S. Kresge store to buy a new 45 rpm record and once a month another package of yellow inserts to spin them on my record player (not a fancy one). I also picked up Keener Radio’s Top Hit List. The first 45 I bought was “Sugar Sugar” by The Archies. Bubblegum music they called it – even the name sounds like bubblegum. I listened to these songs on a transistor radio back then, plugging it in one ear with a long pink cord so my parents didn’t have to hear it. Thanks for this entertaining post and the radio station recommendation.

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      • Dan – thank you so much for sharing this site! Like JP’s site, I just bookmarked it, plus I spent some time looking at it. I like their recent playlist, all songs I know by heart. They even featured the turquoise and white Keener 13 logo that they used for their weekly printed hits list. I had no idea this site existed. I thought WOMC, a local oldies station, was the only official radio station of the Woodward Dream Cruise and that station does stray into 70s, 80s and 90s tunes, so not all true golden oldies. I have suggested to JP in the past that he would really enjoy seeing the granddaddy of all cruises!

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    • I have heard Sugar Sugar in just the last week! It’s funny how central and important a stack of 45s was in those days. And I remember the assortment of places that sold them. Even the Singer sewing machine store in the local mall had a rack of rop-ranked 45s right near the store entrance. Probably to allow the mothers some time to buy sewing supplies while the kids pawed through the newest records.

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      • And I’ll bet you remembered the words to Sugar Sugar when you heard it didn’t you? Back then the bubblegum songs were pretty short and so it was easy to remember all the lyrics. I couldn’t tell you any songs that are on any type of top list now. I’m probably the only person who has never listened to a Taylor Swift song. That was clever marketing by the Singer sewing machine shop!

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  21. It’s fascinating to read how young you were when you drawn to a former – and unquestionably better – generation of music (while the rest of us your age were chewing on “bubble gum”). My collection of 45s would’ve been wildly different from yours; dozens of one-hit wonders from the 70s and pop music from Elton John, Olivia Newton-John, Captain & Tennille, and so on. As for radio, I can’t quite give up the “dial” on my car in favor of streaming playlists. No matter the music I find (including classical), it seems the live voices and even the commercials add a sense of real-time connection you simply can’t get otherwise. I hope stations such as your WNAP hang around, at least until the end of our respective days.

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    • Agreed! I have often wondered what radio will be like when millennials are in their 50s. Will it still broadcast music, or will that part of the spectrum be diverted to some other use we cannot now conceive.

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  22. You know, I’ve been thinking about this entry for a couple of days now, and I think we all miss certain aspects of radio from our youth. My friend who started out as a DJ, was in the FM era of DJ’s setting their own programs, then they transitioned into a program director, and what he used to tell me was a card system they had, where you would get a box of cards from the program director before your shift. As you went on air, you leafed through the card box, and they had songs listen in there, which you were required to play, and then open spots where you could play what you wanted. Of course, all that went through permutations until we got where we are today, with rigid playlists pre-programed into a computer.

    There are certain things that hastened the death of radio as we know it, the killing of the Fairness Doctrine in the 80’s being one, and the 1996 Deregulation. The radio (and TV) waves were considered a public trust, prior to this, and you couldn’t own more than a couple in the same market area. This was all thrown out the window. I remember him telling me that in the 80’s, there was some semi-famous program director that stations all over the country would hire to tweak their playlists. He was considered the Doctor Death of the radio we loved, and many times, multiple stations in the same city would hire him, and they would all sound the same. While trying to find out/remember who this was via google, I ran across this entry on Radio Homogenization, which is worth a read. It certainly leaves a trail of bread crumbs to where we are today!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_homogenization

    I think there’s a bunch of interesting stats in there worth reading, like altho the number of stations has grown, the listenership has declined (no kidding). I’m one of those that declined as well. The state of bad American rock radio, and terrible arena rock hair bands I couldn’t listen to, as well as tiny play lists, drove me into jazz in the mid 70’s, and I’m happy to be there. I also listen to a lot of alt and experimental on college radio stations; I haven’t listened to a “for profit” music station on the air for 45 years. Having been there at the time, I can remember that huge players in the punk and new wave genres, people like David Bowie, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, XTC, were NOT on the playlists of rock radio in the fly-over. WXRT in Chicago made their bones by playing this stuff against the grain of programmed rock radio in the late 70’s and into the 80’s.

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    • Everything has become corporatized in the last 40 years, and radio is no exception. I fear that in this era of an ability to custom-create your own streaming playlist traditional radio may be doomed. But it has reinvented itself multiple times in the past century, so maybe we will soon see another one.

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      • JP, you may be right…I thought I’d never see another radio station with open programming in my lifetime, and then one appears, WITT, in Indianapolis! Like listening to FM radio n the early 70’s!

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  23. I have satellite radio in my Honda, so many of these songs haven’t “disappeared” for me. I set the selector buttons on channels that specialize in songs from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s, as well as channels that focus on hard rock and disco.

    A few months ago I heard a song on Youtube by the Peppermint Rainbow – Don’t Wake Me Up in the Morning, Michael. It was from 1969, and triggered memories of that year for me (particularly a trip that we took to Ohio that summer). The group was based in Baltimore.

    Did some research on its chart history, and was surprised to find that it only peaked at #54 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late July 1969. Yet I still remember that song!

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