Teleidoscope

Mon, Dec 11, 2006

Cross-Country Radio

Posted at 10:13 pm MST to Media

Damn, Gary Puckett had a great set of pipes. I wonder if he had classical voice training...

I have occasionally commented on the fact that because I was born in 1954, I don't really remember a time when there were no computers or space satellites. It is equally true that I do not remember a time when there was no rock-and-roll.

This can be useful when driving across the country, especially on major trucking routes. Every market has one or more stations that I find listenable, because Oldies and Classic Rock and most other flavors of Rock are the music of my lifetime. And I also like folk and world music and many flavors of Classical. (And at this time of year there are a lot of stations switched to pure Holiday formats, though some have a really strange definition of holiday music.)

Sometimes I need to stretch things a little: the early morning show of the Portland Oregon Oldies station in 2002 was almost completely pre-British Invasion, which is really about 5 or 10 years to early for me, but I didn't mind waking up to it.

My favorite radio station in Boston is WCRB, which is a rarity: a commercial Classical station. With commercials for things like retirement communities and investment brokers and polo tournaments. I listened to it all the way to the Connecticut border.

Crossing Connecticut, I listened to WDRC, which claims to be Connecticut's first FM station. It was the Top 40 station we listened to in high school and college. I'm not sure what they call their current format, but they are still (or again) using the same music library I remember from the old days.

I think the neatest station I came across while I drove across the country this past weekend was what I assume was a public access channel in Pennsylvania. I never heard call letters mentioned that I noticed. I heard about 45 minutes of Christmas Polka music (I came in after the start of the program) followed by some fascinating music from the Middle East. I was sorry to move out of range of that one.

The one stretch of the trip where there was little music I found listenable was northeastern Colorado, where the tumbleweeds tumble and the deer and the antelope play --or at least chow down -- but apparently don't provide much of a radio audience. The first clear music station I hit north of Denver was 101.5 "Martini on the Rockies", which plays standards and some stuff that might be called urban eclectic. It also played an advertisement for my credit union, which somehow struck me as a bit surreal.

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