In the old days of AM radio, you turned off the car feeling better about the world
The last time I listened to AM radio was — couldn’t tell you. Yet, like barbershop quartet and Burger Chef, it’s something we will miss in a theoretical kind of way, even if it was no longer central to our daily routines.
AM radio will still be there, but it will be harder to find, with the announcement that major car companies like Ford and BMW will no longer be including AM radios in their automobiles. Most problematic is that AM radio and electrical power don’t mix, as anyone who has driven under a high-tension line listening to AM can attest.
This has created a swirl of controversy, but as swirls go it’s lacking the power to stop the tide; it’s like your mom’s tuna casserole — you’d love to have it one more time, but not enough to try to recreate the dish yourself.
So AM vehicular radio is going the way of the full-sized spare tire, a bad idea committed in the name of progress.
Neither Andy Gibb singing “I Just Want to be Your Everything” nor piloting a 1977 Ford Maverick with a suspension so unmoored it felt like driving a waterbed, could of themselves be categorized as good things, but they were foundational elements of a time when you could get up out of an Adirondack chair without assistance.
It seems kind of stupid now, but a 13-year-old kid would listen to a staticky Mary MacGregor singing “Torn Between Two Lovers” and think, “yeah, that’s me all right” even though the two girls it brought to mind wouldn’t even have acknowledged your existence.
Fifty years ago it was mind-blowing to a kid that late at night if atmospheric conditions were right, you could listen to WGN out of Chicago or WOWO out of Fort Wayne, Ind. AM radio was STEM before there was stem, getting lots of kids interested in tech as they contemplated that magic of the circuitry and wondered how the magic could all happen in one of those small, square concrete block buildings, the call letters on the side being the only form of ornamentation.
And if you were in a car, AM radio was a lifeline in lonely stretches of highway like Interstate 81 in Pennsylvania where you could lock onto a Phillies game knowing the station would hang in there for 100 miles or more. It wasn’t like FM where you had to frantically hunt for a new station every 20 minutes so you could hear Rush Limbaugh finish his thoughts about birth control.
I submit that before the medium was poisoned by the likes of Limbaugh, Alex Jones and the emergence of shock-jock FM, the world was a better place because AM radio was friendly radio.
Local AM radio hosts were the community conscience, soul and referee. Local newspapers did the reporting, but AM jocks set the agenda, knowing what stories were worth amplifying, poking gentle fun or injecting sympathetic pathos as needed.
They decided what stories to amplify based on their contribution to the greater good, not on what was going to make listeners' blood boil in the name of ratings and profits.
Unlike Anger Radio, you come away from a Lou Scally show feeling better about the world, not worse. Even weird Art Bell, whose lonely voice would somehow find your dial at 3 in the morning when there were no other stations or traffic around, was more like watching a train wreck as opposed to being in it. The Art Bell show actually contacted me one time for an interview, no doubt after I’d taken a position that was extra stupid — I didn’t know whether to be thrilled or to go stick my head in a microwave oven.
I didn’t call back, but now I kind of wish I had. As Joni Mitchell sang so many times on AM radio, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Before anger radio and FM shock jocks, AM radio was friendly radio
