1969: Radio Somewhere

Listening in the dark

In many stories I’ve mentioned that my love of hit music (Rock, Pop, Soul) truly began in 1969 (me age 13) when a friend of mine insisted that I HAD to start listening to the radio, particularly Birmingham’s AM station WSGN (The BIG 610). Birmingham had two other Top 40-styled AM stations: WVOK (The MIGHTY 690) and WAQY (Wacky 1220).

If all of this sounds quaint and somewhat naive, please note/remember that by the end of summer 1969, America had shot three men to the moon (two of them walking it); had seen a mass three-day rock/folk/soul show held on New York farmlands; and had found itself shattered again by a mass killing on Cielo Drive by a family/cult.

I’m sure other events rocked us, too, but if those three things were all that happened in the U.S. that year, that summer, wouldn’t it be enough to make you want to go home, wherever you were (to badly paraphrase a Joe South hit song)?

I would have learned about these events had I not listened to the radio, but WSGN’s news—”Five minutes sooner!”—at five before the top of the hour relentlessly rained all details down upon my pretty little red-haired head.

So, I had to hear the news, but what I mainly remember—because after my friend got me listening, I couldn’t stop no matter the time of day or night (I can still reel off all the WSGN disc jockeys and their time slots)—was the music, the tunes played during that summer and fall (and for years to come).

As I remember these best, I see myself, that 13 year-old boy, sitting in his parents’ bedroom where one of only two household radios sat. The other was in the console stereo in our den, but when my dad came home, the TV switched on, the radio off, and so I sequestered myself in my parents’ space, despite their coming in and out, bothering me with their need to change into bedclothes, etc.

They’d perpetually ask,

“Why are you sitting in the dark?”

Which to me was the most natural setting to listen to disembodied voices coming from a tin speaker, housed in a little box back in the days when radios were made of tubes and had to “warm up.”

This radio was AM only, and later it would sit by my own bedside and I would take it with me during my college years when I spent a semester alone in DC.

But in 1969, there I’d be, sitting on a stiff wooden chair as close to the radio as I could get, the only light coming from the radio dial itself.

That was good for me, not so good for my parents because I had to sing with all the hits and my voice back then was…breaking? I have a decent singing voice now, but when a boy is hitting the puberty blues, his voice kind of shifts around and the one thing he cannot do well is hit any note higher than, well, I don’t really know what high note I could hit.

But I tried.

Most of the time my parents let me be, but sometimes my dad, an accomplished clarinetist, had to proclaim from two rooms away,

“You’re flat!”

Yeah. But I didn’t stop.

If you understand the Top 40 format, you know that whatever station playing the hits you’re tuned into will play the same songs over and over, with golden oldies, and “on the road to solid gold” newbies interspersed between. So, for instance, that Elvis hit, “Suspicious Minds,” might be played twenty times during the course of a normal 24-hour day. What I’m saying is that since I listened during the mornings and afternoons, too, and of course in the car on the way to somewhere, by nighttime, I had heard all of these songs four or five, maybe ten times already.

Why, then, did I want or need, to sit alone in the dark of my parents’ bedroom listening again, still, and for hours?

Maybe because, though I wouldn’t have thought of this exactly back then, there is something inherently romantic about listening in the dark to a disc jockey sitting high atop Birmingham’s tallest building, alone in his room, playing songs for you in yours. Callers would make requests when they could get through, and of course those requests were for songs that had already been played and would be played again no matter the caller, no matter the desperation, no matter the lost or found love they had.

Likely, I would think about certain girls as songs like 3 Dog Night’s “Easy To Be Hard” or Tom Jones’ “Without Love” or Isaac Hayes’ “Walk On By” played on. Just as likely, I would imagine that one day I would be fronting a band and my voice would be paired with that English band that sounded for a moment like it hailed from Nashville (You do remember “Honky Tonk Women” right?).

And yes, it’s possible to love and honor a segue from Steppenwolf’s “Move Over” to The Doors’ “Running Blue” to Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay.”

Or “A Boy Named Sue,” “Marrakesh Express,’ “Give Peace a Chance,’ “Keem-O-Sabe (remember the Electric Indian?), The Clique’s “Sugar on Sunday” or Aretha’s “Spanish Harlem?”

I’ll stop listing now because it’s all too much and my mind is not just flooding but swamped (which makes me think of Creedence’s “Proud Mary,” sigh).

Night after night I did this, only coming out to watch “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour” or “The Johnny Cash Show,” and network series like “Then Came Bronson” and “The Mod Squad.”

By the next summer, my dad decided to intervene:

“Do you ever think about calling a girl?” he asked.

What a thought.

And so I traded one medium for another, though my nightly 3-hour phone calls didn’t exactly correspond to whatever he hoped would keep me from sitting in a dark room, by myself, listening to disembodied voices trying to help me make it through yet another teenaged night, talking about, what else?

Hit songs on the radio.