THE HISTORY OF ROCK RADIO I LIVED IN

by **Charlie FiftyWatts** Wed May 27, 2020 2:29 pm

THE HISTORY OF ROCK RADIO I LIVED:

In 1969, the radio station to listen to (in Worcester, MA area) was WAAB 1440-AM.

Yup, AM. It was top 40. It didn't have too many ads. And though AM is mono, it's
all there was for radio so we didn't know it wasn't as good as it could be, we liked it.

In 1972, WAAB changed to talk, because FM radio had become the choice for music listening.
It offered much better sound quality, IN STEREO, and it was playing whole albums ad-free for us.
So we moved to WAAF 107.3 FM. [NOTE: "WAAF" was actually WAAB-FM, hence: WAA"F".]

And this became what we had on the radio as we got ready for school each morning, 1973-1977.
It played the top 40, which was great then. They introduced songs from new albums as they came out.
They even had "God" explain why the weather would be that day, which was amusing.

But as the 70's ended, rock was waning. We had survived disco, but now Punk & New Wave were moving in.
They offered something temporarily, but music was no longer headed in a growing direction.
Companies were just scraping the pot for some/any marketable shtick to tell people they like
to keep their money train going. It'd take a few years of sputtering to play out, but music itself was dying.

and to be replaced by machine-produced goo for the lucrative stupid people segment

~~ ~~ ~~

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In 1978 we moved to WBCN 104.1 FM (Boston) because it was COOLER than WAAF had become.
(WAAF told us it "couldn't" say the name of Alice Cooper's 'Muscle Of Love' album, because "gosh!")
But WBCN wasn't afraid. It was funny and outlandish.
It claimed to be "an experiment", did things others wouldn't, and was heroic for us.
That stuff matters.

And it was a good place for Classic Rock AND New Wave & Punk..plus local stuff like J Geils.

We loved WBCN even more than we'd previously loved those other two stations.
(They had been good because of the music. But WBCN had interesting on-air personalities,
like Charles Laquidara on "The Morning Mattress"...and his alter ego, Duane Ingalls Glasscock,
who had a dog named Yoop, and would get weird, and once even took the station hostage (yes really).

And that was the 80's for us.

~~ ~~ ~~

By the 90's, music was on TV, and our radios had become just alarm clocks. For the same
reason TV has died now, radio was abandoned BECAUSE TOO MANY ENDLESS SICKENING ADS!

We had changed from listening to radio in our cars (and having to keep twisting the knob
as each ad started, trying to find another station that might be playing an actual song currently)
to making our own mix tapes so we could just listen to all our favorite songs commercial-free. Cool

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In the 70's, FM-radio playing whole albums had given us a way to get albums free, by taping them off air.

That party ended, but then we had Napster & now youtube.

FUCK THE CORPORATE RUINERS OF OUR GOOD THINGS.

NOT that I'm adverse to paying. I payed $20,000 (in 90's dollars) for albums.
But they price-gouge for them, then trick us into having to buy them all again.

And as for radio, there's no way I'm gonna' PAY for THAT by listening to
an entire hour of ads just to hear two songs I don't particularly like.

Those who had gained from bringing us music were screwing up their own game with their ever-increasing greed.

Then in the 90s THEY STARTED RAP.

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We moved to WZLX 100.7 FM "Classic Hits" then, because WBCN's playlist wasn't good anymore.
We still wanted to hear Bad Co, BTO, Cooper, Zeppelin, Sabbath, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, Allmans...

But WZLX ran too many ads and even more ads, like stations only did,
so we abandoned radio entirely in the 90's.

WBCN went off the air in 1997.

~~ ~~ ~~

Now..we're all just waiting to die. Wikipedia keeps a list of rock stars dying.
It lengthens depressingly. The grim march to the sea is on. And those who aren't
dead yet..have you seen what they look like at 70+? (Do yourself a favor, don't.)

There is YOU TUBE currently, which can be used as a commercial-free radio. It and the internet in general gives us
SO MUCH we could never see or hear before...film of the bands we loved, in the way of interviews, documentaries,
memorabilia clips, and concerts we'd never been able to see. So there is good stuff now, but we're old. Young stupid
people abandoned our culture in favor of garbage, and Republicons took everything else...living wages, decent products,
rights, privacy, a factual uncensored press, solvency, pride, hope, even democracy itself. It's a shitty world now.
And people have proven to be entirely stupid and gutless. They won't stick up for what's theirs, when someone
takes it from them. In fact they're SO idiotic they parrot the excuses for their victimizers to do it to them!

People should be purged.

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But the world really WAS once ours and cool.
Our great music. Our classic cars.
Being on the same decent page together.

So HERE are some recordings of WBCN, from when all was still right in the world. Forget today's skeevy reality,
my children. Go back to when a universe of amazingly cool things was still forming in the cosmic soup. Enjoy!

(Oops, thought I was Venus Flytrap for a moment. Dig...

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NOTE: Radio in the fifties was what started EVERYTHING in the way of modern music.
But I'm writing what I observed first-hand, in my life time, I'm not pasting histories from
Wikipedia. So I can't tell you about the 50's here. I didn't live in them. But you CAN find
documentaries on you tube, and oh do watch those! Talk about DJ's "being heroic for us"!

ALSO: If your interest is to track the changing mediums used to broadcast the popular music of each decade,
it happened thusly: Radio in the 50's. Outdoor festivals in the 60's. TV shows of live music hall performances
in the 70's. And MTV in the 80's. (After that, who cares. I'm not gonna' tell you about the Li'l Waynes and
pitch-corrected Disney girl & nigger noises ..just as no one ever really needed to hear the Bathroom Boys
and In Stink. But you can always GO to a bathroom - the mens room at a truck stop specifically -
and get yourself a whiff of what THAT STUFF was like if it would really mean something to you.

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A LIVED HISTORY by Charlie Fiftywatts a.k.a. Tree - c. Sept 2019

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WCUW 91.3 FM Worcester
(click to listen)

And read the wiki. Interesting little college station
started by Robert Goddard in 1920 at Clark University.

[The call letters, "CUW", stand for Clark University Worcester]

This station is a discovery I made on my FM dial back in the 80's,
during the endless struggle ruinous greedy advertisers put us through,
to be ever having to twist the knob seeking a station that isn't playing ads.

This station had no ads, and played different music types in blocks. Sometimes blues, sometimes folk,
(& sometimes Irish stuff, which we dug on as a novelty a few times because we'd never heard it before).

But in the 90's, WCUW turned PC when asinine X'ers inflicted that on our society,
so everyone was suddenly "needing" to include EVERY different type of peoples
stuffs, "to be fair". As impulses go it wasn't evil, but it was stupid and terrible.
All they accomplished by it was they watered down something really cool
& OURS, turning it into a morass of unwanted noise. I stopped listening.

I used to hear blues and folk and cool stuff..next thing I know: ALL GONE! Why?

"Because we can't keep score in sports any more. That's why Johnny. That's why."

Such was the 90's PC ridiculousness, the lone contribution of worthless Generation X.

I made a similar point regarding WBCN versus WAAF--> YOU NEED TO BE OUR HERO for us. It's NOT heroic
to abandon us, by replacing our cool stuff with other people's SHIT they could start their own station for.
(like MTV giving away our only music outlet and entire culture, because a minority threatened to sue
when MTV wouldn't play their stupid RAP, because it was a rock station. -> Why didn't MTV tell them
to start their own channel? When music was on radio, was there only ONE station?

But MTV WAS NOT OUR HERO.

And people are stupid.

Corporate jackasses feed their idiocy, then sell ad space to fleece a profit from it.
Money's money, they don't care. Everybody's tone deaf anyway, JUST TELL THEM
THEY LIKE SHIT. That way, shit = good enough. So more profit! For nothin'!! YAY.

And thus stupid wins.

And shit is all that can be popular now.

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NOTE: You can still hear blues, without ads,
Fridays 5:00-9 PM
Saturdays 6:00-9 PM

at: http://player.streamguys.com/wcuw/sgplayer/player.php

AND THERE ARE STILL blocks of other kinds of musics. ALL AD FREE.

Here's a schedule: CLICK

THERE IS A GOOD RADIO STATION THERE.

Just use the schedule, because it doesn't stick to just the music you like.

Though -having said all that - I was just listening to Sami & Native American musics there
(The Puta Mayo Hour), and it was just as charming as the Ukrainian folk songs I once encountered
when I used to write for a holiday calendar. There is an entirely disarming innocence in the voices.
One could no more hate such music as hate a child for humming happily. Wonderful. Check it out! Surprised

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A LIVED HISTORY by Charlie Fiftywatts a.k.a. Tree - c. Sept 2019