O/T The Music Thread

Yeah, that's pretty close to what I had. I had several models through the years and like that one they all had lots of knobs and dials and gauges, some of which I couldn't figure out the purpose for.

They were great radios -- not just AM/FM, but shortwave and longwave transmissions like police and fire and railroad and marine terminals too. They also could bring in single sideband from ham radio operators. It was like eavesdropping on the world.

William B. Williams! Wow, Clipper, seeing that name brought back a lot of good memories.

Hey Max, it's always great to find somebody else who remembers that stuff.  We're growing scarcer!

You probably remember the overnight guy at WABC, Bob Lewis -- Bob-A-Lu -- a fast-talking jock who was always going to the Gold Mine in the Groove Yard to fish out an oldie for "The All Americans" at 77.  Bob died in 1987 at only 49 years old.  Chuck Leonard was another one from that era.  When we lived in NYC in the early 2000s, he was a lector at the church my wife went to.  She had never heard of him, she would just come back and say there is this former radio guy who has the most magnificent speaking voice.  When she told me his name, I was almost ready to sign up for her church just to talk radio with him, but he became ill and passed away not much later.

Man, the Five Satins were one of the truly great Doo Wop groups.  Naturally "In The Still Of The Night" was by far their best-known song, but they had a lot of good ones --"To The Aisle" and "Shadows" (a big favorite in Philly) and their version of "I'll Be Seeing You."  From New Haven CT.

Oh man, I love Dylan.  One of the undisputed giants.  His voice is one more example of why someone who doesn't meet the classical definition of vocal ability can still be perfect in his own genre -- him, Johnny Cash, Neil Young right off the top of my head were guys who probably could not have made their high school choirs, but were powerful forces in their fields for their ability to convey meaning and emotion.  I will acknowledge that I often preferred the spiffed-up pop versions of his songs as done by The Byrds or The Turtles, but still he was the source.  How ironic that he meshed so well with one of the truly magnificent voices in rock history, Roy Orbison, with the Traveling Wilburys.  Genius always finds a way,

Hey Clipper -- oh for sure BBC, they blasted through, but they weren't playing any rock music in those days.  For their station ID they would play the chimes of Big Ben and intone "This is London."  Gave me chills every time.  Radio Luxembourg was kind of a rocker, as was Radio Nederland from Hilversum, Netherlands.  You could hear some of the UK acts before they got here (sometimes they never got here -- not many people in the US remember Johnny Kidd and the Pirates or Screaming Lord Sutch.)

It was easy to pull in Japan, Australia, South America, any place in Europe.  I used to listen to the insane propaganda of Radio Beijing during the Cultural Revolution.  The running dogs of imperialism, all that jazz.  I collected the verification (QSL) cards of different stations.  You had to tell them what you heard and when and on what frequency and they would send back a nice card and sometimes a few publications.  Radio Beijing sent me boxes of stuff -- really nice calendars, copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, big wall maps of China -- after awhile I began to get nervous that the FBI would show up with the mail one day, so I asked them to take me off the mailing list.  My parents didn't raise no Commie.

Short wave is pretty much dead now.  The internet destroyed interest in it because so much of the mystique of global communication has been rendered commonplace.

Yes, Wooly Burger for Gary Stevens.  Good one!  I didn't know he went to Switzerland.  And definitely WMCA had a better playlist than WABC.  Most stations did, in fact.  Not too far from NYC I was able to get good rock from two Hartford stations, WDRC 1360 and WPOP 1410.  Joey Reynolds worked at one of them before going to Buffalo, but I can't remember which.

WLS 890 in Chicago had Art Roberts and Dick Biondi, the self-styled "Wild I-Talian" who boasted that he had been fired 23 times.  Biondi was the first US deejay to play a Beatles song when he broadcast "Please Please Me" in the summer of 1963.  He was jumping the gun; the record flopped on the first go-round but six months later it was riding high.

CKLW was a clear channel on 800 out of Windsor Ontario (essentially Detroit) and that station was heard throughout most of North America.  Don't know if you recall jocks there like Terry Knight and Tom Shannon.

That's because I can't write as eloquently as you and some of the other members of our board.  I'm a better reader than writer.  

A little longer and you may have gotten the "Workers of the World, Unite!" t-shirt.