Two days late, but I would challenge anybody to come up with as good a quality set of releases today, much less the quality of the bands…
And this one is just plain funny…
And the early days of the ‘neighborhood watch’… Those old ladies saw ‘everything’!!!
There are good bands today, but they don’t get radio play. Hubby and I like Clutch.
“A Quick Death in Texas”
+1
The powers that be seem to believe that we should all listen to crap. The only station around here that plays decent new music is the PBS station. I shut it off when it’s “news” time.
Yeah, all the radio stations are owned by 5 companies and they ‘playlist’ everything, no DJs anymore (a lot of the DJ’s you hear are actually pre-recorded, they do it all in a hour).
It’s why I don’t listen to radio anymore. Trying to find new music is hard, and there’s a lot of it out there.
Yep. It’s like the musical version of McDonalds. It will satisfy most of the people most of the time.
Our market is really tiny, with two radio groups. One is regionally (Pac NW) based, with the other local to our small city. However, the latter one has to rely on the syndicated shows for some of its programming (morning country is Big D and Bubba(!), with a related show until midafternoon).
Like the small TV market west of the Cascades, local talent is either young and going to move out, or older and planning to retire in the area.
In August 1968, I would have been listening to Larry Lujack on Chicago’s WCFL. Hell of a good city to be *from*, back then. Now, even though family still lives there, I won’t go.
OldNFO: Dick Biondi left WLS a bit before–rumor has it he said some awful things about his boss’s wife. On the air.
Anybody else remember WWVA? 50,000 watts, Rockies to Maine at night. We used it before CB to relay messages to other truck drivers — or our families!
The old ladies had something faster and more widespread than the Interwebz, too. Mom knew you caused trouble before you started.
My Mom had a network of spies. One of them was the lunch lady at my elementary school that lived across the street. By the time I got home from school, Mom already knew of my day’s exploits. Now, you would have thought I hated the lunch lady, but that was not true at all. She was known as “Grandma Ned” to all us kids. You see, those were the days when we kids actually knew we did wrong and truly deserved whatever punishment we got, no matter how it got found out.
The older ladies they not only saw everything they reported everything to the appropriate authorities.
In my neighborhood every mother knew every other’s phone number and knew just about everything about everyone’s kids. Secrets? More like intelligence data. I think air conditioning was the first step in the destruction of neighborly communication as it closed windows and doors, making matronly overlook ineffective*; the Internet didn’t come until much later, but it was the final nail in the coffin.
*It didn’t help that soap operas came along about the same time and the overseers found new ways to spend their time.
My house in Rancho Cordova had that ‘neighborhood watch’ feature. A -LOT- of the women there were widows, their husbands had retired from working at Mather (either USAF or Civilian workers) and they all kept an eye on what was going on.
Which is why when the bums broke into our house after we’d moved, the police got a call in like 15 minutes (and so did I!).
I remember when they built Rancho Cordova. It was great in those days.
I’m slowly building an “oldies” playlist on the iThingy. Just added greatest hits albums by the Guess Who, Jethro Tull, and Steppenwolf.
And yeah, ’68 through ’71 were just about the best of best, for that era. (There were a few outliers, earlier on.)
All- Thanks for the comments. I didn’t know about the ‘scripted’ playlists, but I’m not surprised. Good DJs were priceless back in the day. I will always remember Wolfman Jack on XERB out of Mexico, and the ads for ‘autographed’ pictures of Jesus… sigh
And WGN, Larry Lujack and Dick Biondi (I think)…
Our local radio station plays 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.
Growing up, I could get Wolfman Jack in the evening from XERB (??) just across the border in Mexico, Ciudad Acuna (with that ‘lazy s’ over the n)…in mid Missouri.
And there was one from Chicago, with Dick Biondi, until he got fired for something he said on the air…
Re; Neighborhood watch, not only they see and report, they enforced discipline as well. Me looking for sympathy: “Mom, Mrs X spanked me.” Mom: “Well you deserved it, and consider yourself grounded young man.”
There was a phone-tree when I was growing up, before the term existed. One mom would see the pack of us northbound, and would phone the next mom up the street, and so on. I never knew about it until after we moved to Texas. MomNet, plus Ladies of a Certain Age, had better intel than did SAC (also based in the area.)
My best friend from highschool ran the amateur radio club then and got his EE degree and made Principal Engineer at Motorola in FW/TX. He loves home bench tinkering and in his rural home out by Boyd TX he could only receive two AM stations, one he called conservative and the other liberal. He built two crystal radio sets – one tuned to each station. With a long wire antenna on his property he would tune in the liberal station, rectify the output with a diode bridge, and let it charge a huge-ass capacitor bank while he was away at work. He says the Freedom if Information act allows people to receive and ‘record’ any public radio broadcast, for their own purposes.
When he’d return in the evening, he’d use the charged up capacitors to power a modest amplifier to enjoy the conservative station for a few hours. It gave him profound satisfaction to know that the power he used came from electrical energy bought by the liberal station, and that he merely harvested the emitted power as it arrived on his private property.
@ Jedi Master Iyvan, here’s some Steve Morse for you & friends:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpl5U9PdU08
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it3S_tYbnoo
This is the kind of sound and rhythm I think of when I think of “country.”
And he does/did WAY wider than that style, too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1N8L-tk4sw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc1GhI82-uk
I believe Steve Morse has retired after decades of playing,
and his tendons have earned their rest.
Enjoy – and have a great long weekend, everyone…