Mondays with Mike: When AM ruled

I am wont these days to make declarations like “Music was better back then.”

But I doubt music is worse or better. I like plenty of new stuff I hear. I think what I’m really missing is the diverse, surreptitious exposure I got as a lad from, of all places, the likes of WLS and WCFL, the Chicago AM radio powerhouses of my youth.

We were experienced.

What I’m missing is the smorgasbord of music—Motown, psychedelic, schmaltzy, bubble gum, Osmonds, R & B, some really awful, some really great—you name it that, AM served up. Today, I can set my preferences on Pandora or other music services, and get what I know I like. But it seems harder than ever to bump into stuff I’d be surprised by if I just heard it.

When FM started taking off, I, like pretty much every music fan and audiophile, was happy. The tyranny of the three minute single and the low fidelity of monaural radio was replaced by the full, long versions of songs straight off an album, recorded and reproduced in stereo!

Today AM is populated by blowhard pundits and sports hate radio who fill time with repetitive droning. I still enjoy WXRT-FM, which was an evenings-only basement-studio based revelation in my teens. I still like it, but I guess somewhat ironically, it seems kind narrow in its own way—geared to people of a certain age, like, well, me.

To wit, my friend Patrick and I, during a serious barstool discussion, looked up the top singles from 1968. Check it out here, it’s incredible. And here’s a Pinterest collection of WLS “Silver Dollar Surveys” from several years. What my little transistor lacked in audio quality, it more than made up for with variety. Of course, there were the Beatles. And Monkees. But, also James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Johnny Rivers, Steppenwolf, Herb Alpert, Jimi Hendrix, Donovan, Cher, Etta James, The Doors, Smokey Robinson, Petula Clark, The Turtles, on and on.

Yep, I’d grimace when the 1910 Fruitgum Company came on, but the pain was worth the epiphany of falling in love with something new, that I didn’t know or would even guess I’d like.

Even after the AM hay day, when I was in college, I heard new stuff just by walking the halls of my dorm. There was no disc jockey, I’d just duck into a room and ask, “What’s playing?” Today, pretty much everyone is on ear buds. I’ve been told that the thing to do in the modern age is got to festivals—here in Chicago, that would be events like Pitchfork and Riotfest and, gulp, Lollapalooza.

But I’m tool lazy, not mention too cheap (though I happily still buy recorded music). For readers who are music fans, I’m open to ideas.

AM singles-oriented radio certainly had its problems. There was payola and the crazy, caricatured disk jockeys. But I not sure they weren’t better than today’s recommendation algorithms.