What radio stations did you listen to growing up?

BBC unsettles me. Their serious tone always seems like something bad has happened or will happen.

 

Growing up in the middle of bumfuck Alberta we had two country stations and CBC. All of them AM. On a good night you could get talk/news radio (630 CHED) out of Edmonton. It wasn't until I was in college that my hometown got a rock station. I was in between my first and second year so that was 2001. I was working in the gravel pits and it was a big deal to be able to listen to the test loop. The Goat, as it is called, plays mostly rock from the 70s and 80s with a little bit of 90s and Top40 sprinkled in. They are big on their ACDC, Chilliwack, Poison, Van Halen, def leppard, Motley Crue, etc. I contend you don't need a hot tub to travel back in time to the 80s, you just need to drive to my home town where the mullet still has a certain appeal to far too large a portion of the population.

 

I learned to like country music because my car only had an AM radio.

 

Shirley, Stanley, and "Maggot Brain" were all on WNCX. It was also the station that introduced us to the horridness that is "Gotta Keep A Runnin'" by Godz.

Edit: According to Wiki, "Maggot Brain" was played every Sunday at 1:30 on WMMS.

 

WCMF is still on, but for some reason I can't get it in my car now and I'm all iPod all the time anyway. I am too young to remember WBBF, but I'm sure I would've liked it.

 

BBF was sort of a precursor to CMF, then they were competitors for a little while, then BBF just sort of died out as CMF started to dominate that segment of the radio audience.

What sort of iPod set-up do you have in your car? I just bought this thing at Best Buy so I don't have to keep fumbling with CD's on long road trips, but I lose the stations after a few songs and have to keep fumbling with this new thing to find the open station as I move down the road. Maybe I just need to get the hang of it or something, but right now it doesn't seem worth the trouble.

 

I was a serious radio geek growing up (and still am), although commercial radio is next-to-unlistenable right now.

FM:
WFBQ-Indy. Loved Bob & Tom when they were local. Pretty much stopped listening when they began to syndicate, because they couldn't poke fun at familiar local stuff anymore and most of the humor turned into toilet humor. They had a great station round-the-clock, though. And that was pretty much it. I would hit the local classic rock station or the oldies station, but I didn't spend a lot of time on the FM band. As has been noted, they haven't changed their song rotation in about 20 years (or, since ClearChannel bought them), so they're pretty stale and tired when they were fairly cutting-edge at one time.

There was a local yokel station called WLHN-97.9 out of Anderson, IN that was awesome on Friday nights. Anderson was one of those towns were high school sports were HUGE -- they had three local high schools, one played in a 9,000-seat gym, and it was full more often than not (the other two routinely played before packed houses in gyms half the size). The Anderson sectional -- in that 9,000-seat gym -- was quite possibly the toughest ticket in Central Indiana for years. Not only did they do play-by-play of games, they had an incredible Friday-night postgame show that would feature call-in reports from about 10 different games, and fan call-ins and discussion, and they'd have several people in-studio chatting about high school hoops. It was incredible. Then, when I was about halfway through high school, the station got sold, the program shunted to an AM with a tin can for a transmitter, and now it's a big religious station (and Emmis Communications started a statewide postgame scoreboard show at about the same time the station went dark that is a must-listen for anyone driving back from a Friday-night game these days, and while it's good, it doesn't quite have the same homey, yet professional, flavor that show had).

AM:
WLW 700-Cincinnati. Loved Gary Burbank & Bill Cunningham and they had one of the best sports talk shows in the country back in the day when they were rare -- with Bob Trumpy hosting whenever he was in town. Not a Reds fan, but Marty Brennaman in his prime was a great listen. I still love their overnight trucker show.

WGN-720 Chicago & WBBM-780 Chicago. Loved the all-news and Blackhawks games on BBM and I grew up with the Cubs on WGN. Their day-to-day programming never really did it for me, though.

WOWO-1190 Fort Wayne. Not just for the Fort Wayne Komets, this was a great station round-the-clock. Had a full-service news/talk/sports/5-songs-an-hour oldies format for years and years. '

WHO-1040 Des Moines. They always replayed Hawkeye games at midnight (men's bb, women's bb and football), so I often would listen after I went to bed.

WCBS-880 New York. Sure, the Yankees games were excessively annoying to listen to (you can only hear "thuuuuuuuuuuuuh pitch" about 250 times a night before it gets annoying), but their 24-hour news was second to none.

I'd usually catch games on WBBM (Blackhawks), KDKA (Penguins, Pirates ... as a young Bruins fan, I still remember listening with despair during the '91 and '92 Eastern Conference Finals, and about throwing my radio every time I heard "Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee shoots and scoooooores" and the Pens had scored again), KMOX (Blues, and much less often, Cardinals), WJR (Red Wings & Tigers), WBZ (when they got the Bruins rights late in my HS days), WTAM (Indians, sometimes the Cavs), WSB (Braves) ... I was always listening to *something* at night.

We had a local station in Indy that was gradually transitioning to all sports called WNDE (has been all sports for about 20 years now) that I listened to, with a guy who has been all over the place in local radio/TV -- Mark Patrick (whose current claim to fame is that he's the father of Nats pitcher Drew Storen) -- hosting a wildly popular afternoon talk show (which he's now in his third stint hosting on the same station ... and it's barely listenable anymore except during baseball season). Now, we have three competing all-sports stations, and I probably spend about 30 minutes a week listening to any of them.

I'd think it was awesome when I could pick up a really, really faraway station, like KOA out of Denver or WBAP out of Dallas (which I could often get crystal-clear) or the French-speaking station on 860 out of Toronto (on which I listened to quite a few Canadiens playoff games and used my high school French to attempt to understand what was going on). WWL out of New Orleans was a hit-and-miss reception-wise that was fun to listen to ... I pulled it up a lot during Katrina to listen to the local coverage of what was going on.

 

About 85% of US commercial news stations (radio or TV) project a tone of perpetual near-incoherent hysteria.

The corporate honchos like it that way. Keep the sheeple constantly on the verge of complete panic.

Wait a minute!! Here's a report direct from the Weather Porch!!! Hold on!! CHANCE OF SNOW TONIGHT!!!

 

77 WABC - Cousin Brucie

WHFS - the greatest radio station of all time.

started with HFS in '78 at 102.3, listened all through college. Before anyone knew to Fear the Turtle.

 

The level of hyperventilation about the weather on TV and radio would be comical if it wasn't so pathetic. I got your fucking street level radar right here. Yeah, guess what, it's snowing.

 

I lived in extreme small-town Kansas as a kid, at least two hours away from anywhere, so we had no good local stations. But when the sun went down you could pick up some decent alternative stations T95.1 out of Wichita or 101 The Edge out of Omaha. I was pissed when they started up a new country station in Hays, Kan., on the same frequency as The Edge because that signal overpowered it 24 hours a day.

105.9 The Lazer in Lawrence was an awesome station back in the day, but went Top 40 at least a decade ago. You still occasionally see "The New Lazer Sucks" bumber stickers or T-shirts though.