Requiem for the AM Radio Waves

Many new car radios will only receive FM signals. Is it the AM band’s death knell?

Over the conjunction of Christmas 1958 and my fifth birthday almost two weeks later in January 1959, I was gifted with a transistor radio. The little red plastic device was a magic carpet that carried me off to magical and exotic realms, a supersonic rocket ship blasting me out to unexplored galaxies, and a syringe injecting what became my biggest lifelong addiction, popular music, straight into my veins.

Like many others of my generation, at bedtime I’d stow my radio under my pillow, plug in the earphone and tune into seemingly faraway signals: primarily such seminal New York City Top 40 AM stations as WABC, WMCA and WINS. The svengalis spinning the boss sounds were legends like Alan Freed – the man who coined the term “rock’n’roll” and was pivotal to breaking the genre on radio – Murray the K and “Cousin Brucie” Morrow.

The three musical acts at the time who most enchanted me were Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison. When The Beatles arrived in America a few years later, it was as if they’d been custom-tailored for my tastes. The path my life would take was set.

Our local AM Top 40 outlet WENE, owned by TV talk show host Merv Griffin, was a constant presence in my youth. As I was reaching adolescence, the local AM country station, WKOP, hired a fellow from the City, Perry Cooper, who had worked as an assistant for Murray the K, to spin rock and soul records from 8 PM to midnight, presaging the soon-to-rise freeform FM rock radio movement by deep-diving into album cuts by artists like The Rolling Stones. I also became friends with the with the WENE midday disc jockey, Norm Sherwood, nicknamed the Jolly Green Giant after the canned and frozen food company’s mascot for his six-feet-and-then-some height. When he’d do remote broadcasts, I’d ride my bike to Sherwood’s location and hang out with him in his small-trailer mobile studio, helping him pick out the 45 RPM seven-inch platters to spin.

At eight years old, I sang live as a featured soloist on the top-rated AM radio station in my hometown.

And of course, whenever I was riding in a car the AM radio would be playing the hits of the day. My Dad would also listen every Saturday afternoon to live Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the top local station WNBF-AM, where I also appeared on the air in a simulcast of my church choir’s presentation of Benjamin Britten’s Saint Nicholas, in which I soloed as the Boy Nicholas.

AM radio was a formative force in my life and who I became and remain to be. And most of those mentioned above circled around later in my journey. In 1975, when I moved to NYC following my college graduation, Cooper helped me get my first music business job in the mailroom of Arista Records. After Perry moved to Atlantic Records to head up its artist relations department, I spent an afternoon hanging out with him and Genesis singer and drummer Phil Collins backstage at the Forest Hills Stadium as Cooper showed Collins his scrapbook from his DJ days.

When the Arista mailroom gig failed to launch me up the ladder to become a music mogul (thank God, I say now) and I left the job to start freelancing as a music journalist, the first major feature article I had published was a profile of Cousin Brucie in the Soho Weekly News. In the late 1970s, I got to spend time talking with Holly’s producer Norman Petty while he was visiting New York. (Coincidentally, my oldest brother Tony, an attorney, did estate planning work for Petty.) Around the same time, I also enjoyed a lunch in Dallas with Holly’s charming widow Maria Elena. A few years later, also in Dallas, I had another backstage hang, that time with Orbison and his father at the annual music awards show by the local Buddy music magazine – named after Holly. And when the Everlys reunited in 1983, I was joyous.

When I was Senior Editor at the Austin Chronicle in the early 1990s, overseeing the music section (among other editing and writing duties), our first computer system was installed by Alan Freed Jr., son of the rock’n’roll radio pioneer. The copy of Microsoft Word on our machines was his. Every time I opened it to write an article, the name Alan Freed would appear, much to my delight. In the mid-to-late 1990s, I was the radio columnist and reporter for the Austin American-Statesman.

As the FM band became the home of rock radio in the 1970s, AM mutated into a variety of formats. It’s a swamp of right-wing talk radio alongside news and sports broadcasting, religious and gospel music programming and stations that cater to foreign-language minority communities. Here in central Texas one can hear such Mexican-American styles as Tejano, norteño and conjunto music; on trips to Louisiana’s Cajun country, I’ve enjoyed Cajun and zydeco music on small AM stations that dotted the region.

But as a recent article in The Washington Post reports, “Automakers, such as BMW, Volkswagen, Mazda and Tesla, are removing AM radios from new electric vehicles because electric engines can interfere with the sound of AM stations. And Ford, one of the nation’s top-three auto sellers, is taking a bigger step, eliminating AM from all of its vehicles, electric or gas-operated.” Who knows what fate will befall the AM band in the years to come. I hope, like vinyl record albums, it might someday enjoy a revival.

For me, Top 40 AM radio will forever echo in my memory as the place where I first heard countless artists and songs. Little did I know when I was charmed in my youth on hearing the keyboard playing of the late Ian McLagan on “Itchycoo Park” by The Small Faces on AM radio that years later he would become a dear mate of mine who included me as the third person he thanked – right after Pete Townshend! – in the forward to his wonderful memoir, “All the Rage.”

Those are the gifts in my life that I’ve enjoyed thanks to AM radio. For as Britt Daniel of the band Spoon – who used to write record reviews for me at the Austin Chronicle – sings in his delicious ear-candy song “On The Radio” from the group’s most recent (and superb) album, “I was born to it.”