Well, this is certainly a post that hits my sweet spot. I have loved listening to the radio all my life, and loved radios, too. When I was young, I made crystal set radios. Now that I am old, I collect them. Some of my favorites are my GE Superadio III, my Tivoli Model One table radio, my Sangean HD radio, my old but still working Admiral table radio which was probably young when I began listening to FM radio in high school in the 1970s. Have you heard that old country song, "There Ain't Nothing Wrong With the Radio" by Aaron Tippin? It speaks truth the way a good country song does. I have driven some real wrecks in my time, but at least the radio always worked!
I listen to my radios at home but also my car radio. I have buttons saved for the local classic rock station, the local alternative rock station, the main sports talk station, the AM station that broadcasts local sports, the local jazz station and the local classical music station. Also the NPR news station, altho I don't listen to it very much, as I already get plenty of bad news from The New York Times, The Washington Post and Reason magazine's website.
It's interesting how listening to the radio can give you a music education. I learned a great deal about rock music via radio. For years, I never felt the need to buy a Led Zeppelin album, I already knew the band's music so well. A few years ago, I sat down and listened to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album all the way through, possibly for the first time in decades. I was surprised to discover that I knew every song by heart, simply because I had heard each track repeatedly played on FM radio. Listening to classical music radio also has helped me learn a lot.
I liked your bit about Eric Carmen. "Go All the Way" is my favorite Raspberries song. I live in the Cleveland area, where he was from, and when he died a few years ago, there was a sad, bitter court fight between his children and wife No. 3 over his estate. "As I got older, I realized they were very many bands who rode the coattails of the Beatles, and I thought The Raspberries were just trying to be Beatles with a hard-rock vibe." Also not a bad description of Cheap Trick. I have seen Cheap Trick in concert five times: Three times in Oklahoma over the space of quite a few years, once in Dallas at an all-day megaconcert, and once in Cleveland after I moved up here.
I suppose you have heard the story of how the Rolling Stones "rode the coattails" of the Beatles? The Stones were signed by Decca. Supposedly Decca knew the label had screwed up badly by rejecting the Beatles, and label executives took a chance on the Stones because they could not afford to make the same mistake again.
The early Stones gradually developed the rep as Bad Boys to the Beatles Good Boys. They also stuck with hardcore American blues a lot longer than the Beatles did. But we all negotiate our own Stones and Beatles. At 14 I didn't know the Stones much at all, except "Satisfaction" and "Brown Sugar." Maybe a couple others. But I knew the Beatles catalog inside-out. Then a friend borrowed his older brother's 2-LP Hot Rocks: 1964-1971 and I played the hell out of that and sort of caught up with them, then bought Made In The Shade.
Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) really did seem like the Stones were suddenly heavily under the influence of the Beatles, but they broke away. I really like that record.
Another Beatles-y psychedelic rock record I'm totally in love with to this day is the Zombies's Odessey and Oracle (1968). (Yes, that's how they spelled odyssey.) To me, it's there with Pet Sounds.
One of the oddest things about aging: as a senior in HS, the Stones somehow "came back" and had one of their greatest records: Some Girls. We had sorta written them off: they had a good long run, but they're old now. FM radio in LA played almost all - maybe more than 70% of the songs on Some Girls. Like Rumors: they just played everything. And I thought, "Good for them: they're really old and can still rock." That was 1979 and they're still going? Keith Richards is still alive and super old and I'm old now too? WTF? I just didn't think, as an 18 year old, that things could go that way. I suspect some part of thought rock musicians must go the way of great baseball players: after age 35 or 40, no matter how good you were, you will lose it.
I totally agree with you on Cheap Trick: I love them to this day for the way they carried on a Beatles-y thing. I also thought Badfinger were a later Beatles-y deal. ELO was a sort of Beatles, too. For me, at least. I'll throw in The Hollies, at least some of their stuff. I recall the 1971-1975 period when each Beatle went his own way and we tried to keep up with the solo careers. For awhile Ringo was having more success on Top 40 than the others. There were people who tried to hang with their solo stuff, but the sadness was they weren't together; it's just not the same. Imagine "You're 16, you're beautiful, and you're mine" trying to get airplay these days. (Ringo was covering an old song written for Johnny Burnette.)
As for Zep, Presence hardly got any airplay on FM radio in LA, but it's one of my favorite Zep records. Same with a lot of the tunes on Physical Graffiti: about 5 songs got airplay, but I also really liked a handful of other tunes from that record - a double-LP - that we never heard on the radio. Like the Ringo cover of "You're Sixteen" but even more debauched, Zep has "Sick Again" at the end of Physical Graffiti, and it's clearly about underaged groupies in LA and their own reality with them. It was never played on the radio. I paid attention to the guitar parts anyway.
There was a recent poll about radio usage in the US: 1000 people between 25-64: radio use - at some point during the week - is still WAY higher than podcast use; podcasts had been gaining ground over radio and it's leveled off. This post about radio and the psychological effects of the sound of voices was WAY too long, but it could have been three times longer, easily, as I had a lot to say about podcasts, but hey: maybe some other day.
I wonder what the future of radio will be. I am with you: I have my car tuned to jazz, classical, rock stations, but I think the sort of hyper-local eclectic stations are coming on. In Sonoma County, where I live, there's KRSH, which has ads for local stores and plays a mix of R&B, Bob Dylan/Tom Petty/Joni Mitchell, blues players, local musicians, some bluegrass, Alison Krauss, and at the moment I'm writing this, I just checked their playlist: the last 7 acts they played were Beck, Duncan Sheik, Jimi Hendrix, U2, Maya Hawke, Kathleen Edwards and Dire Straits. Late at night but not every night of the week, KPFA-Berkeley comes in strong with jazz.
Terrific piece. I had parallel experiences. In eighth grade I listened to a lot of AM radio. They had news once an hour, and listening to this helped me do well in the weekly trivia contests in my social studies class. In the second semester of eighth grade a new student came to the school, Scott Larson. He joined our German class and he and I did not get along. That summer I got super into the Beatles. Our 7-9th grade junior high did not offer third year German, so a few of us walked to the high school next door for our German class every morning. Scott and I got to talking, and it turned out he loved the Beatles too. That December I went to his house for the first time and he place "Money", "Come Together" and "The Ocean" for me, none of which I had ever heard before in my AM world. Changed my life forever. He got me to start listening to FM radio.
In junior high I also listened to old radio shows. I remember "Inner Sanctum" started by telling the listener to put chair in the middle of the room with your back to the radio, turn out the lights, sit down and listen. Great stuff. Stephen King has a nice discussion of radio horror in his non-fiction book "Danse Macabre".
I find it interesting that Orson Welles created perhaps the most influencial radio show and the most influencial movie of all time, both before he turned 26, and he also did revolutionary stage shows.
I moved to Southern California in December 1997. I got a job as a management trainee with Blockbuster Video in February 1998. They had me travelling all over Southern California filling in for sick managers. I would search the radio dial, and on Sundays I kept hearing this great Grateful Dead show hosted by Barry Smolin on KPFK. I had grown up in the Bay Area, so I had a slight affection for the Dead, but his voice and his show made me a Deadhead, and for years I had to hear his opening poetic monologue on Sunday nights. Later I learned to love Smolin's novels.
Orson Welles's voice is one I think of as "Voice of God" along with a bunch of others. I checked out a bunch of The Shadow radio shows from the library a few years ago.
Your local library might have Smithsonian collection of radio shows from the 1940s on CDs. I will never get over the realization that the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy show was a hit on radio.
Love your story about Scott Larson and the Beatles. There's a ginormous amount of writing in books about the Beatles pre-1963 and I've read a lot of it. I often find when I contemplate that their lives as a group of recording artists was only 1963-1970...there's something I can't quite come to grips with there. ALL THAT happened in 7 or 8 years?
I guess, these days, instead of saying I am old or I am older, one can say: "I grew up with the radio." That immediately puts you back some 60 to 80 years.
Radio forced us to use our imagination and create pictures. Of course, that was before TV years.
Great voices always meant a lot to me. I prefer warm and deep voices. One of the narrators I really enjoy listening to is Morgan Freeman. I find his voice warm, deep, stable, calming and filling up my living room with meaningful substance.
I really do think that the skills we develop listening to radio (making pictures in our head to accompany the voices) don't go away when later media usurp the throne.
McLuhan uses anthropological "tribal" metaphors for radio because its auditory: in the tribe you can hear what's going on at the other end of the camp. It's an auditory reality, just as when you have the radio on and do chores around the house, moving from one room to another: you still stay in "touch" with the radio. Not so with TV, unless you're using it like a radio: to feel less alone, to keep yourself company, possibly to drown out thoughts.
As for Morgan Freeman, producers agree with you. He's been hired for his voice countless times. Imagine having never seen Morgan Freeman in a movie or a TV show, but you'd only listened to his voice narrate: is he still the Wise Old African-American Man voice? I think he is.
When I was 17 and lived in Denver I got kicked out of HS and went to a continuation school, where all the teachers were older hippies and we called them by their first name. At this moment in my life we smoked tons of weed and had adventures outside of school, but the local rock station, KBPI, was something we all listened to, every day, pretty much constantly. And at my continuation school I found there was going to be "field trip" to tour KBPI, so of course I had to go. I remember we were all really excited because we all listened to that station, which would now be called Classic Rock. 1977.
So, we enter the station and the DJ is on the air doing commercials and reading ads and he's inside a large glass box-room. And the speakers are on outside the room so we can hear it live. I can't remember the name of the DJ but we listened to him all the time. To SEE him do that voice was...sort of destabilizing. THAT'S what the guy doing that voice looks like? He looks like an ordinary dude! Like: what did we - or I - expect?
Then he answered all our questions. It found it educational.
Well, this is certainly a post that hits my sweet spot. I have loved listening to the radio all my life, and loved radios, too. When I was young, I made crystal set radios. Now that I am old, I collect them. Some of my favorites are my GE Superadio III, my Tivoli Model One table radio, my Sangean HD radio, my old but still working Admiral table radio which was probably young when I began listening to FM radio in high school in the 1970s. Have you heard that old country song, "There Ain't Nothing Wrong With the Radio" by Aaron Tippin? It speaks truth the way a good country song does. I have driven some real wrecks in my time, but at least the radio always worked!
I listen to my radios at home but also my car radio. I have buttons saved for the local classic rock station, the local alternative rock station, the main sports talk station, the AM station that broadcasts local sports, the local jazz station and the local classical music station. Also the NPR news station, altho I don't listen to it very much, as I already get plenty of bad news from The New York Times, The Washington Post and Reason magazine's website.
It's interesting how listening to the radio can give you a music education. I learned a great deal about rock music via radio. For years, I never felt the need to buy a Led Zeppelin album, I already knew the band's music so well. A few years ago, I sat down and listened to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album all the way through, possibly for the first time in decades. I was surprised to discover that I knew every song by heart, simply because I had heard each track repeatedly played on FM radio. Listening to classical music radio also has helped me learn a lot.
I liked your bit about Eric Carmen. "Go All the Way" is my favorite Raspberries song. I live in the Cleveland area, where he was from, and when he died a few years ago, there was a sad, bitter court fight between his children and wife No. 3 over his estate. "As I got older, I realized they were very many bands who rode the coattails of the Beatles, and I thought The Raspberries were just trying to be Beatles with a hard-rock vibe." Also not a bad description of Cheap Trick. I have seen Cheap Trick in concert five times: Three times in Oklahoma over the space of quite a few years, once in Dallas at an all-day megaconcert, and once in Cleveland after I moved up here.
I suppose you have heard the story of how the Rolling Stones "rode the coattails" of the Beatles? The Stones were signed by Decca. Supposedly Decca knew the label had screwed up badly by rejecting the Beatles, and label executives took a chance on the Stones because they could not afford to make the same mistake again.
The early Stones gradually developed the rep as Bad Boys to the Beatles Good Boys. They also stuck with hardcore American blues a lot longer than the Beatles did. But we all negotiate our own Stones and Beatles. At 14 I didn't know the Stones much at all, except "Satisfaction" and "Brown Sugar." Maybe a couple others. But I knew the Beatles catalog inside-out. Then a friend borrowed his older brother's 2-LP Hot Rocks: 1964-1971 and I played the hell out of that and sort of caught up with them, then bought Made In The Shade.
Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) really did seem like the Stones were suddenly heavily under the influence of the Beatles, but they broke away. I really like that record.
Another Beatles-y psychedelic rock record I'm totally in love with to this day is the Zombies's Odessey and Oracle (1968). (Yes, that's how they spelled odyssey.) To me, it's there with Pet Sounds.
One of the oddest things about aging: as a senior in HS, the Stones somehow "came back" and had one of their greatest records: Some Girls. We had sorta written them off: they had a good long run, but they're old now. FM radio in LA played almost all - maybe more than 70% of the songs on Some Girls. Like Rumors: they just played everything. And I thought, "Good for them: they're really old and can still rock." That was 1979 and they're still going? Keith Richards is still alive and super old and I'm old now too? WTF? I just didn't think, as an 18 year old, that things could go that way. I suspect some part of thought rock musicians must go the way of great baseball players: after age 35 or 40, no matter how good you were, you will lose it.
I totally agree with you on Cheap Trick: I love them to this day for the way they carried on a Beatles-y thing. I also thought Badfinger were a later Beatles-y deal. ELO was a sort of Beatles, too. For me, at least. I'll throw in The Hollies, at least some of their stuff. I recall the 1971-1975 period when each Beatle went his own way and we tried to keep up with the solo careers. For awhile Ringo was having more success on Top 40 than the others. There were people who tried to hang with their solo stuff, but the sadness was they weren't together; it's just not the same. Imagine "You're 16, you're beautiful, and you're mine" trying to get airplay these days. (Ringo was covering an old song written for Johnny Burnette.)
As for Zep, Presence hardly got any airplay on FM radio in LA, but it's one of my favorite Zep records. Same with a lot of the tunes on Physical Graffiti: about 5 songs got airplay, but I also really liked a handful of other tunes from that record - a double-LP - that we never heard on the radio. Like the Ringo cover of "You're Sixteen" but even more debauched, Zep has "Sick Again" at the end of Physical Graffiti, and it's clearly about underaged groupies in LA and their own reality with them. It was never played on the radio. I paid attention to the guitar parts anyway.
There was a recent poll about radio usage in the US: 1000 people between 25-64: radio use - at some point during the week - is still WAY higher than podcast use; podcasts had been gaining ground over radio and it's leveled off. This post about radio and the psychological effects of the sound of voices was WAY too long, but it could have been three times longer, easily, as I had a lot to say about podcasts, but hey: maybe some other day.
That poll I refered to:
https://www.insideradio.com/free/radio-listening-holds-firm-as-podcast-usage-levels-off-in-2026-survey/article_40308698-635b-4517-81cb-a57b6f40d140.html
I wonder what the future of radio will be. I am with you: I have my car tuned to jazz, classical, rock stations, but I think the sort of hyper-local eclectic stations are coming on. In Sonoma County, where I live, there's KRSH, which has ads for local stores and plays a mix of R&B, Bob Dylan/Tom Petty/Joni Mitchell, blues players, local musicians, some bluegrass, Alison Krauss, and at the moment I'm writing this, I just checked their playlist: the last 7 acts they played were Beck, Duncan Sheik, Jimi Hendrix, U2, Maya Hawke, Kathleen Edwards and Dire Straits. Late at night but not every night of the week, KPFA-Berkeley comes in strong with jazz.
Terrific piece. I had parallel experiences. In eighth grade I listened to a lot of AM radio. They had news once an hour, and listening to this helped me do well in the weekly trivia contests in my social studies class. In the second semester of eighth grade a new student came to the school, Scott Larson. He joined our German class and he and I did not get along. That summer I got super into the Beatles. Our 7-9th grade junior high did not offer third year German, so a few of us walked to the high school next door for our German class every morning. Scott and I got to talking, and it turned out he loved the Beatles too. That December I went to his house for the first time and he place "Money", "Come Together" and "The Ocean" for me, none of which I had ever heard before in my AM world. Changed my life forever. He got me to start listening to FM radio.
In junior high I also listened to old radio shows. I remember "Inner Sanctum" started by telling the listener to put chair in the middle of the room with your back to the radio, turn out the lights, sit down and listen. Great stuff. Stephen King has a nice discussion of radio horror in his non-fiction book "Danse Macabre".
I find it interesting that Orson Welles created perhaps the most influencial radio show and the most influencial movie of all time, both before he turned 26, and he also did revolutionary stage shows.
I moved to Southern California in December 1997. I got a job as a management trainee with Blockbuster Video in February 1998. They had me travelling all over Southern California filling in for sick managers. I would search the radio dial, and on Sundays I kept hearing this great Grateful Dead show hosted by Barry Smolin on KPFK. I had grown up in the Bay Area, so I had a slight affection for the Dead, but his voice and his show made me a Deadhead, and for years I had to hear his opening poetic monologue on Sunday nights. Later I learned to love Smolin's novels.
Orson Welles's voice is one I think of as "Voice of God" along with a bunch of others. I checked out a bunch of The Shadow radio shows from the library a few years ago.
Your local library might have Smithsonian collection of radio shows from the 1940s on CDs. I will never get over the realization that the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy show was a hit on radio.
Love your story about Scott Larson and the Beatles. There's a ginormous amount of writing in books about the Beatles pre-1963 and I've read a lot of it. I often find when I contemplate that their lives as a group of recording artists was only 1963-1970...there's something I can't quite come to grips with there. ALL THAT happened in 7 or 8 years?
I guess, these days, instead of saying I am old or I am older, one can say: "I grew up with the radio." That immediately puts you back some 60 to 80 years.
Radio forced us to use our imagination and create pictures. Of course, that was before TV years.
Great voices always meant a lot to me. I prefer warm and deep voices. One of the narrators I really enjoy listening to is Morgan Freeman. I find his voice warm, deep, stable, calming and filling up my living room with meaningful substance.
I really do think that the skills we develop listening to radio (making pictures in our head to accompany the voices) don't go away when later media usurp the throne.
McLuhan uses anthropological "tribal" metaphors for radio because its auditory: in the tribe you can hear what's going on at the other end of the camp. It's an auditory reality, just as when you have the radio on and do chores around the house, moving from one room to another: you still stay in "touch" with the radio. Not so with TV, unless you're using it like a radio: to feel less alone, to keep yourself company, possibly to drown out thoughts.
As for Morgan Freeman, producers agree with you. He's been hired for his voice countless times. Imagine having never seen Morgan Freeman in a movie or a TV show, but you'd only listened to his voice narrate: is he still the Wise Old African-American Man voice? I think he is.
When I was 17 and lived in Denver I got kicked out of HS and went to a continuation school, where all the teachers were older hippies and we called them by their first name. At this moment in my life we smoked tons of weed and had adventures outside of school, but the local rock station, KBPI, was something we all listened to, every day, pretty much constantly. And at my continuation school I found there was going to be "field trip" to tour KBPI, so of course I had to go. I remember we were all really excited because we all listened to that station, which would now be called Classic Rock. 1977.
So, we enter the station and the DJ is on the air doing commercials and reading ads and he's inside a large glass box-room. And the speakers are on outside the room so we can hear it live. I can't remember the name of the DJ but we listened to him all the time. To SEE him do that voice was...sort of destabilizing. THAT'S what the guy doing that voice looks like? He looks like an ordinary dude! Like: what did we - or I - expect?
Then he answered all our questions. It found it educational.