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Sunday morning I was tuning through the AM radio band just to see if it was still being used and for what it was being used. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the frequencies being put to use by local, small church preachers; some large city churches were also broadcasting their Sunday sermons to the masses.
Until the late 1960′s, AM radio was about all there was other than shortwave broadcasts from abroad. FM was around, but was not popular among the proletariat; it had the reputation of snobbishness because many of the few available stations aired jazz and classical music, something which made hillbillies sneeze and fart and run screaming for the outhouse. My first real introduction to the FM band was in 1972 when I bought a Dodge pickup truck which had an AM/FM radio. It was love at first listen for me; I remember driving home to Tennessee on Friday evenings from working in West Virginia, and somewhere atop Flattop Mt. on the West Virginia Turnpike, I started picking our local FM station from Johnson City which was WJHL-FM. The good part was that they were playing some album oriented rock and roll and a mix of other genres. By the mid-70′s, the station had changed its call letters to WQUT, boosted its output to 100,000 watts, and was playing only album oriented rock and roll to ex-hippies and cool-dude fans in several states. By the late 70′s, the station had become the most popular commercial FM station in the United States, beating out markets in New York City and Los Angeles. With shows like The Tennessee Midnight Rambler on Saturday nights and Friday afternoon’s Blazing Turntables (Blazing TT’s), along with the uninterrupted playing of a new album each Wednesday night at 12:00 which could be recorded to cassette at home, the local rock scene was booming. Big-name rock bands were begging to play recitals at our small Freedom Hall Civic Center. Then along came—choke-choke—disco and before you could say ‘where’s my coke spoon’, the station became mostly Michael Jackson and other to 40 vomit. Sometime in the late 80′s, it once again tried to recapture the old magic by changing to a hard rock format, but it was too late, new wave country garbage like Achy Breaky Heart was mesmerizing the nation. WQUT is now just another classic rock station, playing repetitive canned fare each day and beating our brains into jelly with The John Boy and Billy Big Show each morning … disgusting!
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Have a Tuesday, my friends.
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