AM Glory

Lunch today included a conversation about public radio and their regular fund raising drives. I had just made my annual donation yesterday and mentioned the main reason was the new music station launched by Colorado Public Radio, OpenAir. One person looked at me and with a bit of a disbelief said: "You mean the AM station with music??"

I get the disbelief. Yes, music on AM radio still exists. The AM dial is not completely the domain of talkers. But I get it when people are skeptical about listening to music on an AM radio station. When I first heard OpenAir last fall, I didn't like it. The sound was muddy, in mono, and, with the nosier numbers, almost hard to make out a song buried in the sludge. I wanted pristine stereo pouring through the speakers of my car; this is 2012 dammit!

Despite wishing I had the perfect sound, I kept listening to OpenAir I kept listening because it's the only station playing interesting, adventurous, new, and local music on terrestrial radio (more on how freakin' great this station is another day). And after awhile, I remembered something I forgot in the CD>digital era:  music sounds great on AM radio. Music sounds more real, warmer in muddy mono.

Most important, on AM radio a crappy song can't hide behind pristine production, stereo tricks, and other new era technologies. AM radio means a song must stand on its own merits. It's all right there for your listening and judging. After years of hearing pro-tuned music compressed through a digital machine where the heart is computerized out, music heard through AM radio is dripping with soul.
 
I'm a child of the 1970s Midwest. I grew up on AM stations. They were where we went for music on the radio. My favorite was WLS out of Chicago. My (what we call now) tween years were spent in reverent worship of what DJs like Larry Lujack, John Records Landecker, Bob Sirott, and Tommy Edwards were playing. These were real personalities playing real music. They were loose and at the core was rock & roll in all it's glorious mess; an AM radio fueled mess.

Or, at least that's the gauzy Wonder Years-like memory I've retained. But that memory is something I'd forgotten as we morphed from vinyl to CDs to online music. And I am a huge fan of what online music has brought us. I have more access to music today than ever before. From Spotify to the Internet Archive to Pandora/Slacker/etc. to every show by every band available in audience recordings or soundboard, the internet has blown open the doors to music. Somewhere along the way, though, I had lost a bit of what music sounded like when I fell in love with it.

After the lunch conversation, I got another reminder of how great AM radio can be. I got in my car this evening and turned on the radio as a fund raising appeal morphed into Spiritualized's "Hey Jane." The driving bass overwhelmed my speakers and we were off to the races. It sounded perfect.