Listen to the Music

Listen to the Music

Gather around kids, it’s time to tell you about the old days, when options for listening to music were evolving, thank heavens.

I’ll talk more about it later, but I listened to a radio almost constantly when I was little. I had a series of small transistors with one ear plug that I carried with me everywhere and kept in my bed (baseball and hockey night games during their respective seasons, music the rest of the time). It was an absolute necessity because if I rode in the car, my mom was never changing the radio from WMCL-AM, a country station out of McLeansboro, Illinois, and later WMIX-FM, my hometown radio station. There was no way I was spending a minute in the car listening to George Jones, Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, or any of the other country artists of the day. I was using that ear plug and listening to KXOK-AM in St. Louis and all my top 40 favorites.

Inside, I also had my trusty record player. Business soon picked up when at some point in the late 60s/early 70s, tired of only being able to hear one song by your favorite artist when a DJ chose to play it on the radio, some brilliant minds somewhere figured out how to take your favorite album with you in the car, via the 8-track tape player. The 8-track was actually invented in the early 50’s, but it became mainstream in my life in the early 70’s.

This modern marvel had an entire album in one plastic case that housed a looped tape (no need to turn it over) not quite double the size of and thicker than a cellphone. Cars began being outfitted with factory-installed 8-track players (or seriously cool people had them installed aftermarket) and soon, everyone could play their favorite albums on the open road. Their AM radio came complete with a big rectangular opening below it that would play the latest and greatest technology.

For my 10th birthday (I think), my grandmother bought me a pump-top 8-track player. These were sleek and super cool, and you could change tracks by pushing the handle on top of the machine. There was a round window that displayed a number showing which of the four sides was playing. My next-door neighbor, Kathy Brookman, had introduced me to Chicago (much, much, much, MUCH more on them later) and Queen, and I played Queen’s “A Night at the Opera” 8-track so much the tape finally broke and I had to buy another one. 

This was also the time in my life when I began assuming multiple identities. I know this seems strange for a 10-year-old, but it was a dishonest course of action I took out of excitement at my new 8-track player and desperation because of a lack of funds. I was still jamming with my cool orange record player, too, and my allowance went every week to 5 new 45 records (also known as 2-sided singles). This didn’t leave much for an 8-track budget, so desperate times called for desperate measures.

In the early 70s, if it was your desire to grow your 8-track tape collection, you signed on with Columbia House and RCA Music. These purveyors of modern music were subscription services (think early Spotify except shipping and handling was involved) that allowed you, for mere pennies, to obtain multiple 8-track tapes sent straight to your house. When you clipped the membership application from TV Guide or Reader’s Digest or Tiger Beat or Parade Magazine or any other magazine of the day, you signed your name agreeing to purchase a certain number of tapes (at full price) over the course of the next few months and you taped a penny to the order form!  Ideally, your commitment to purchase more would allow them to make their money back for the music you’d received almost free.

This is where the multiple identities come in. It is possible that my mother did not know I had joined these clubs. Somehow I was able to intercept the mail, so she never saw the boxes arrive, and I was able to buy an 8-track tape case for tape storage at Murphy’s that slid under my bed out of sight. Also, she didn’t care for my music, so she didn’t lurk around the bedroom door when I was rocking out.

I can’t describe the feeling of having so many choices for that awesome pump 8-track player. I can listen to Queen? And then change to Chicago X? Oh wait, how about ELO’s

A New World Record? Or maybe The Singles by The Carpenters? I had all of them and more and felt like it couldn’t get much better. However, if you didn’t fulfill your obligation to purchase (or knew there was no way you could), you’d need someone else at your address to also sign up for the club. My mom was already a member, and it was too risky to use my dad, so I signed up under another couple of names. One was similar to my own name (think Chanandler Bong – IYKYK), one was the name of one of my favorite book characters and one was my favorite TV actress (I see you, Kate Jackson – The Rookies and Charlie’s Angels – you were always my favorite). 

Fortunately, cross-referencing technology didn’t exist then, or I’d have been caught dead to right, but I grew my 8-track collection, and no one was the wiser. I’d probably feel a lot guiltier about doing this if virtually everyone I knew hadn’t done the same thing.

The 8-track tape soon became old news with the advent of the cassette. Where you could listen to an entire album in your car with an 8-track, the cassette allowed you to purchase an entire album in a much smaller package, AND you could buy RECORDABLE cassettes – hello mix tapes! However, at first, recording wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was a while before I had a nice stereo system with a built-in cassette player. All I had was a stand-alone player, a flat device with a pop-up window to insert the cassette and a few buttons to record and play. So, I either had to play a song on my stereo or 8-track player and record it by setting the cassette recorder in front of the speaker, or worse yet, if there was a song you loved but could only hear on the radio, you had to call and request the song (or hope it was in heavy rotation), and WAIT for it to be played, having your cassette player set up perfectly in front of the radio speaker, ready to hit record as soon as the song started.  You also had to hope the DJ wasn’t reading a promo about Stan the Tire Man or Bonanza steakhouse or some other ad that bled into the beginning of your song.

When cassette players began being installed in cars, we also got a radio upgrade – with FM! And then, the clouds parted, and the Lord looked down and said, “Let there be KSHE-FM,” and a fantastic new St. Louis rock radio station was born. I all also listened to WCIL-FM, coming to me live from Carbondale, Ill., home of the Southern Illinois University Salukis. Where AM sounded like the DJ was in a warehouse with no insulation and a trucking operation was going on next door, FM sounded like the DJ was in a room with carpeted walls, leather furniture, a full ashtray and lush shag carpeting. The voice, as well as the music, was smooth and unencumbered by any outside noise.

While there were plenty of top 40 FM stations, many became album rock stations, favored by college kids (soon, they’d just become college radio). They’d delve into the deep cuts of rock albums being championed by my older cousins as well as college kids around the country. FM was where I first heard Steely Dan and Elvis Costello and punk and new wave bands that didn’t hit the AM hot 100 lists.

Of course, the advent of FM radio brought with it a radio station’s ability to play songs that lasted longer than the three-minute hits we’d hear on AM. Many of the deep tracks from albums by Led Zeppelin, Rush, Pink Floyd, and other FM faves went on forever. This gave DJ’s something they’d only ever dreamed of – they could cue up “Freebird” and proceed to park on the toilet for their daily constitutional without having to change the track.

Somewhere in all of this, disco found its way into my everyday listening. I was never a huge fan. I was too young to go dancing and a little Midwest town wasn’t exactly alive with discotheques anyhow, but I couldn’t possibly live during that time and not be affected by the incredible Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, with its endless string of hits. This was where the “dance mix” was born. Lots of popular songs got the disco treatment and a backbeat was added so you could dance to most anything. There were a few songs I didn’t mind, but my favorite was a cover of “Knock on Wood” by Amii Stewart. It’s still one of my favorite songs today.

Music in the 70s sometimes gets a bad rap, but there are so many songs from that era that I love. The decade began with Vietnam and government protest music, and the Motown hit machine was starting to evolve into more sophisticated rhythm and blues, all to be upended when disco moved in. Still, the fact that 70s hits is the first saved station on my Sirius/XM car radio says it all – I love it. And it made it easier to deal with the fact that my mom STILL wouldn’t let me change the car radio.

Thanks for reading!