Remembering AM Radio

How the Music of 1968/69 changed my life

There is a period of awakening that comes in every person’s life, usually at the dawn of adolescence, when their soul stirs in a way that is distinctly different from the relatively carefree days of childhood. That time for me was 1968. I was 12 years old, about to turn 13.

I kissed my first girl in the summer of ’68. Her name was Debbie Lee, and she was in 8th grade. That was a big deal for me, a lowly 7th grader!

I got my first job as a substitute newspaper delivery boy for the Washington Post. I would scan the headlines every morning: student opposition to the Vietnam War; the assassination of Robert Kennedy; the Tet Offensive and Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam; the body counts; Nixon defeating Hubert Humphrey; the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In the Spring of 1968, from the safety of my suburban Fairfax, Virginia front yard, I saw smoke rising over the treetops. Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, and many were expressing their rage and grief by rioting. Nearby Washington DC was on fire.

I went to my first sock-hop dance in 1969, at Frost Intermediate School. There I busted out my best moves but was so embarrassed that I vowed I would learn an instrument so I could be on stage instead of on the dance floor. I got a pair of drumsticks and started to practice.

I was awake and alive for the summer of 1969 when John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in a plea for peace, spent a week in bed. We were glued to black and white television sets that summer to watch American astronauts land on the moon.

Throughout all of those times, nothing stirred my young soul more than music. My Dad, another music lover, had given me a small AM radio, and I would listen to it every free moment. The fidelity was terrible, and at night, when the FCC required AM stations to power down, the sound would almost disappear. But that little AM radio was a doorway into a life of music that I still enjoy over 50 years later.

Here are just a few of the songs I heard on AM radio in 1968/69, and that I bought on 45 RPM vinyl records, slinging them over my drumsticks so I could carry them to a friend’s house where we would listen to them for hours.

• Crimson and Clover by Tommy James and Shondells

• White Room by Cream

• Pictures of Matchstick Men by the Status Quo

• Love is Blue by Paul Mauriat

• In the Ghetto by Elvis Presley

• Love Child by Diana Ross and the Supremes

• Pinball Wizard by The Who

• In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evens

• Hey Jude by The Beatles

• The Age of Aquarius by the 5th Dimension

• Bend Me, Shape Me by The American Breed

• Mrs. Robinson by Simon and Garfunkel

• Touch Me by The Doors

• Midnight Confessions by The Grass Roots

• One, a Harry Nilsson song covered by Three Dog Night

Like many of my generation, I abandoned scratchy AM radio, with its emphasis on pop music, for the better fidelity of FM and the underground LP rock they would play. The year 1970 would introduce me to FM DJs smoking weed on air while playing bootleg Grateful Dead albums from “high atop the triangle towers.”

I was done with AM, but AM was not done with me. After my first divorce in 2006, a tiny AM radio station in Crewe, Virginia gave me a much-needed job, saving me from a winter of utter despair. I produced my first short film about that experience.

So it is with some melancholy that I learned today that AM radio, already weakened by FM and internet streaming, has been dealt a death blow. But all things must pass sang George Harrison, so I say goodbye to AM while I listen to each and every one of the great songs of 68/69, on-demand, via streaming.

They still sound great, and they help a person of my generation remember.

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