November 18, 2025 • 48 mins
The era of AM radio isn't over, but it's well past its heyday. Dive in today for a trip down memory lane.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Everybody, we have a big announcement, but Josh, I think
you need to do your traditional tour announcement.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
COURU, there we go. That means it's tour time, everybody.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
We took off twenty twenty five because it just felt
like the right thing to do. But we are hitting
the road again next year and we are super excited.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Yes get this. So we're gonna start hitting the road
in January, starting January twenty seventh at the Paramount Theater
in Denver. The next day we'll be at the Paramount
Theater in Seattle, and on January twenty ninth, we'll be
back to our beloved Sketch Fest at the Sydney Goldstein
Theater in San Francisco, CA.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
That's right, that's our January run.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
And then in April we're going to hit the Midwest
and we're going to some cities we haven't been to yet.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
And I'm super excited because on April.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Sixteenth, we'll be in Madison, Wisconsin at the Orpheum Theater.
On the seventeenth, we'll be back in Chicago at the
Chicago Auditorium, a city we love, and then to my
wife's some town. Finally, April eighteenth and Akron, Ohio at
the Goodyear Theater.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
That's right, and get this for the January leg. Tickets
are on sale now and we're actually running a pre
sale today November eighteenth. You can use our code sysk
live to get tickets early. Go to stuff youshould Know
dot com. It'll have all the tickets and info that
you need. And you can buy Sketch Fest tickets right
now as well.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
That's right. Sketch Fest on sale the sixteenth of November.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
There's no presale on that one. General on sale is
happening as we speak.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
That's right. So we'll see you guys in twenty twenty six.
We're really excited to get back out there. We hope
you're excited too. If you're not, just bake it when
you see us.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
That's right, and pay attention the Great White North because
there is more to come this summer.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
That's right. So we'll see you soon.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just keeping it
old school, real mellow style, which is what I understand.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
All of the kids say today, that's right, and hey,
before we get going, this is probably the perfect episode
to mention that our episode on how Vinyl Works that
was released on Vinyl is being reprinted because that thing
sold out and I think people would love to have
one of these things for Christmas.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Yeah, we're releasing it just in time for the holidays.
As a matter of fact, it's coming out on Black Friday,
November twenty eighth this year, which also happens to be
record store Day from what I understand, and our friends
at Born Losers Records put this out again. They did
the first one, did a magnificent job, of course, and
they printed three hundred red and black marble records that
(02:51):
are just beautiful. Those are available online at syskvinyl dot com.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, and then.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
For the actual store where you have to leave your home,
probably put on a cap because it's late November, maybe
a coat, go down to your local indie record store. Yeah,
they do it. There might be a chance that they
have one of the three hundred Gold Royalty records. Those
are exclusives for record stores.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Well, you can bet your boopie I'll be going to
my local record store and supporting ourselves by buying one.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
That's awesome. You should draw more people by just spending
like a full day there and telling.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
You, oh, yeah, maybe I could work something out with
the wack Street here in town. I can go sit
up there and those guys cannot talk to me.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
We'll see if we can get a cutout of you too,
to stand behind you while you sit there.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
I'm really excited this is back out though, because people
really seem to enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
And what is it again, sysk vinyl dot com.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
That's right awesome and thanks again to our friends at
Born Losers. You guys are great. Yeah, they're the best.
Yeah they are, okay, Chuck. So yeah, this is a
really good episode to shout out Records because we're talking
about AM radio and we talked a little bit about
it in our Beautiful Music Short stuff AKAABM.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
That's right, I'll.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Never get over. But there's a lot more to AM radio,
And in fact, I didn't realize this. Julia helped us
with this one, and I didn't realize before that AM
broadcasting basically set the standards, yeah, for all sorts of
different things like how news is presented, soap operas, all
(04:35):
sorts of different stuff that lasted for decades and decades
and decades. It all started with AM radio because ultimately
it was the very first form of mass communication that
was not printed.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, I mean Top forty radio started on AM, which
is I mean, I think these days the kids, if
they hear of AM radio probably either don't know what
it is, or may not if they have as we'll
see a newer model card especially ev may not even
have AM radio or a radio in their house like
a transistor radio or something or receiver, but they may
(05:09):
think AM radio is as like you know, news talk,
sports talk, maybe some foreign language stations, maybe some if
they're driving through a rural community, some like weird Farm
Report or something that they've never heard. I remember that,
And that's that's kind of what AM radio became. But
it launched Top forty. It was the up until like
(05:30):
nineteen seventy eight. It beat FM, and FM had been
around since what like the thirties, Yeah, it had.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
And everybody said, nope, we're really happy with AM and
stuck with it even after FM came around for quite
a while. But let's talk about this because, like you
hit on some really good points. So We're going to
touch on all of those, but let's start at the
very very beginning when AM radio really started to come around.
Because people had been messing with AM broadcasting since the
(06:01):
very early nineteen hundreds. There were some inventions that all
kind of came together around the same time. And I
do not understand how this could possibly happen, but putting
these disparate inventions together and figuring out how to broadcast
radio waves that have encoded sound in them is just
I mean, hats off. That's like mad genius stuff. But
(06:24):
that's what happened in the very early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, there were people broadcasting AM signals at the time,
and you know, the only people that had these AM
receivers that could listen were like soldiers at sea or
something like that. This was before they made it into
the homes of Americans that pause during World War One
because they said, hey, we can't have you broadcasting your
daughter playing violin, even though our soldiers love it that
(06:49):
are out at sea. We need to kind of lock
this down for now. But starting in about nineteen twenty,
in fact, exactly nineteen twenty was when commercial broadcast AM
radio started with KDKA Pittsburgh.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Yeah, that was the very first one. I think that
they read the results of the Warren Harding election. I
can't remember the other guy's name, somebody Cox. Warren Harding
obviously won. But right after that, I mean, like, this
was so clearly a groundbreaking medium. It was basically for
the people in the nineteen twenties. It was what people
(07:26):
in the early nineties experience with internet. Yeah, it was
almost like, holy cow, I can't like, you can't even
begin to imagine all the different ways that this thing
is going to change the world. You just know it's
going to change the world. That's kind of what happened.
And so right after that first broadcast, it just exploded
all over the world. And one reason why it exploded
(07:48):
all over the world is because the person who's considered
the father of radio, Gulielmo Marconi. He set up companies everywhere,
so very quickly radio stations started to develop. And just
a year or two after Katie Ka went on the.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Air, I'm, by the way, a little mad at you
because ever since you sent me the Marconi tidbit this morning,
I cannot get we built the city on rock.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
And roll out of my head.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
How waii. That's that's odd.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Marconi played the mamba Oh never do the radio. Yeah,
And I mean, I hate that song so much and
I can't get it out of my head, all because
I just saw the word Marconi typed in an email.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
I always thought, seriously, it was some gibberish I had
in my head. I knew it wasn't right, but it
was like in La says lebar something like that. I
had no idea Marconi was name check. But that's appropriate.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yes, I'm not really mad at you, but boy, that
thing really gets rooted in your head pretty well. But
like you said, by the early nineteen twenties, everybody was
on board. In nineteen twenty two, in fact, AT and
T had the first radio network built when linked to
thirty eight radio stations by phone lines, and could broadcast,
you know, weaf out of New York all around the country.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
So like people, it was it was literally, like you said,
like the.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Internet, it was American life before and life after as
far as AM radio.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Goes, well, we'll put it and not just American life too.
Like this, like I said, it spread around the world
very quickly. The BBC started broadcasting in nineteen twenty two
Australia's first radio station, two SB, which is now ABC Sydney.
That's they started in nineteen twenty three. Canada got its
first one in nineteen thirty two XWA out of Montreal.
(09:38):
It was just just like the Internet, It's not like
it was just one country. It was everybody who got
involved because it was a humanity altering invention.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
By the late nineteen twenties, the major networks had launched,
and you know, these were radio networks NBC and CBS.
These were international broadcasts from the un United States all
over the world, and you know they worked by you know,
you had to have a receiver.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
So early on, you know.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Vacuum tubes worked with radio receivers connected to loud speakers
and that's how you could hear things. Later on, transistor
radios came along and that's what really changed the game
because that's when it was like TV's for the olds,
the young people, we had these little radios in their pocket.
And then they started, you know, putting radios in cars.
(10:29):
But it's funny to think about a time when like, yeah,
TV's out outdated, right, and we want AM radio in
our pocket.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
And then it came roaring back eventually thanks to LA Law.
You mentioned something that I think is worth calling out too.
You mentioned that there's a speaker that converts that sound
signal back into actual acoustics sound. They weren't headphones, they
were speakers. So that meant that early radio was a
thing that the family gathered around. It was a social
(10:57):
activity listening to all the stuff that was on the
ra which is really important because I mean that's definitely
become fragmented and fractured today as it you know, personal
media has become like more and more available. But that
was like whatever was on the radio right then, probably
whatever your parents wanted to listen to. That's what the
(11:17):
family was listening to.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, for better or worse.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
I think by nineteen thirty there were forty percent of
US homes had AM receivers. Hopefully most of them had speakers.
Wise they just sit there and look at it. There
were more than six hundred radio stations in nineteen thirty,
obviously all of them AM. But like we mentioned, FM
came along pretty quickly in the nineteen thirties and had
a better sound, but you know, it just didn't take
(11:44):
over until nineteen seventy eight. I think by nineteen forty
even eighty three percent of the households in America. I
mean that's really massive coverage had AM radio signals, like
you know, being broadcast through their homes.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Yeah, and you said, I mean like FM was around,
but people said, no, we're sticking with the AM. One
of the big reasons is because the FM receiver needs
more power because of the way FM radio was pumped out,
that was a big thing for a long time. That
was one reason people stuck around with AM. But there's
definitely an affection that developed for AM radio over the years.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Yeah, there's also something called FM drift, Like you know,
if you're driving around listening to an FM station, it
can kind of go in and out, you know, to
the left or to the right. I guess you could
kind of turn your dial a little bit and try
and dial it back in. But that was an issue.
And we'll talk about some of the AM radio issues.
But if you're looking at the dial, AM according to
(12:46):
the FCC, AM waves have to be broadcast on frequencies
between five thirty five megahertz and one point seven and
FM is from eighty eight to one oh.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Eight sounds legit, so check out based on the radio
call signs I'm familiar with.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Do you ever listen to AM radio anymore?
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Yeah? I listened to the Bulldogs game on the way
home from Yumi's parents house on Saturday.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Wasn't that nice?
Speaker 3 (13:16):
The ballgame?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Or listening to the radio, listening to a sports broadcast
on the radio.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yes, I used to do that in college. I can't
remember the sportscaster's name, the legendary one for Georgia with
the hobnail boot.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah, yeah, Larry Munson.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Larry Munson. Yeah, back in college. I would listen to
him and watch the game. Yeah, like I'm mute, and
hopefully they would sync up.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah, that was the preferred method.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
But I still love and it doesn't happen a lot
because you know, I'll watch the game on TV generally,
but if I'm traveling like you were just talking about,
or I remember when I built we couldn't afford to build,
like to get a fence company to build our fence
twenty years ago. So I built our privacy fence like
picket by picket over the course of two months, and
(14:03):
a lot of that was spent with me listening to
Georgia Bulldogs on the radio. I mean it was pre
podcast even, and it's just it's still to me a
great way to catch a game for sure, not even
nostalgia wise, like it really is a great way to
listen to catch a game.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Oh yeah. The play calling is like you have to
be really good. There's no assist there. You're telling everybody
going on, you know. Yeah, I say we take a
break because we're getting nostalgic already. What do you think.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yeah, I'm gonna park that and we'll stick to the facts.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Okay, baby, we're taking a break. Everybody will be right back.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
So, if we're talking the golden age of radio as
a whole, that was about a three to four decade
period from the twenties through the mid fifties or so.
That was when am radio starred. We'll also talk a
little bit later about sort of the seventies period when
am radio music was like, you know, the Mellow Gold
stuff was a big deal. But that you know, that
(15:34):
first decade of radio ushered in. You know, it was
blowing people's minds like they had never heard sometimes any
of this stuff, or certainly had not heard any of
this stuff live like a live broadcast and speaking of
Sports in nineteen twenty one, over about one hundred and
twenty five thousand square miles from where it broadcasts out
of Jersey City, New Jersey, people listened to the heavyweight
(15:58):
boxing championship. I can't imagine what that was like to
hear a sports broadcast like that for the first time.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
As it happened.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
Hopefully the commentator knew what he was doing too, and
when they weren't like long pauses like the boom goes
the dynamite guy.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
One of them's punching another one repeatedly.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. Carpentee just went down.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
One of the other things that we'll see about AM
Radio two, Chuck, is that's it was long considered a
public good, so that the government had like a little
more willingness to be like, no, you can say this,
you can't say that, and you have to do this.
One of the reasons why is because it was very
quickly used to kind of spread public information, Like presidents
(16:43):
took to it very quickly. Remember I said that Katie
Ka announced the results of the Harding election. Within just
a couple of years, Warren Harding was using it to
talk to America and FDR was probably the most famous
president who used the radio to talk to America. Had
a series of like just informal speeches basically called fireside chests. Yeah,
(17:05):
that really made a lot of the countries just fall
in love with them. But it was very it was
it was very clear early on just how much influence
it could have on people's political opinions.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Well, and it was a lot of people the first
time they ever heard the president's voice.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Speak, you know, how what he sounds like. Yeah, it
wasn't around during Lincoln because everyone would.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Have been like really, but yeah, you know, there was
definitely public good and we'll dive into that a little bit,
along with tons of entertainment and you know, it was
basically like fifteen minute chunks for a long long time
of all over the map variety style stuff, kind of
reminiscent of vaudeville. Like there were hosts of shows, but
(17:47):
the DJ thing didn't come along till much later. So
you had like advice shows and news shows and obviously
comedy stuff, game shows.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
You know. Radio dramas were a big big deal.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Yeah, that's where soap op came from. Two They were
broadcast almost exclusively with women as their target audience. And
at the time, this is just post World War One,
where women had helped the war effort in the factories.
The men came back and they were like, get back
in the house, and women were stuck in the house
all day. So these radio dramas were broadcast to them
(18:21):
and they were almost exclusively sponsored by cleaning product companies.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
So they became known as soap operas. And one of
the longer lasting soap operas of all time actually made
the jump successfully from radio to TV. That was Guiding
Light No Way. Yeah. It started in nineteen thirty seven
on the radio and was finally canceled in two thousand
and nine on TV. It was seventy two years of
(18:47):
Guiding Light every weekday. Too.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
I had a very very brief foray into soap operas. Yeah,
I guess it was in college or something. I don't
know why, but I got hooked for I mean, not
too long, but I was hooked.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
I was like, these things are stupid. I was like, yeah,
but what happens.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah, the same thing happened to me again in college too,
and I cannot remember the name of it, but it
was just off the chain. I know there was a
main character named Marlena, and she was possessed by the
devil at one point. Someone will remember, like, yeah, certainly,
that's like a very famous plotline that was going on
when I was hooked on them, and then I got
(19:26):
hooked on them enough that I would switch channels during
ads and see what was on other soap operas and
general hospital. Once there was a scene where this couple
was in bed and they did such a poor job
of editing that they left in the director saying cut
and the two actors roll out of bed. I'll never
forget it. It was one of the greatest things I've
(19:47):
ever seen on television.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
They're like that, the sheets are pulled up, you know,
to their bare skin, and.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Then they roll out of bed and they have on
like blue jeans.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Yeah. I don't remember what they were wearing or anything,
but yeah, I'm sure it was just like that.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
That's really funny.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Oh God, to have that time again where you could
just like maybe sort of get hooked on a soap
for no reason.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Religion was also a big deal early on AM radio.
All of a sudden, evangelist could broadcast far and wide
from what they call the electric pulpit, and they became like,
you know, big time personalities and stars during the depression era.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Yeah, one of the first people that the question of
freedom of speech was raised around his father, Charles Coughlin,
who was a bigoted, hate speech Catholic priest who really
kind of pushed the envelope, you could say. I think
he said the Nazis didn't go far enough during Crystal
knockt like, he was that kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
So he definitely rose to prominence during this time. On
the lighter side, one of the most popular long running
shows was the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, Yeah,
which was a ventralic act on the radio. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
I mean the jokes still worked, but it's definitely a
visual medium for sure.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
But he managed to make it like super radio friendly
and it was super popular. You said that the Golden
Age of radio ended around the nineteen sixty two, and
we should say this was This depends on your perspective,
because a lot of people say no Golden Age of
radio and all the way to the seventies. This would
be like the first wave of Golden age radio where
(21:30):
it wasn't music. It was like dramas, scripted comedies, like sports,
all this stuff like what TV is today. This was
the first iteration of radio and it was all am radio.
But there was a year nineteen sixty two when two
shows were canceled, two long running shows, and people point
to their cancelation as essentially the end of that era.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
What were those yours?
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Truly? Johnny Dollar?
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (21:57):
It was about an insurance fraud investigator.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Sounds like true crime, it is.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
It sounds interesting. Each episode was a flashback of him
going over the line items for his expense report for
that particular case, and then each line item would kind
of bring up like a new scene. Pretty interesting.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
The radio network guys like can he kill his lover?
Speaker 3 (22:21):
And then Suspense was another one, and it sounds like
it was a little bit of a predecessor to like
Alfred Hitchcock Presents and maybe The Twilight c here or there,
And both of those were really well produced shows and
they got canceled the same year, and everybody said that's it,
that's the end of the Golden Age, and they spat
on the floor.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Well, you mentioned the public good starting in the nineteen twenties.
To jump back a little bit, you know, like you
mentioned President speaking inaugural addresses were being broadcast, and the
government really realized, hey, like we have a sort of
a public service we need to enact when we're sharing information,
because we got to get the word out about stuff
(23:02):
sometimes and this is the way to do it. So
the USDA Radio Service began talking to farmers in nineteen
twenty six. The US Bureau of Home Economics had a
chat program they launched, I believe in the same year
where they could talk about, like, you know, any emergencies
happening in regards to kids, like health and safety, stuff
(23:23):
like a new disease going around that your kid maybe
should get vaccinated against, stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Like that new fangled polio.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
But by the end of the nineteen twenties, they were like, hey,
there's a limited bandwidth and people are getting political messages out,
and we need to make sure that everyone in America
is getting sort of equal access to these messages, so
you know, no particular message gets out more than any other.
And that's where the fairness doctrine came about, right.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, we talked about that in the Presidential Debates episode,
but I think it deserves its own episode. It's so contraal,
But basically, the fairness doctrine is what I was talking
about earlier when I said the government wasn't shy about
getting involved in regulating radio because of what you just said, Like,
you can't just use radio at the time. You couldn't
to just put out one, say, specific political viewpoint. So
(24:16):
the fairness doctrine said, you have to have equal time
when you're talking about political matters, you have to give
equal time to both opposing viewpoints. It also said some
other stuff too that I thought was pretty cool. It
made sure that commercial concerns did not eclipse social ones,
so you couldn't screw over the public for your own
(24:36):
bottom line, which is just refreshing these days. The radio
served the public good and that you have like a
kind of public programming that's essentially like in addition to
all of the you know, ventriloquist acts and soap operas
and all that, you have like stuff that makes people,
(25:00):
helps people be more informed citizens. Like that was what
the government was getting involved in radio for.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Yeah, maybe perhaps if we would have been around the time,
it might have been stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
I could see that. I could see that, Yeah, we
would have been great for AM radio. I think as
a matter of fact, we should probably just stop podcasting
and start broadcasting on AM radio.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Yeah, we got to get the message of Jackhammer's out
far and wide.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
You know, the fairness doctrine went away, and you know,
like you said, we should do a whole episode on that.
But one of the things that happened was, you know,
the FM becoming a dominant force and just way more
choices and way more bandwidth for radio, so they didn't
need it anymore. So then you know, that's where that's
really literally where the echo chamber of politics started, where
(25:50):
you could turn into just your person who only talked
about things that you agreed with.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Yep, and that's it.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yeah. Not coincidentally, in nineteen eighties is when talk radio
like really started to become a thing with like people
like Rush Limbaugh that did not exist before that kind
of thing.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, and you know, FM when that came around, it
did create that echo chamber, but it was mostly like
a wealthy, educated crowd that could afford FM receivers. They
were more expensive, like you were talking about. I think
there were more than two thousand AM stations on the
air in the nineteen fifties, some of them would broadcast
on both I definitely remember, you know, both AMFM stations,
(26:32):
but FM did have some.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
And still do have.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Some sort of things that weren't in their favor, like
if you were inside a buildings sometimes the AM signal
could get blocked and get a little more difficult to
get a lot of AM stations, I think most of
them in fact, have to either reduce their power or
just go off the air at night, so you know,
back in the day and maybe still you hear those
sign offs at the end of the night, which is
(26:57):
kind of fun where they play like the stars angle
banner or something.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Then it just goes dead.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Yeah, like in Poltergeist.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
But another cool thing about AM is if you've ever
been like driving around out West or something, and you know,
probably not these days, but back when I was taking
my big out West trips, when all ahead was like
a cassette player in the radio. Once the sun went down,
sometimes you could get an AM station on your radio
that's like four states away because of those bear waves
(27:28):
bouncing off the ion a sphere and saying we'll take
it from here.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
Yeah. During the day, the ionosphere is super ionized. That's
where it gets its name. At night, it's less ionized,
So there's for some reason AM radio signals can bounce
off of it easier and like you said, end up
down in Mexico for goodness.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Sake, Yeah, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
For that reason though, that's why they stop transmitting at night,
a lot of them. Like I'm with you, I don't
know if they still do or not. It seems like
the kind of thing that maybe was licked, but it
also seems so fundamental that maybe it's still a problem.
But there were some stations that were designated clear channels.
They were allowed to broadcast twenty four hours a day,
(28:11):
and they were spread out both physically around the country
and in Canada and Mexico, and also spread out on
the dial so that their signals wouldn't interfere with one
another when they traveled really far distances. And one of
the reasons why they had AM stations designated to operate
twenty four hours a day is again part of that
(28:33):
public good, which was a service that AM radio offers
that has kind of overlooked a lot here in the
United States, which is it is like a national security
alert system essentially We'll talk a little more about that later.
But that's why the clear Channel thing is a thing.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Right, And to be clear, I didn't even mean that,
not to be confused with former iHeartMedia company Clear Channel.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
No, but I bet that's where they get their name.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Man, it'd be a real coincidence. Huh.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Wasn't that the name of the city that was built
on rock and roll?
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Clear Channel?
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Yeah? Clear Channel City.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
I'm not falling for anything you ever say anymore, so
don't even try.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Should we take another break?
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Yes, all right, we'll take another break talk about the
rise of TV and you know, music on AM radio
right after this.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
Okay, Chuck, we're back. And we talked about how the
Golden Age of radio ended, but that was what the
old stars considered the golden age. If you were young
and hip, the Golden Age was still yet to come.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
I mentioned Top forty was invented on AM and it
was specifically developed by a station odor named Todd Stores
in Nebraska at the beginning of the nineteen fifties. I guess,
and he said, Hey, you know, radio has all these
great shows. I love those puppets. That ventriloquism is great,
but we've got rock and roll now and R and
(30:36):
B and soon you know, pop music coming our way,
pop and pop music.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Who was that is that? Falco?
Speaker 3 (30:44):
No, I shouldn't have opened my big mouth because I
don't remember I even have that on my phone, so
maybe I'll look sometime soon.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
But he said, hey, let's let's start playing this music.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Let's create a what Julia calls a jew box driven
media and you know, play people stuff that. You know,
DJs became a thing. That's when they became personalities. Each
station started having you know, these sort of wacky that's
where those first you know, like the Wolfman and all
those sort of wacky early DJs came from that were
like real personalities people would tune into just to listen
(31:19):
to their specific show.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Yeah, Like each station had to have their own personality,
like the Big Bopper, one of the most famous of
all time. Yeah, he was djaying for a station in Beaumont, Texas.
Like it had like, if you had a station, you
had to have a personality, and some of them just
happened to be so popular that they became international icons essentially.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yeah, Like the Wolfman went on to own a furniture
store in North Georgia called Gallery Furniture. If you wanted
a waterbed, you would go ask for the Wolfman.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Boy, that's a niche joke. Should we even explain it
or not? Okay?
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Good?
Speaker 3 (31:58):
I think if you go onto utube and you look
up Gallery Frensham the Wolfman, there'll be something on there.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Oh. Sure, but that was a wolf mate, Jack. Are
you sure you didn't really think it was the same guy,
did you?
Speaker 3 (32:10):
No?
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Okay, See, I don't know what to believe anymore.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
I'm not trying, you know, I just wanted to come
clean about this.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
I've never tried to fool you. That was a thing
that just kind of evolved. I've just been making dry,
random jokes all this time, but it's never been to
fool you. You took that and ran with it. I've
never done it directly to fool you.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
This is not what you said during our therapy session
last week.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Well, doctor Krantz said.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
That, Doctor Katz, that's who we should have gotten.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Yeah, doctor Katz said that I needed to make more
stuff up.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
So we're not therapy together. By the way, everybody, that
was a joke. But if we did we'd get the
guy who therapied Metallica, right.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Oh, I forgot that they were in therapy together. Yeah,
I guess it worked.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
I'm not knocking at at all.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
I mean, we haven't had to do it, but I
think that's a great idea for any kind of partnership.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
You know, agreed? Okay, Was that the therapist that talked
Metallica out of their emo phase? Right, because hats off
to that therapist. Maybe we're talking, Oh yeah, we're talking
about what was going on with this transition to music.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Well, one of the reasons why AM radio transition to
music and away from things like soap operas and all
that stuff was because those things ended up on TV. Yeah,
the older people followed those. Remember, they're like radios the
pits now because the golden there is over And then
they turn on their TVs and they're like, oh, the
golden there is over here. Now, let's just keep going
(33:46):
and watching now instead of just listening. And that left
the kids to fill this vacuum, which was AM radio,
And like you said, the top forty format started there.
The like big internationally known DJs started there, and it
just kind of took off little by little. But really
picked up steam when a few things kind of came
(34:07):
together and one of them you already mentioned, which was
transis to radios, So now you didn't just have to
sit at home with the oldsters to listen to your
favorite hits. And then also AM radio started to show
up in cars essentially as not even an option after
a while, like you got the AM radio whether you
wanted it or not.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah, I think more than half of American cars had
AM radio receivers factory installed by the nineteen fifties. And
that was a huge, huge deal obviously, and you know,
it was the dominant paradigm for music until seventy eight.
And there was that period from kind of the early
(34:48):
seventies to the early eighties, little under ten years where
that you know, sort of yacht rocky am mellow gold
stuff really really took over. Yeah, you had to kind
of watch what you put on the radio because FM
was playing you know, they were playing the AOAR album
oriented rock stuff that had a little more mckismo and
(35:11):
testosterone fuel, like you know rock bands. Big hair, yeah, exactly,
big hair, long hair, not a mustache in sight unless
it was part of a beard probably, but wasn't the
case on AM with yacht rock, there were mustachioed dudes,
generally sensitive guys. The songs weren't about usually like conquering women.
(35:32):
Most of them were about getting dumped by women. A
lot of sad sack music coming out, Yeah on AM
radio in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
I still listened to a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Yeah, and a lot of the constraints. I found this
to be true throughout my life. When you put constraints
on something, it automatically fuels creativity because it doesn't mean
you don't still want to get across you know, subversive ideas.
You just have to cloak them within the confines of
these constraints, and it makes you more creative than just
saying the idea out loud, right, which is why album
(36:05):
rockers are typically dumb compared to yacht rockers as far
as the artist go.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
Yeah, So, like, if you're a songwriter and you're like,
I'm a yacht rocker, I'm not going to sing about,
you know, teenage girls. I'm going to sing about things
I like, like Penia Kalattison and getting caught in the ring.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Man. That guy, I think he's one of the most
reprehensible songwriters of all time. Not song, not just that song,
the Penia Kalada song. Have you ever heard the song him?
His song Him?
Speaker 2 (36:37):
I don't know, I don't know it by name. What
I recognize it?
Speaker 3 (36:40):
You think, I don't know. It's a it's considered yacht rock,
but it's it's a really despicable song about this this
guy whose girlfriend is sleeping around on him. So he's
got a teacher a lesson to basically bring her back
to heal and how he's not heartbroken or hurt. He's
just mad that this guy. He says, like nobody should
get it for free. Yeah, that's what he's upside. Well,
(37:04):
it's a nutsoe song. Go listen to it. But yeah,
Rupert Holmes, I don't think he'd like him Bodies the seventies,
like the worst part of Men in the seventies, I.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Think, Yeah, I mean, I really don't like that song
at all. But I do love most yacht rock. And
I know we've probably talked about it briefly at some
point as a recommendation, but the yacht rock documentary that
came out last year is really really good. Yeah, and
we do definitely want to say that that term was
not coined until the two thousands, when a comedy web
series spoofing the genre made up the nam yacht rock.
(37:38):
Before that, I think, like you know, Time Life put
out those the am Gold series of CDs. I think
am Gold or mellow or easy listening. That sort of
is what we called it, right, didn't that what you
called it?
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Easy listening? Yeah, that's what I was first introduced to it.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
As our mutual friend Allison who we used to work with.
My friend Eddie's wife calls it carsick music because it
just brings back days of like riding backwards in a
station wagon and being car sick and that stuff just
droning on and on.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
That's a perfect name for it.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, it's good.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
But when you know, when you're familiar with the idea
that they had to kind of cloak subversive ideas in
like non obvious terms, right, and you go back and
listen to some of this mellow Gold stuff, it's like,
whoa they were Really it's a little crazier than you thought.
Like for example, love Grows where My Rosemary Goes is
(38:31):
code for let's smoke some DMT. Yeah, that was the
only one I turned up.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
I mean, what do you think Ride Like the Wind
is about?
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Come on, right, that's about DMT as well. Oh wow,
all right, but he's talking about what it's like to
be on DMT, not just inviting you to smoke DMT.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Well, when you know what's funny, I think Christopher Cross
wrote Ride Like the Wind when he was on LSD.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
I believe that.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
I think said that in the yacht Rock doc.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Did he really? Yeah, it's a great song.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
It's a great song and has one of the most
one of the greatest guitar solos because he's a killer
guitar player. But it's so buried in the mix, and
there's all kinds of YouTube videos now where they're like, yeah,
let's bring it up in the mix and talk about
this solo and like how amazing it is.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
That's kind of like those videos of Van Halen with
nothing but David Lee Ross's vocals. Have you heard those?
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Those are Those are very funny. And to be clear,
it's a ripping solo for yacht Rock. It's no so
it's not like the solo for My Sharona or anything,
but it's still good.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
I don't Yeah, neither of the solos stand out to me.
I can't bring either one to mind.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Oh man, the My Sharona solo is a top five
guitar solo of all time for me. And you got
to listen to the radio version cut out a full minute.
It's like nineties plus seconds the full version.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
And they cut out two thirds of it for the
radio version. So you got to listen to the real
full version. It's like it's way better than it should
be for that song.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
That would be the album at it right?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Yeah, I guess so it's Kiddler.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
Or the twelve inch version.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
I don't know about the twelve inch Okay.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Well, regardless, go listen to some Mellow Gold. It'll make
you happy for sure.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
But where are we these days with AM radio?
Speaker 3 (40:20):
Well, there's this battle over it, just like absolutely every
single other thing that people more than one person talks
about in America, AM radio's actually managed to become politicized
a bunch of car makers, from what I can tell,
led by Tesla. I think they were the first ones
to announce this back in twenty twenty that they were
(40:42):
going to discontinue AM radios in their cars. Boo yeah.
And I think now you can kind of imagine why
it's a politicized idea, But the ostensible reason is that
the AM stereo is interfered with by the ev long story,
(41:03):
short AM waves are much more susceptible to noise because
of electrical interference. Well, an electrical vehicle is lousy with
electrical interference, And so the whole car industry is like,
we're gonna have to spend a bunch of money just
to keep this AM radio in there. And the US
government is a pretty adamant that AM radio needs to
(41:26):
stick around again, not just for the public good thing,
the nostalgia factor, but also because if you are going
to get an alert that you know the Cubans have invaded,
you're going to probably get that alert over an AM
radio station because that's what the whole system is set
up to do. Not because it's antiquated, but because AM
(41:47):
radio does all sorts of things those they could. The
waves can travel very far, so it reaches a lot
of people. Rural people listen to AM radio still today,
like it's just part of rural life. So it's everybody
is reached by AM one way or another. And I
didn't know this, but you can make a type of
(42:08):
radio a crystal receiver radio that can play AM radio
broadcasts without any battery or power source. The crystal manages
to take the energy in the radio carrier wave and
it's amazing and use that alone to basically reproduce the sound.
(42:28):
So for all those reasons, AM like radio really makes
a lot of sense to put all of your eggs
in that basket. As far as getting like emergency broadcasts out,
So the government said, long story short, you need to
keep AM radios in cars, and they're trying to figure
out how to get that mandated.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Yeah, I mean it's called the Emergency Alert System now.
It used to be the EBS, the Emergency Broadcast System.
And if you're thinking, like man, I get my Amber alert,
so like all that stuff comes through my phone now.
And this isn't like gen X saying like, oh, to
rely on on your phones, but like if you expect
that phone to always work in all cases for the
(43:08):
rest of time, you're sorely mistaken because if that system
is taken out, then you're gonna rely on something like
AM radio to get important information out, you know. I mean,
that's why it's still there. That's why they're you know,
going to the car makers and saying like, hey, like
you may not listen to it, you may think it's
old fashioned, but there are still four thousand AM stations
(43:30):
and eighty million listeners a month that some of them
rely on this stuff to get information, and you can't
just say like, well, it seems old timey, so we
don't interferes with our stuff, so we don't want it anymore.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Yeah, I do kind of have the feeling that there
is like a certain scorn toward the nostalgic factor of
AM radio. Yeah, and that that's part of maybe what's
driving it, which really ticks me off, because who are
car makers to decide whether AM radio sticks around or not.
Congress says, no, we actually have come up with a
(44:02):
law called the Am Radio for Every Vehicle Act that
basically says, if you sell a car in the United States,
it has to have AM radio as a feature, not
even an option. And a lot of carmakers are like, sure, fine,
we're on board with that. Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar, Kiya, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Silantis, Subaru,
(44:23):
Toyota all said we're keeping AM radio. Ford had said
they weren't, and they said, okay, we didn't realize AM
radio was so popular, we're going to keep it too.
So I guess if you want to show your support
for AM radio, everybody should just go out and buy
a Jaguar.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Well, Tesla, Rivian, Pollstar, BMW, Volkswagen, and Balvo dispensed with
AM radio and some of their new car models. I
don't think completely across the board for each of those manufacturers,
but that every AM for Every Vehicle Act failed in
twenty twenty four. Unfortunately, it was reintroduced this year in
(45:00):
twenty twenty five, just I think recently in September, and
has a lot of support, like on you know, both
sides of the aisle. So you know, if the one
hundred and nineteenth Congress ever decides to do anything at all,
perhaps that will be reconsidered.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah, it's got legs like an intern carrying coffee back
to the office is how they put it in Washington.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
It's good. That was the original zzy top line, but
it was a little bagg.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Don't forget the Zzy top Eliminator video trilogy. You were feminist,
that's right. You got anything else? Man?
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, I think that was that was good support support
AM radio. It's not a relic it's still important.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
Yeah, well put dude. If you want to know more
about AM radio, start listening to AM radio. And since
I started to sign off this episode like it was
one of the OG episodes, that means it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
This is from car just kind of a thank you.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Carra started listening in two thousand and eight when she
was sick at home from high school with pneumonia. Yours
was the very first podcast ever listened to, back when
hardly anyone knew what a podcast was. I've been avid
listener to a lot of shows since, but you have
been a constant in my life through the end of
high school, college, grad school, and beyond. Your voices have
always been a sense of comfort and familiarity when things
(46:23):
in life got really difficult. I went to see You
Live in Boston three times, always on my own, and
each show felt like a small celebration for myself of
something that had carried me through so many years.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
I wonder if that's the person who had the laugh
that we called out in Boston every time.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Oh, I don't know. Maybe I think Kara would have
mentioned that. Probably.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Probably one rule with stuff you should know for me, though,
is I could not listen to an episode until I
could really pay attention, like other shows were background podcasts
for me, but not yours. The only downside was that
I fell further and further behind unless I had the
focus to listen. This year, I've had to do a
(47:02):
lot of driving, though, and things have settled down some,
so I made it a goal to catch up in
time to listen to the twenty twenty five Halloween special
on Halloween. I also told myself, if I did it,
get finally right in and tell you how much I
appreciate the information, banter, humor and movie.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Rerecks and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
So this is a day before Halloween email coming from
Kara or Kara ka R.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
That's awesome, Thanks Carra. Kara obviously very goal motivated and
I appreciate that, and thank you for listening to all
of our shows for so long. That means a lot
that we have friends who are travelers like you. You know.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Yeah, I mean We've said it before. If there weren't
the Cara Karras, then we would not exist as a
show anymore.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
Absolutely, that sounds like a T shirt if you ask me.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
Yeah, And Cara Carra sounds like I don't know, like
a food Yeah, like replaced.
Speaker 3 (47:59):
Okay, if you want to get in touch of this
like Kara Kara did and let us know what we
meant to you. We love those emails. You can wrap
it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it
off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Everybody, we have a big announcement, but Josh, I think
you need to do your traditional tour announcement.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
COURU, there we go. That means it's tour time, everybody.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
We took off twenty twenty five because it just felt
like the right thing to do. But we are hitting
the road again next year and we are super excited.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Yes get this. So we're gonna start hitting the road
in January, starting January twenty seventh at the Paramount Theater
in Denver. The next day we'll be at the Paramount
Theater in Seattle, and on January twenty ninth, we'll be
back to our beloved Sketch Fest at the Sydney Goldstein
Theater in San Francisco, CA.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
That's right, that's our January run.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
And then in April we're going to hit the Midwest
and we're going to some cities we haven't been to yet.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
And I'm super excited because on April.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Sixteenth, we'll be in Madison, Wisconsin at the Orpheum Theater.
On the seventeenth, we'll be back in Chicago at the
Chicago Auditorium, a city we love, and then to my
wife's some town. Finally, April eighteenth and Akron, Ohio at
the Goodyear Theater.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
That's right, and get this for the January leg. Tickets
are on sale now and we're actually running a pre
sale today November eighteenth. You can use our code sysk
live to get tickets early. Go to stuff youshould Know
dot com. It'll have all the tickets and info that
you need. And you can buy Sketch Fest tickets right
now as well.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
That's right. Sketch Fest on sale the sixteenth of November.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
There's no presale on that one. General on sale is
happening as we speak.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
That's right. So we'll see you guys in twenty twenty six.
We're really excited to get back out there. We hope
you're excited too. If you're not, just bake it when
you see us.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
That's right, and pay attention the Great White North because
there is more to come this summer.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
That's right. So we'll see you soon.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just keeping it
old school, real mellow style, which is what I understand.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
All of the kids say today, that's right, and hey,
before we get going, this is probably the perfect episode
to mention that our episode on how Vinyl Works that
was released on Vinyl is being reprinted because that thing
sold out and I think people would love to have
one of these things for Christmas.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Yeah, we're releasing it just in time for the holidays.
As a matter of fact, it's coming out on Black Friday,
November twenty eighth this year, which also happens to be
record store Day from what I understand, and our friends
at Born Losers Records put this out again. They did
the first one, did a magnificent job, of course, and
they printed three hundred red and black marble records that
(02:51):
are just beautiful. Those are available online at syskvinyl dot com.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, and then.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
For the actual store where you have to leave your home,
probably put on a cap because it's late November, maybe
a coat, go down to your local indie record store. Yeah,
they do it. There might be a chance that they
have one of the three hundred Gold Royalty records. Those
are exclusives for record stores.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Well, you can bet your boopie I'll be going to
my local record store and supporting ourselves by buying one.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
That's awesome. You should draw more people by just spending
like a full day there and telling.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
You, oh, yeah, maybe I could work something out with
the wack Street here in town. I can go sit
up there and those guys cannot talk to me.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
We'll see if we can get a cutout of you too,
to stand behind you while you sit there.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
I'm really excited this is back out though, because people
really seem to enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
And what is it again, sysk vinyl dot com.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
That's right awesome and thanks again to our friends at
Born Losers. You guys are great. Yeah, they're the best.
Yeah they are, okay, Chuck. So yeah, this is a
really good episode to shout out Records because we're talking
about AM radio and we talked a little bit about
it in our Beautiful Music Short stuff AKAABM.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
That's right, I'll.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Never get over. But there's a lot more to AM radio,
And in fact, I didn't realize this. Julia helped us
with this one, and I didn't realize before that AM
broadcasting basically set the standards, yeah, for all sorts of
different things like how news is presented, soap operas, all
(04:35):
sorts of different stuff that lasted for decades and decades
and decades. It all started with AM radio because ultimately
it was the very first form of mass communication that
was not printed.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, I mean Top forty radio started on AM, which
is I mean, I think these days the kids, if
they hear of AM radio probably either don't know what
it is, or may not if they have as we'll
see a newer model card especially ev may not even
have AM radio or a radio in their house like
a transistor radio or something or receiver, but they may
(05:09):
think AM radio is as like you know, news talk,
sports talk, maybe some foreign language stations, maybe some if
they're driving through a rural community, some like weird Farm
Report or something that they've never heard. I remember that,
And that's that's kind of what AM radio became. But
it launched Top forty. It was the up until like
(05:30):
nineteen seventy eight. It beat FM, and FM had been
around since what like the thirties, Yeah, it had.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
And everybody said, nope, we're really happy with AM and
stuck with it even after FM came around for quite
a while. But let's talk about this because, like you
hit on some really good points. So We're going to
touch on all of those, but let's start at the
very very beginning when AM radio really started to come around.
Because people had been messing with AM broadcasting since the
(06:01):
very early nineteen hundreds. There were some inventions that all
kind of came together around the same time. And I
do not understand how this could possibly happen, but putting
these disparate inventions together and figuring out how to broadcast
radio waves that have encoded sound in them is just
I mean, hats off. That's like mad genius stuff. But
(06:24):
that's what happened in the very early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, there were people broadcasting AM signals at the time,
and you know, the only people that had these AM
receivers that could listen were like soldiers at sea or
something like that. This was before they made it into
the homes of Americans that pause during World War One
because they said, hey, we can't have you broadcasting your
daughter playing violin, even though our soldiers love it that
(06:49):
are out at sea. We need to kind of lock
this down for now. But starting in about nineteen twenty,
in fact, exactly nineteen twenty was when commercial broadcast AM
radio started with KDKA Pittsburgh.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Yeah, that was the very first one. I think that
they read the results of the Warren Harding election. I
can't remember the other guy's name, somebody Cox. Warren Harding
obviously won. But right after that, I mean, like, this
was so clearly a groundbreaking medium. It was basically for
the people in the nineteen twenties. It was what people
(07:26):
in the early nineties experience with internet. Yeah, it was
almost like, holy cow, I can't like, you can't even
begin to imagine all the different ways that this thing
is going to change the world. You just know it's
going to change the world. That's kind of what happened.
And so right after that first broadcast, it just exploded
all over the world. And one reason why it exploded
(07:48):
all over the world is because the person who's considered
the father of radio, Gulielmo Marconi. He set up companies everywhere,
so very quickly radio stations started to develop. And just
a year or two after Katie Ka went on the.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Air, I'm, by the way, a little mad at you
because ever since you sent me the Marconi tidbit this morning,
I cannot get we built the city on rock.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
And roll out of my head.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
How waii. That's that's odd.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Marconi played the mamba Oh never do the radio. Yeah,
And I mean, I hate that song so much and
I can't get it out of my head, all because
I just saw the word Marconi typed in an email.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
I always thought, seriously, it was some gibberish I had
in my head. I knew it wasn't right, but it
was like in La says lebar something like that. I
had no idea Marconi was name check. But that's appropriate.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yes, I'm not really mad at you, but boy, that
thing really gets rooted in your head pretty well. But
like you said, by the early nineteen twenties, everybody was
on board. In nineteen twenty two, in fact, AT and
T had the first radio network built when linked to
thirty eight radio stations by phone lines, and could broadcast,
you know, weaf out of New York all around the country.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
So like people, it was it was literally, like you said,
like the.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Internet, it was American life before and life after as
far as AM radio.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Goes, well, we'll put it and not just American life too.
Like this, like I said, it spread around the world
very quickly. The BBC started broadcasting in nineteen twenty two
Australia's first radio station, two SB, which is now ABC Sydney.
That's they started in nineteen twenty three. Canada got its
first one in nineteen thirty two XWA out of Montreal.
(09:38):
It was just just like the Internet, It's not like
it was just one country. It was everybody who got
involved because it was a humanity altering invention.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
By the late nineteen twenties, the major networks had launched,
and you know, these were radio networks NBC and CBS.
These were international broadcasts from the un United States all
over the world, and you know they worked by you know,
you had to have a receiver.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
So early on, you know.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Vacuum tubes worked with radio receivers connected to loud speakers
and that's how you could hear things. Later on, transistor
radios came along and that's what really changed the game
because that's when it was like TV's for the olds,
the young people, we had these little radios in their pocket.
And then they started, you know, putting radios in cars.
(10:29):
But it's funny to think about a time when like, yeah,
TV's out outdated, right, and we want AM radio in
our pocket.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
And then it came roaring back eventually thanks to LA Law.
You mentioned something that I think is worth calling out too.
You mentioned that there's a speaker that converts that sound
signal back into actual acoustics sound. They weren't headphones, they
were speakers. So that meant that early radio was a
thing that the family gathered around. It was a social
(10:57):
activity listening to all the stuff that was on the
ra which is really important because I mean that's definitely
become fragmented and fractured today as it you know, personal
media has become like more and more available. But that
was like whatever was on the radio right then, probably
whatever your parents wanted to listen to. That's what the
(11:17):
family was listening to.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, for better or worse.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
I think by nineteen thirty there were forty percent of
US homes had AM receivers. Hopefully most of them had speakers.
Wise they just sit there and look at it. There
were more than six hundred radio stations in nineteen thirty,
obviously all of them AM. But like we mentioned, FM
came along pretty quickly in the nineteen thirties and had
a better sound, but you know, it just didn't take
(11:44):
over until nineteen seventy eight. I think by nineteen forty
even eighty three percent of the households in America. I
mean that's really massive coverage had AM radio signals, like
you know, being broadcast through their homes.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Yeah, and you said, I mean like FM was around,
but people said, no, we're sticking with the AM. One
of the big reasons is because the FM receiver needs
more power because of the way FM radio was pumped out,
that was a big thing for a long time. That
was one reason people stuck around with AM. But there's
definitely an affection that developed for AM radio over the years.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Yeah, there's also something called FM drift, Like you know,
if you're driving around listening to an FM station, it
can kind of go in and out, you know, to
the left or to the right. I guess you could
kind of turn your dial a little bit and try
and dial it back in. But that was an issue.
And we'll talk about some of the AM radio issues.
But if you're looking at the dial, AM according to
(12:46):
the FCC, AM waves have to be broadcast on frequencies
between five thirty five megahertz and one point seven and
FM is from eighty eight to one oh.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Eight sounds legit, so check out based on the radio
call signs I'm familiar with.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Do you ever listen to AM radio anymore?
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Yeah? I listened to the Bulldogs game on the way
home from Yumi's parents house on Saturday.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Wasn't that nice?
Speaker 3 (13:16):
The ballgame?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Or listening to the radio, listening to a sports broadcast
on the radio.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yes, I used to do that in college. I can't
remember the sportscaster's name, the legendary one for Georgia with
the hobnail boot.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah, yeah, Larry Munson.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Larry Munson. Yeah, back in college. I would listen to
him and watch the game. Yeah, like I'm mute, and
hopefully they would sync up.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah, that was the preferred method.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
But I still love and it doesn't happen a lot
because you know, I'll watch the game on TV generally,
but if I'm traveling like you were just talking about,
or I remember when I built we couldn't afford to build,
like to get a fence company to build our fence
twenty years ago. So I built our privacy fence like
picket by picket over the course of two months, and
(14:03):
a lot of that was spent with me listening to
Georgia Bulldogs on the radio. I mean it was pre
podcast even, and it's just it's still to me a
great way to catch a game for sure, not even
nostalgia wise, like it really is a great way to
listen to catch a game.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Oh yeah. The play calling is like you have to
be really good. There's no assist there. You're telling everybody
going on, you know. Yeah, I say we take a
break because we're getting nostalgic already. What do you think.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yeah, I'm gonna park that and we'll stick to the facts.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Okay, baby, we're taking a break. Everybody will be right back.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
So, if we're talking the golden age of radio as
a whole, that was about a three to four decade
period from the twenties through the mid fifties or so.
That was when am radio starred. We'll also talk a
little bit later about sort of the seventies period when
am radio music was like, you know, the Mellow Gold
stuff was a big deal. But that you know, that
(15:34):
first decade of radio ushered in. You know, it was
blowing people's minds like they had never heard sometimes any
of this stuff, or certainly had not heard any of
this stuff live like a live broadcast and speaking of
Sports in nineteen twenty one, over about one hundred and
twenty five thousand square miles from where it broadcasts out
of Jersey City, New Jersey, people listened to the heavyweight
(15:58):
boxing championship. I can't imagine what that was like to
hear a sports broadcast like that for the first time.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
As it happened.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
Hopefully the commentator knew what he was doing too, and
when they weren't like long pauses like the boom goes
the dynamite guy.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
One of them's punching another one repeatedly.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. Carpentee just went down.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
One of the other things that we'll see about AM
Radio two, Chuck, is that's it was long considered a
public good, so that the government had like a little
more willingness to be like, no, you can say this,
you can't say that, and you have to do this.
One of the reasons why is because it was very
quickly used to kind of spread public information, Like presidents
(16:43):
took to it very quickly. Remember I said that Katie
Ka announced the results of the Harding election. Within just
a couple of years, Warren Harding was using it to
talk to America and FDR was probably the most famous
president who used the radio to talk to America. Had
a series of like just informal speeches basically called fireside chests. Yeah,
(17:05):
that really made a lot of the countries just fall
in love with them. But it was very it was
it was very clear early on just how much influence
it could have on people's political opinions.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Well, and it was a lot of people the first
time they ever heard the president's voice.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Speak, you know, how what he sounds like. Yeah, it
wasn't around during Lincoln because everyone would.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Have been like really, but yeah, you know, there was
definitely public good and we'll dive into that a little bit,
along with tons of entertainment and you know, it was
basically like fifteen minute chunks for a long long time
of all over the map variety style stuff, kind of
reminiscent of vaudeville. Like there were hosts of shows, but
(17:47):
the DJ thing didn't come along till much later. So
you had like advice shows and news shows and obviously
comedy stuff, game shows.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
You know. Radio dramas were a big big deal.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Yeah, that's where soap op came from. Two They were
broadcast almost exclusively with women as their target audience. And
at the time, this is just post World War One,
where women had helped the war effort in the factories.
The men came back and they were like, get back
in the house, and women were stuck in the house
all day. So these radio dramas were broadcast to them
(18:21):
and they were almost exclusively sponsored by cleaning product companies.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
So they became known as soap operas. And one of
the longer lasting soap operas of all time actually made
the jump successfully from radio to TV. That was Guiding
Light No Way. Yeah. It started in nineteen thirty seven
on the radio and was finally canceled in two thousand
and nine on TV. It was seventy two years of
(18:47):
Guiding Light every weekday. Too.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
I had a very very brief foray into soap operas. Yeah,
I guess it was in college or something. I don't
know why, but I got hooked for I mean, not
too long, but I was hooked.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
I was like, these things are stupid. I was like, yeah,
but what happens.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah, the same thing happened to me again in college too,
and I cannot remember the name of it, but it
was just off the chain. I know there was a
main character named Marlena, and she was possessed by the
devil at one point. Someone will remember, like, yeah, certainly,
that's like a very famous plotline that was going on
when I was hooked on them, and then I got
(19:26):
hooked on them enough that I would switch channels during
ads and see what was on other soap operas and
general hospital. Once there was a scene where this couple
was in bed and they did such a poor job
of editing that they left in the director saying cut
and the two actors roll out of bed. I'll never
forget it. It was one of the greatest things I've
(19:47):
ever seen on television.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
They're like that, the sheets are pulled up, you know,
to their bare skin, and.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Then they roll out of bed and they have on
like blue jeans.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Yeah. I don't remember what they were wearing or anything,
but yeah, I'm sure it was just like that.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
That's really funny.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Oh God, to have that time again where you could
just like maybe sort of get hooked on a soap
for no reason.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Religion was also a big deal early on AM radio.
All of a sudden, evangelist could broadcast far and wide
from what they call the electric pulpit, and they became like,
you know, big time personalities and stars during the depression era.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Yeah, one of the first people that the question of
freedom of speech was raised around his father, Charles Coughlin,
who was a bigoted, hate speech Catholic priest who really
kind of pushed the envelope, you could say. I think
he said the Nazis didn't go far enough during Crystal
knockt like, he was that kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
So he definitely rose to prominence during this time. On
the lighter side, one of the most popular long running
shows was the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, Yeah,
which was a ventralic act on the radio. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
I mean the jokes still worked, but it's definitely a
visual medium for sure.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
But he managed to make it like super radio friendly
and it was super popular. You said that the Golden
Age of radio ended around the nineteen sixty two, and
we should say this was This depends on your perspective,
because a lot of people say no Golden Age of
radio and all the way to the seventies. This would
be like the first wave of Golden age radio where
(21:30):
it wasn't music. It was like dramas, scripted comedies, like sports,
all this stuff like what TV is today. This was
the first iteration of radio and it was all am radio.
But there was a year nineteen sixty two when two
shows were canceled, two long running shows, and people point
to their cancelation as essentially the end of that era.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
What were those yours?
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Truly? Johnny Dollar?
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (21:57):
It was about an insurance fraud investigator.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Sounds like true crime, it is.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
It sounds interesting. Each episode was a flashback of him
going over the line items for his expense report for
that particular case, and then each line item would kind
of bring up like a new scene. Pretty interesting.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
The radio network guys like can he kill his lover?
Speaker 3 (22:21):
And then Suspense was another one, and it sounds like
it was a little bit of a predecessor to like
Alfred Hitchcock Presents and maybe The Twilight c here or there,
And both of those were really well produced shows and
they got canceled the same year, and everybody said that's it,
that's the end of the Golden Age, and they spat
on the floor.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Well, you mentioned the public good starting in the nineteen twenties.
To jump back a little bit, you know, like you
mentioned President speaking inaugural addresses were being broadcast, and the
government really realized, hey, like we have a sort of
a public service we need to enact when we're sharing information,
because we got to get the word out about stuff
(23:02):
sometimes and this is the way to do it. So
the USDA Radio Service began talking to farmers in nineteen
twenty six. The US Bureau of Home Economics had a
chat program they launched, I believe in the same year
where they could talk about, like, you know, any emergencies
happening in regards to kids, like health and safety, stuff
(23:23):
like a new disease going around that your kid maybe
should get vaccinated against, stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Like that new fangled polio.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
But by the end of the nineteen twenties, they were like, hey,
there's a limited bandwidth and people are getting political messages out,
and we need to make sure that everyone in America
is getting sort of equal access to these messages, so
you know, no particular message gets out more than any other.
And that's where the fairness doctrine came about, right.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, we talked about that in the Presidential Debates episode,
but I think it deserves its own episode. It's so contraal,
But basically, the fairness doctrine is what I was talking
about earlier when I said the government wasn't shy about
getting involved in regulating radio because of what you just said, Like,
you can't just use radio at the time. You couldn't
to just put out one, say, specific political viewpoint. So
(24:16):
the fairness doctrine said, you have to have equal time
when you're talking about political matters, you have to give
equal time to both opposing viewpoints. It also said some
other stuff too that I thought was pretty cool. It
made sure that commercial concerns did not eclipse social ones,
so you couldn't screw over the public for your own
(24:36):
bottom line, which is just refreshing these days. The radio
served the public good and that you have like a
kind of public programming that's essentially like in addition to
all of the you know, ventriloquist acts and soap operas
and all that, you have like stuff that makes people,
(25:00):
helps people be more informed citizens. Like that was what
the government was getting involved in radio for.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Yeah, maybe perhaps if we would have been around the time,
it might have been stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
I could see that. I could see that, Yeah, we
would have been great for AM radio. I think as
a matter of fact, we should probably just stop podcasting
and start broadcasting on AM radio.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Yeah, we got to get the message of Jackhammer's out
far and wide.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
You know, the fairness doctrine went away, and you know,
like you said, we should do a whole episode on that.
But one of the things that happened was, you know,
the FM becoming a dominant force and just way more
choices and way more bandwidth for radio, so they didn't
need it anymore. So then you know, that's where that's
really literally where the echo chamber of politics started, where
(25:50):
you could turn into just your person who only talked
about things that you agreed with.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Yep, and that's it.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yeah. Not coincidentally, in nineteen eighties is when talk radio
like really started to become a thing with like people
like Rush Limbaugh that did not exist before that kind
of thing.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, and you know, FM when that came around, it
did create that echo chamber, but it was mostly like
a wealthy, educated crowd that could afford FM receivers. They
were more expensive, like you were talking about. I think
there were more than two thousand AM stations on the
air in the nineteen fifties, some of them would broadcast
on both I definitely remember, you know, both AMFM stations,
(26:32):
but FM did have some.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
And still do have.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Some sort of things that weren't in their favor, like
if you were inside a buildings sometimes the AM signal
could get blocked and get a little more difficult to
get a lot of AM stations, I think most of
them in fact, have to either reduce their power or
just go off the air at night, so you know,
back in the day and maybe still you hear those
sign offs at the end of the night, which is
(26:57):
kind of fun where they play like the stars angle
banner or something.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Then it just goes dead.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Yeah, like in Poltergeist.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
But another cool thing about AM is if you've ever
been like driving around out West or something, and you know,
probably not these days, but back when I was taking
my big out West trips, when all ahead was like
a cassette player in the radio. Once the sun went down,
sometimes you could get an AM station on your radio
that's like four states away because of those bear waves
(27:28):
bouncing off the ion a sphere and saying we'll take
it from here.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
Yeah. During the day, the ionosphere is super ionized. That's
where it gets its name. At night, it's less ionized,
So there's for some reason AM radio signals can bounce
off of it easier and like you said, end up
down in Mexico for goodness.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Sake, Yeah, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
For that reason though, that's why they stop transmitting at night,
a lot of them. Like I'm with you, I don't
know if they still do or not. It seems like
the kind of thing that maybe was licked, but it
also seems so fundamental that maybe it's still a problem.
But there were some stations that were designated clear channels.
They were allowed to broadcast twenty four hours a day,
(28:11):
and they were spread out both physically around the country
and in Canada and Mexico, and also spread out on
the dial so that their signals wouldn't interfere with one
another when they traveled really far distances. And one of
the reasons why they had AM stations designated to operate
twenty four hours a day is again part of that
(28:33):
public good, which was a service that AM radio offers
that has kind of overlooked a lot here in the
United States, which is it is like a national security
alert system essentially We'll talk a little more about that later.
But that's why the clear Channel thing is a thing.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Right, And to be clear, I didn't even mean that,
not to be confused with former iHeartMedia company Clear Channel.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
No, but I bet that's where they get their name.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Man, it'd be a real coincidence. Huh.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Wasn't that the name of the city that was built
on rock and roll?
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Clear Channel?
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Yeah? Clear Channel City.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
I'm not falling for anything you ever say anymore, so
don't even try.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Should we take another break?
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Yes, all right, we'll take another break talk about the
rise of TV and you know, music on AM radio
right after this.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
Okay, Chuck, we're back. And we talked about how the
Golden Age of radio ended, but that was what the
old stars considered the golden age. If you were young
and hip, the Golden Age was still yet to come.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
I mentioned Top forty was invented on AM and it
was specifically developed by a station odor named Todd Stores
in Nebraska at the beginning of the nineteen fifties. I guess,
and he said, Hey, you know, radio has all these
great shows. I love those puppets. That ventriloquism is great,
but we've got rock and roll now and R and
(30:36):
B and soon you know, pop music coming our way,
pop and pop music.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Who was that is that? Falco?
Speaker 3 (30:44):
No, I shouldn't have opened my big mouth because I
don't remember I even have that on my phone, so
maybe I'll look sometime soon.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
But he said, hey, let's let's start playing this music.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Let's create a what Julia calls a jew box driven
media and you know, play people stuff that. You know,
DJs became a thing. That's when they became personalities. Each
station started having you know, these sort of wacky that's
where those first you know, like the Wolfman and all
those sort of wacky early DJs came from that were
like real personalities people would tune into just to listen
(31:19):
to their specific show.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Yeah, Like each station had to have their own personality,
like the Big Bopper, one of the most famous of
all time. Yeah, he was djaying for a station in Beaumont, Texas.
Like it had like, if you had a station, you
had to have a personality, and some of them just
happened to be so popular that they became international icons essentially.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yeah, Like the Wolfman went on to own a furniture
store in North Georgia called Gallery Furniture. If you wanted
a waterbed, you would go ask for the Wolfman.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Boy, that's a niche joke. Should we even explain it
or not? Okay?
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Good?
Speaker 3 (31:58):
I think if you go onto utube and you look
up Gallery Frensham the Wolfman, there'll be something on there.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Oh. Sure, but that was a wolf mate, Jack. Are
you sure you didn't really think it was the same guy,
did you?
Speaker 3 (32:10):
No?
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Okay, See, I don't know what to believe anymore.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
I'm not trying, you know, I just wanted to come
clean about this.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
I've never tried to fool you. That was a thing
that just kind of evolved. I've just been making dry,
random jokes all this time, but it's never been to
fool you. You took that and ran with it. I've
never done it directly to fool you.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
This is not what you said during our therapy session
last week.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Well, doctor Krantz said.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
That, Doctor Katz, that's who we should have gotten.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Yeah, doctor Katz said that I needed to make more
stuff up.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
So we're not therapy together. By the way, everybody, that
was a joke. But if we did we'd get the
guy who therapied Metallica, right.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Oh, I forgot that they were in therapy together. Yeah,
I guess it worked.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
I'm not knocking at at all.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
I mean, we haven't had to do it, but I
think that's a great idea for any kind of partnership.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
You know, agreed? Okay, Was that the therapist that talked
Metallica out of their emo phase? Right, because hats off
to that therapist. Maybe we're talking, Oh yeah, we're talking
about what was going on with this transition to music.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Well, one of the reasons why AM radio transition to
music and away from things like soap operas and all
that stuff was because those things ended up on TV. Yeah,
the older people followed those. Remember, they're like radios the
pits now because the golden there is over And then
they turn on their TVs and they're like, oh, the
golden there is over here. Now, let's just keep going
(33:46):
and watching now instead of just listening. And that left
the kids to fill this vacuum, which was AM radio,
And like you said, the top forty format started there.
The like big internationally known DJs started there, and it
just kind of took off little by little. But really
picked up steam when a few things kind of came
(34:07):
together and one of them you already mentioned, which was
transis to radios, So now you didn't just have to
sit at home with the oldsters to listen to your
favorite hits. And then also AM radio started to show
up in cars essentially as not even an option after
a while, like you got the AM radio whether you
wanted it or not.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah, I think more than half of American cars had
AM radio receivers factory installed by the nineteen fifties. And
that was a huge, huge deal obviously, and you know,
it was the dominant paradigm for music until seventy eight.
And there was that period from kind of the early
(34:48):
seventies to the early eighties, little under ten years where
that you know, sort of yacht rocky am mellow gold
stuff really really took over. Yeah, you had to kind
of watch what you put on the radio because FM
was playing you know, they were playing the AOAR album
oriented rock stuff that had a little more mckismo and
(35:11):
testosterone fuel, like you know rock bands. Big hair, yeah, exactly,
big hair, long hair, not a mustache in sight unless
it was part of a beard probably, but wasn't the
case on AM with yacht rock, there were mustachioed dudes,
generally sensitive guys. The songs weren't about usually like conquering women.
(35:32):
Most of them were about getting dumped by women. A
lot of sad sack music coming out, Yeah on AM
radio in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
I still listened to a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Yeah, and a lot of the constraints. I found this
to be true throughout my life. When you put constraints
on something, it automatically fuels creativity because it doesn't mean
you don't still want to get across you know, subversive ideas.
You just have to cloak them within the confines of
these constraints, and it makes you more creative than just
saying the idea out loud, right, which is why album
(36:05):
rockers are typically dumb compared to yacht rockers as far
as the artist go.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
Yeah, So, like, if you're a songwriter and you're like,
I'm a yacht rocker, I'm not going to sing about,
you know, teenage girls. I'm going to sing about things
I like, like Penia Kalattison and getting caught in the ring.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Man. That guy, I think he's one of the most
reprehensible songwriters of all time. Not song, not just that song,
the Penia Kalada song. Have you ever heard the song him?
His song Him?
Speaker 2 (36:37):
I don't know, I don't know it by name. What
I recognize it?
Speaker 3 (36:40):
You think, I don't know. It's a it's considered yacht rock,
but it's it's a really despicable song about this this
guy whose girlfriend is sleeping around on him. So he's
got a teacher a lesson to basically bring her back
to heal and how he's not heartbroken or hurt. He's
just mad that this guy. He says, like nobody should
get it for free. Yeah, that's what he's upside. Well,
(37:04):
it's a nutsoe song. Go listen to it. But yeah,
Rupert Holmes, I don't think he'd like him Bodies the seventies,
like the worst part of Men in the seventies, I.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Think, Yeah, I mean, I really don't like that song
at all. But I do love most yacht rock. And
I know we've probably talked about it briefly at some
point as a recommendation, but the yacht rock documentary that
came out last year is really really good. Yeah, and
we do definitely want to say that that term was
not coined until the two thousands, when a comedy web
series spoofing the genre made up the nam yacht rock.
(37:38):
Before that, I think, like you know, Time Life put
out those the am Gold series of CDs. I think
am Gold or mellow or easy listening. That sort of
is what we called it, right, didn't that what you
called it?
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Easy listening? Yeah, that's what I was first introduced to it.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
As our mutual friend Allison who we used to work with.
My friend Eddie's wife calls it carsick music because it
just brings back days of like riding backwards in a
station wagon and being car sick and that stuff just
droning on and on.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
That's a perfect name for it.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, it's good.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
But when you know, when you're familiar with the idea
that they had to kind of cloak subversive ideas in
like non obvious terms, right, and you go back and
listen to some of this mellow Gold stuff, it's like,
whoa they were Really it's a little crazier than you thought.
Like for example, love Grows where My Rosemary Goes is
(38:31):
code for let's smoke some DMT. Yeah, that was the
only one I turned up.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
I mean, what do you think Ride Like the Wind
is about?
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Come on, right, that's about DMT as well. Oh wow,
all right, but he's talking about what it's like to
be on DMT, not just inviting you to smoke DMT.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Well, when you know what's funny, I think Christopher Cross
wrote Ride Like the Wind when he was on LSD.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
I believe that.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
I think said that in the yacht Rock doc.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Did he really? Yeah, it's a great song.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
It's a great song and has one of the most
one of the greatest guitar solos because he's a killer
guitar player. But it's so buried in the mix, and
there's all kinds of YouTube videos now where they're like, yeah,
let's bring it up in the mix and talk about
this solo and like how amazing it is.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
That's kind of like those videos of Van Halen with
nothing but David Lee Ross's vocals. Have you heard those?
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Those are Those are very funny. And to be clear,
it's a ripping solo for yacht Rock. It's no so
it's not like the solo for My Sharona or anything,
but it's still good.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
I don't Yeah, neither of the solos stand out to me.
I can't bring either one to mind.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Oh man, the My Sharona solo is a top five
guitar solo of all time for me. And you got
to listen to the radio version cut out a full minute.
It's like nineties plus seconds the full version.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
And they cut out two thirds of it for the
radio version. So you got to listen to the real
full version. It's like it's way better than it should
be for that song.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
That would be the album at it right?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Yeah, I guess so it's Kiddler.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
Or the twelve inch version.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
I don't know about the twelve inch Okay.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Well, regardless, go listen to some Mellow Gold. It'll make
you happy for sure.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
But where are we these days with AM radio?
Speaker 3 (40:20):
Well, there's this battle over it, just like absolutely every
single other thing that people more than one person talks
about in America, AM radio's actually managed to become politicized
a bunch of car makers, from what I can tell,
led by Tesla. I think they were the first ones
to announce this back in twenty twenty that they were
(40:42):
going to discontinue AM radios in their cars. Boo yeah.
And I think now you can kind of imagine why
it's a politicized idea, But the ostensible reason is that
the AM stereo is interfered with by the ev long story,
(41:03):
short AM waves are much more susceptible to noise because
of electrical interference. Well, an electrical vehicle is lousy with
electrical interference, And so the whole car industry is like,
we're gonna have to spend a bunch of money just
to keep this AM radio in there. And the US
government is a pretty adamant that AM radio needs to
(41:26):
stick around again, not just for the public good thing,
the nostalgia factor, but also because if you are going
to get an alert that you know the Cubans have invaded,
you're going to probably get that alert over an AM
radio station because that's what the whole system is set
up to do. Not because it's antiquated, but because AM
(41:47):
radio does all sorts of things those they could. The
waves can travel very far, so it reaches a lot
of people. Rural people listen to AM radio still today,
like it's just part of rural life. So it's everybody
is reached by AM one way or another. And I
didn't know this, but you can make a type of
(42:08):
radio a crystal receiver radio that can play AM radio
broadcasts without any battery or power source. The crystal manages
to take the energy in the radio carrier wave and
it's amazing and use that alone to basically reproduce the sound.
(42:28):
So for all those reasons, AM like radio really makes
a lot of sense to put all of your eggs
in that basket. As far as getting like emergency broadcasts out,
So the government said, long story short, you need to
keep AM radios in cars, and they're trying to figure
out how to get that mandated.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Yeah, I mean it's called the Emergency Alert System now.
It used to be the EBS, the Emergency Broadcast System.
And if you're thinking, like man, I get my Amber alert,
so like all that stuff comes through my phone now.
And this isn't like gen X saying like, oh, to
rely on on your phones, but like if you expect
that phone to always work in all cases for the
(43:08):
rest of time, you're sorely mistaken because if that system
is taken out, then you're gonna rely on something like
AM radio to get important information out, you know. I mean,
that's why it's still there. That's why they're you know,
going to the car makers and saying like, hey, like
you may not listen to it, you may think it's
old fashioned, but there are still four thousand AM stations
(43:30):
and eighty million listeners a month that some of them
rely on this stuff to get information, and you can't
just say like, well, it seems old timey, so we
don't interferes with our stuff, so we don't want it anymore.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Yeah, I do kind of have the feeling that there
is like a certain scorn toward the nostalgic factor of
AM radio. Yeah, and that that's part of maybe what's
driving it, which really ticks me off, because who are
car makers to decide whether AM radio sticks around or not.
Congress says, no, we actually have come up with a
(44:02):
law called the Am Radio for Every Vehicle Act that
basically says, if you sell a car in the United States,
it has to have AM radio as a feature, not
even an option. And a lot of carmakers are like, sure, fine,
we're on board with that. Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar, Kiya, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Silantis, Subaru,
(44:23):
Toyota all said we're keeping AM radio. Ford had said
they weren't, and they said, okay, we didn't realize AM
radio was so popular, we're going to keep it too.
So I guess if you want to show your support
for AM radio, everybody should just go out and buy
a Jaguar.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Well, Tesla, Rivian, Pollstar, BMW, Volkswagen, and Balvo dispensed with
AM radio and some of their new car models. I
don't think completely across the board for each of those manufacturers,
but that every AM for Every Vehicle Act failed in
twenty twenty four. Unfortunately, it was reintroduced this year in
(45:00):
twenty twenty five, just I think recently in September, and
has a lot of support, like on you know, both
sides of the aisle. So you know, if the one
hundred and nineteenth Congress ever decides to do anything at all,
perhaps that will be reconsidered.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah, it's got legs like an intern carrying coffee back
to the office is how they put it in Washington.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
It's good. That was the original zzy top line, but
it was a little bagg.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Don't forget the Zzy top Eliminator video trilogy. You were feminist,
that's right. You got anything else? Man?
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, I think that was that was good support support
AM radio. It's not a relic it's still important.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
Yeah, well put dude. If you want to know more
about AM radio, start listening to AM radio. And since
I started to sign off this episode like it was
one of the OG episodes, that means it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
This is from car just kind of a thank you.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Carra started listening in two thousand and eight when she
was sick at home from high school with pneumonia. Yours
was the very first podcast ever listened to, back when
hardly anyone knew what a podcast was. I've been avid
listener to a lot of shows since, but you have
been a constant in my life through the end of
high school, college, grad school, and beyond. Your voices have
always been a sense of comfort and familiarity when things
(46:23):
in life got really difficult. I went to see You
Live in Boston three times, always on my own, and
each show felt like a small celebration for myself of
something that had carried me through so many years.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
I wonder if that's the person who had the laugh
that we called out in Boston every time.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Oh, I don't know. Maybe I think Kara would have
mentioned that. Probably.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Probably one rule with stuff you should know for me, though,
is I could not listen to an episode until I
could really pay attention, like other shows were background podcasts
for me, but not yours. The only downside was that
I fell further and further behind unless I had the
focus to listen. This year, I've had to do a
(47:02):
lot of driving, though, and things have settled down some,
so I made it a goal to catch up in
time to listen to the twenty twenty five Halloween special
on Halloween. I also told myself, if I did it,
get finally right in and tell you how much I
appreciate the information, banter, humor and movie.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Rerecks and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
So this is a day before Halloween email coming from
Kara or Kara ka R.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
That's awesome, Thanks Carra. Kara obviously very goal motivated and
I appreciate that, and thank you for listening to all
of our shows for so long. That means a lot
that we have friends who are travelers like you. You know.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Yeah, I mean We've said it before. If there weren't
the Cara Karras, then we would not exist as a
show anymore.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
Absolutely, that sounds like a T shirt if you ask me.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
Yeah, And Cara Carra sounds like I don't know, like
a food Yeah, like replaced.
Speaker 3 (47:59):
Okay, if you want to get in touch of this
like Kara Kara did and let us know what we
meant to you. We love those emails. You can wrap
it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it
off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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