The Greatest Hits of All Time
When I was very young, I loved Oldies radio. Specifically, I loved WTRG, Oldies 100.7. I remember sitting in the back of our Ford Taurus station wagon, facing backwards, singing along to The McCoys or The Turtles, Manfred Mann or The Hollies, The Mamas and the Papas or The Chiffons. Those were good times.
Looking back, I loved Oldies radio like I loved my parents. I wasn’t too cool for Petula Clark, and I didn’t mind grocery shopping with my mom. I didn’t mind singing ‘Surfer Girl’ with my dad on the way to see his parents in Farmville.
Then, something happened. I guess it was around the time I turned 13. I had my own Sony boombox, and I stayed up late listening to G105, hoping to hear Jamie Walters ask ‘How Do You Talk To An Angel’ or something from Robin S.
At the same time, Mom and Dad weren’t cool anymore. In fact, I’d started to resent them. They hadn’t changed; I had. The radio station in the car stayed tuned to WTRG, but I tuned out, preferring my Walkman and the mix tapes I’d recorded off of other stations. At home, while my younger brother would be downstairs baking cookies with Mom, I’d be shut away in my room, composing my latest manifesto.
It’s a natural part of growing up, this inevitable distance we put between ourselves and our parents during adolescence. We reject them and everything we associate with them. Those songs we used to tap our feet to? Our parents’ songs. We try to find our own way, determined to be anything but our parents.
In time, we need our parents. A year or two into college, and we realize how much it is that we need them, both emotionally and financially. We start going through some very adult experiences, and the best adults we know are at home.
At some point, we mature enough to give those old songs a listen again. And like our parents, they’ve been there for us all along.
Oldies radio grew in popularity in the late 1970s when people realized disco sucked. Prior to that, it was rare for a radio station to play anything more than three or four years old. So, disco comes along and sucks, and people want to go back to the music that they loved. And it was great music.
But everyone has to go through an evolution, much like radio did back then. For a while, we distract ourselves with our Ace of Base or Soundgarden, our Stone Temple Pilots or Alice in Chains. Some of that music is great. Some of it is not. And I don’t believe everything recorded prior to 1970 is fantastic, either. But there is a reason that the great music endures.
One time, my dad and I walked up to the counter at Camelot Music in Berkeley Mall in Goldsboro. A Ray Charles song was playing over the store’s PA. Dad asked the young woman at the counter, “Why don’t they make music like this anymore?” She suggested he might like D’Angelo. He didn’t.
Over the years, my dad has been an early adopter of technology. I was in third grade when he bought the family’s first CD player. He let Jason and I each pick out a CD at Camelot, and I went with New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough. Jason chose the soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz. Guess which one is on my iPod? A few years after that, Dad bought one of the first CD car adapters, and we hooked it up in Aunt Babe’s old Thunderbird on the way to a Boy Scout camping trip. When we figured it out, Dad was thrilled to have Patsy Cline come through his car stereo. I wasn’t ‘Crazy’ about Patsy then, but it was a neat moment when the first strains of that song began.
In my middle years of high school, I began to listen to punk rock. Not scream-your-lungs-out punk rock, but something that was teetering on the early edge of the emo explosion. Blink-182, MxPx . . . that stuff. Fine, and still fun to go back and listen to on occasion. Then I went through a classic rock stage, something I’m still thankful for. Incidentally, as we get decades away from the 1970s, classic rock and Oldies have started to bleed together on the airwaves. That’s probably, OK, but despite what Wikipedia says, they are not the same thing, and the people of my parents’ generation will tell you that.
But the Oldies were always there, always in the background. I couldn’t get away from the Four Tops, and I soon found myself not wanting to.
Just after college, I began to work as a bank teller at the front of a grocery store. The music they played over the PA grated on my nerves. It wasn’t Oldies, and it wasn’t Classic Rock; it was Soft Rock. It was stuff like Kenny G and Whitney Houston and REO Speedwagon and early Mariah Carey. In other words, it was mostly crap.
Looking back, I’m sure the music played at that grocery store was specifically chosen so that people would buy more produce or something. But for someone ostensibly trying to sell checking accounts, it was debilitating. So much so that on one particularly nauseating morning, I wrote down every single song and artist that I heard. Forty-three of them. That wasn’t a good use of my time, my manager informed me.
Our only saving grace was a small portable radio another employee brought in. And the only station we could get clearly was WTRG. It was a throwback to my younger days, and I realized there’s a reason those songs have endured. They’ve always been there for me.
Ron McKay had an afternoon show, ‘Live from the Big Chill Bar and Grill,’ and he’d play requests. Each time he’d come back from a song, the people in the restaurant would hoot, holler and applaud. Every once in a while, I’d call in and request ‘Going to a Go-Go’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and he’d oblige. I found out that catalogs at Oldies stations are not deep, and a song like ‘Going to a Go-Go’ would only be played upon request. You’d think you were hearing ‘Going to a Go-Go,’ but it would actually be ‘I’ll Be Doggone,’ which, while a fine song by Marvin Gaye (incidentally co-written by Smokey Robinson with backing vocals by The Miracles), is no ‘Going to a Go-Go.’
By playing the Oldies against the crap pumped out over the supermarket aisles, I fell back in love with the songs that taught me what music was in the first place. It was about that time I swallowed my pride, admitted I hated the bank and moved back in with my parents, who welcomed me with open arms.
I didn’t know it then, but WTRG was dying. That fall, it became ‘The New River’ WRVA, and started playing the exact same songs I’d hated in the grocery store. Two years later, my Classic Rock station, WRDU, would become ‘Rooster Country.’ The only place we could hear any good music anymore was in our own collections. And the only place we could find the people who loved us unconditionally was in our childhood homes. Our own ‘Greatest Hits,’ so to speak.
There never was a ‘Big Chill Bar and Grill,’ where people clapped and applauded and sang along to ‘California Dreamin.’ I took for granted that such a place existed, and I would find it. As far as I knew, this bar and grill was somewhere in Raleigh, playing the greatest songs ever recorded. Was I naive? Sure. But was it too much to ask that there was such a place, and not just a lonely man in a radio booth, spinning CDs and pushing the ‘applause’ button?
There never was a ‘Big Chill Bar and Grill,’ but there should have been. Until there is one, we’ll enjoy our own CDs or mp3s, playing back the Oldies. And when we do, we’ll think of the people who first played those songs for us. Sometimes, it's OK to look back. Especially in that rear-facing back seat of a white Ford Taurus station wagon.
posted by Turner @ 9:23 PM
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