Aircheck, freshman!

A great thing (and sometimes a scary thing) about the Web is that, apparently, everything will be preserved forever — something that happened 40 years past can be called up in an instant, just as if it had happened moments before. Another great thing (and sometimes a scary thing) about the Web is that a simple search can sometimes lead you on a descent like Orpheus in his underwear, down into a subculture you barely knew existed but which appears to be alive and thriving on some unknown corner of the Web. It’s not always Illinois Nazis (though often it is).

I’m putting together a disc of some of the great music that came out of Syracuse bands during a very specific little slice of time, my undergrad years, when we were sure every single one of these bands was going to be the next big thing, just as soon as they got their 45 pressed. It happens that I had a couple of stray bits of radio broadcasts from the time that would make nice bookends and such, and thought maybe, just maybe, I could find a couple of others on the web – a couple of radio station IDs at the very least, maybe from old WHEN, WOLF, or WNDR. Well. Into the pit I fell – starting with an encyclopedic site devoted to WOLF, a station that I didn’t listen to very much but which apparently many others did. (This was the late ’70s, when my car radio and every workplace radio still only got the AM band, and for some reason it felt like knowing who was playing the records for us mattered.) But that site has nothing on NortheastAirchecks.com, a fascinating, wide-ranging collection of “airchecks” from radio stations across the Northeast, with a heavy dose of my hometown stations such as WTRY, WPTR and even the little station that could, Schenectady’s 3WD, where I did some hanging out for reasons that are no longer clear in my memory bank but which I think involved a girl who didn’t know I existed. The unremitting awfulness of modern radio led me to become someone who now relies entirely on Sirius for my audio broadcast entertainment (and in Little Steven’s Underground Garage, I’ve found the only station that has ever truly understood me), and as I go through my old records and look at old charts, I just marvel at the tremendous diversity that used to exist in Top 40 radio, at the songs that would have been played, a diversity of sounds and styles that exists nowhere in commercial radio today. Listening back to these old airchecks brings back some of the fun and excitement (and incredible over-annunciation) of those days when it seemed like radio really mattered.

It’s amazing to me that there’s a whole community of people who have saved these tapes for all these years, and even more amazing that now there is a way for them to share them all with anyone who might be interested, even someone who might just have been looking for a quick snippet of Captain Scott King giving the traffic report in a city where the traffic problems were the same day in and day out, but where as the sun set over Onondaga Lake, “sunglasses and sun visors are in effect.”