Well…I am sitting here listening to Pandora on my computer and it sparked an idea in my head bout how much the delivery of music has changed so much just in my lifetime…I remember when I was young the nights where the weather conditions were just right and you could get WLS AM from Chicago and imagine that you were in that city….and listen to music that hadn’t made it to our little town yet….here in GR we had a heated rivalry between the two powerhouse AM stations that played rock and soul music…and there were even WLAV people and WGRD people who would only listen to the station they liked but I liked them both…in truth, they both played the same music fom Elvis, The Beatles, The Stones, the Temps, The Tops (that the Temptations and the Four Tops for those of you that didn’t grow up in that time) but that didn’t stop people from choosing their favorites…something like being a Ford or Chevy person…both perfectly good brands but you would never be caught dead buying the other brand. This continued until I was about 12 or thirteen when the magical new thing called FM came into being, but that was even preceded by some “underground” stuff that was being tried by the AM stations. One of the ones I remember was a show called “Campus After Hours” that ran on LAV, I think, and brought long form music that was beginning to break the 3 minute AM radio format and exposed us to bands we had never heard of and songs that were not the designated “hits” from bands we already knew.

Then came FM radio…I have such fond memories of WLAV-FM from here in GR and the wonderful times of the 70′s and 80′s…and the DJ’s from that time…Aris Hampers, Ed Buchanan ad Alison Harte actually knew and loved the music they were playing…and at that time there was no where else to get the insider information about the bands and exposure to new music you could get there. I heard “Nantucket Sleighride” by Mountain for the first time there…does any FM station have the guts or the freedom to play that live, over 30 minute song anymore? On any night you could hear George Carlin, then the Who followed by Pure Prarie League and Frank Zappa….then back to Cheech and Chong…I heard the “Dave’s not here” sketch for the first time listening to LAV and I can still remember laughing so hard that it hurt….I guess what I wanted to say is that those were wonderful days…and I know they can’t be recaptured….but I can still miss them, can’t I?