Do You Remember Rock'n'Roll Radio?

Over the past few weeks, whenever I just wanted to listen to some music on the radio, I found myself tuning in to the new-ish classic rawk station here in NYC. Now, I was a teenager in the early-to-mid 80s who LOVED New Wave (Echo and the Bunnymen and the English Beat were my top faves) and despised classic rock with the kind of passion only a 16 year-old kid could muster. But here I am two decades later, surprising myself how many of these songs I know -- and not only can I sing along, but I know their titles and who performed them. (How can Aerosmith's "Walk this Way" sound so damn good and tight after all these years?!) So, I'm not worried about being cool anymore and can gleefully revel in the rock'n'roll campiness of it all, but I'm stunned that I actually saved space for these songs in my brain, despite my all out efforts to deny them entry. (The whole thing freaks my wife out -- she thinks I'm headed toward some sort of mid-life crisis.)

When I was at boarding school (grades five through eight) in the late 70s, I was exposed to all sorts of horrific music. This was, of course, back in the analog age...so if you wanted to listen to music, you often had to seek out a record player. The only turntable that we students had access to was in the faculty lounge, which it really wasn't. First of all, all of the faculty (called masters) lived at the school in their own apartments (hence no need for a lounge to escape from the students), and the faculty lounge was just a fancy room where the school held receptions and other formal events. Students had access to the room at certain hours and I could usually find some of my classmates rockin' out to Boston, Kansas, Aerosmith, ELO, Styx, and the like. In particular, there were a couple of guys who would sit there in these sofa chairs rocking not just their heads, but their whole bodies back and forth to the beat, white boy's overbite on every one of them. Thankfully, some good new music seeped into my head sometimes...my bunkmate introduced me to the B-52's debut album and I was blown away the first time I heard The Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated" at a dance we went to at a private girl's school. I probably couldn't tell you one thing about any of the junior high girls that I tried to dance with, but the DJ played "Sedated" at least four times that night.

In high school, at fancy private day school in Riverdale where I was a student, the assault continued. I worked for a few years on the maintenance crew during holidays and summertime to pick up some spending money, and the guys that I was painting classrooms with who dictated our radio selection just didn't get The Smiths or New Order or Heaven 17. This was the "disco sucks" record burning crowd that would gauge your masculinity/sexual orientation by the tunes you dug. Obviously, I would fall into the freaks and fags category, so I just grit my teeth and kept slathering on the paint, though I always thought a little bit of me died everytime I had to listen to "Stairway to Heaven."