My Back Pages

The death of KMET in Los Angeles was a turning point in my young father's life. I was 6 years old when it signed off permanently, ending commercial viability of the progressive, freeform rock format on L.A.'s FM dial.

It's also one of my earliest memories: Windows down and heater up on a cloudy February morning, sitting backseat in an Arby's parking lot before kindergarten, the sound of heresy on the airwaves. Its replacement was Smooth Jazz. We—my father and my 6-year-old self—hated it.

My late father never had words to explain the emotion behind his angry expletives. I just knew that something he loved had been ripped away, and while rock stations like KLOS, KLSX, and KQLZ tried to fill the void, for him nothing stuck.

That commute, and my father's turn to syndicated AM talk shows, radicalized him. I was a teen when that "content" pushed me away—from him, his music, and the radio dial.

This isn't a radio story so much as a story about the cultural backdrop of my aural awakening. As a preteen—when Dad wasn't road raging in bumper-to-bumper traffic through the Santa Ana Canyon—I sang and tapped my foot to every song from the radio. My preformed mind thought repetition—forced familiarity—bred enjoyment. It wasn't until during middle school, humming along for the thousandth time to "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," when I had my first original thought: This kinda sucks.

Sorry, Dad
A recent style of internet meme aims to remind us how old we are and of the inevitable quickening of the passage of time: "What I think is a 20-year-old Honda"—picture of a beat-up 1984 Accord—"vs What's actually a 20-year-old Honda"—picture of a slick-looking 2004 Accord. Or, "If you remember this"—picture of an answering machine—"it's time to schedule a colonoscopy."

Sometimes advanced age—or long memory—is celebrated. One version shows reminiscing Napsterites getting laughed at ("owned") by shiny disc lovers getting laughed at by the Walkman-armbanders and the FM broadcast boombox tape recorders getting LOL'd at by the 8-trackers. And so on. Kids these days, right?

1-800-MUSIC-NOW
I'm from that weird 1978–1982 group of kids (Xennials?) who grew up with analog and digital, tape hiss and file compression, rotary dials and screeching modems.

While the history of radio is the history of American expansion, today it's mostly an afterthought. It's what parents who don't listen to music listen to in the car when the next podcast is too long for the drive to the post office.

There was a time in the '90s when a new music service—one few people remember—was all over FM and TV. It marked, for me, the warm handoff from 20th century analog to late '90s digital: Dial an 800 number from a touchtone phone, sample a few tracks, hand over a credit card—and your music selection would be mailed to your home. Unlike Columbia House and BMG, 1-800-MUSIC-NOW was the tangible(ish), Costco-like sample that helped expand my musical palette. It was the analog precursor to the music-file downloads in the AOL chatrooms that predated Napster.

So of course my friends and I exploited it.

Every day after school, we would crowd the school's only payphone and share the receiver's earpiece. We'd spend an hour on the phone, repeatedly getting booted for not making a purchase, while continually laughing and shouting new commands for new (to us) music from bands FM radio wouldn't play. What started with deep cuts from AC/DC and Ozzy Osbourne led to White Zombie, Monster Magnet, and Korn. Then, one day, that too disappeared.

Killing radio
KMET wasn't the only station I've heard run off the air. I lived through multiple style changes at KLOS before I even turned 18. The Inland Empire's X103 had a good run in the late '90s before it eventually turned. My favorite of all, Y107, played 21 straight songs before a commercial and featured no on-air personalities. It didn't last.

In the late aughts, Indie 103 achieved unicorn status, middle-fingering every convention it could think of including bringing aboard The Sex Pistols' Steve Jones as its first on-air personality, for his acclaimed "Jonesy's Jukebox" show. Jones was followed by others including Henry Rollins, Rob Zombie, and Dave Navarro. Filmmaker David Lynch was the morning weatherman, and actor Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood, Justified) ran sports. A weekly winetasting show featured Crispin Glover, Christina Ricci, Will Ferrell, Maynard James Keenan, Werner Herzog, Phil Donahue, Kristen Stewart, Harry Shearer, Dennis Hopper, and Andy Dick. In 2008, Rolling Stone named Indie 103 the "Best Radio Station" in the country. Then one day, like KMET, it was gone.

On the bus
I'll never forget the first time I heard the extended intro to AC/DC's "Shoot to Thrill" on the Inland Empire's KCAL-FM (footnote 1), though I'd heard the regular release a million times. The opening riff repeated several times, before the drums, before the lead guitar. It moved like a clothesline of carbonated fuzz. Not being a musician myself, the young me didn't know a rock song could do that (doing nothing, I mean, just existing).

"You think that's heavy?" my high school friend Julian asked, smirking in the back of the bus on the way to a cross-country meet. "Try these."

He fed me a succession of Pantera, Slayer, and Deicide on shiny discs. I didn't know such sounds were possible. I felt exhilaration and despair—where and how do you find music like this, I wondered? My answer: From Julian.

In my lifetime, radio has never been the avenue to discovering new music, or whenever it has been, it quickly went away. For discovering music, one has always needed an older brother or upperclassman. Some kind of human guide. Recently, I've found a new source: my son.

"Dad," he called out, walking into the room I was in. "Did you hear the new Cattle Decapitation? It's so good. They're headlining a tour with Carnifex and Rivers of Nihil this summer. Can I go?"

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Footnote 1: Not the Iron Man 2 version or any of the live releases. This was an early alternative studio version that I've since been unable to track down.