Don't Touch That Dial

Sometimes I miss the sound of AM radio, especially in the car... that tinny, trebly sound of Top 40 on the AM band. Sure, it still exists, but it just doesn't sound the same.

That's all the radio I knew until the mid-Seventies, when my tastes grew a little more sophisticated and I was drawn to the FM band instead. Back then you could still pick up WLS from Chicago at night down in Northwest Tennessee, which I listened to night after night until I fell asleep most nights. I remember the excitement when one would finally hit that spot on I-40 West where you could finally pick up WHBQ out of Memphis, king of AM radio in the Mid-South when Rick Dees was still a disc jockey there.

Though I was in both often enough that in some ways it was no big deal, being a small town girl it was still always a little bit exciting to head off to "the big city" - Memphis or Nashville - for whatever it was we were going there for at the time, be it a concert, shopping, family stuff, other stuff, and usually involving several stops at favorite local restaurants. This time we were going to Memphis for some such occasion I can no longer recall.

My parents had long given up control of the radio dial to me (probably why I'm still such a tyrant and dictator over the stereo today and refuse to relinquish control to anyone else). As soon as we hit that spot on the interstate where I knew WHBQ would start coming in clearly, I had my dad switch it over there, and then I settled back into my usual spot, sprawled out across the back seat (back in the days before mandatory seat belt laws) with whatever book I was reading at the time, voracious reader that I was as a child and teenager. I read, and I listened. And listened. And listened some more.

It was summer, and one of those incredibly bright sunny summer days in the South with the bluest skies overhead. Just traveling down the road, on the way to Memphis and some adventure of some sort in the big city. The DJ announced he was about to play a new song from this band called KISS, made some joke about these guys wearing makeup, and then threw the track on.

I wasn't quite 10 years old yet, so maybe I didn't know much about what it was like to "party every day", but I sure knew what rock and roll was already, and I knew what I liked. And for two minutes and 49 seconds, with all that bright sun and blue summer sky outside and on the road to some other big city adventure - and my beloved parents in the front seat not paying one bit of attention to the radio, so it was all mine, just mine - every single thing in the world was not just all right. It was perfect. It was just one of those musical moments you carry with you always and look back on and remember that for a few minutes, the world was perfect.