CARLTON FLETCHER: I’m with Kurt Cobain: Corporate radio sucks

Life is a rock, But the radio rolled me. Gotta turn it up louder, So my DJ told me.

— Reunion

OK, Boomer … yeah, you youngsters in Generations X, Y, Z and all other letters of the alphabet are right. We baby boomers do like to talk about how much better things were “back in the day.”

We only do it for two reasons: to annoy y’all, and because it’s true.

So allow me to add to the list of things that were so much better when we were young: Music. Radio.

Someone said to me the other day: “When Tara and Rock 105 at the brewery went off the air, radio in Albany and southwest Georgia went back to being what it’s pretty much always been. Boring and repetitive. When the one station here now that plays decent music plays the same 40 songs or so over and over and over,” the person went on, “it drives me up the wall.”

(I agreed with the complainer, to a degree. However, I say Cruisin’ ‘94 out of Moultrie plays a very eclectic mix of rock and roll, and not just the stuff that was Top 40 back in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s … at least not during the morning hours when Jay has his “Jam Session” going. Check him out.)

The conversation got me to thinking back to the days when satellite radio, YouTube and music downloads were about as foreign a concepts as $15 hamburgers, Zoom meetings and electric cars. In fact, if you go back far enough — say to the early ’70s — FM radio was still pretty much a very niche concept. AM radio was where it was at. And because, I’m told, of the vagaries of the use of wattage of AM stations at that time, here’s what we in Ocilla could do (when we weren’t listening to WSIZ, Where Your Friends Are).

From 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, we got WAPE out of Jacksonville as clear as a bell. It was there that we got to listen to the antics of the “Grease Man,” one of the South’s premiere “shock jocks” to make his mark before Howard Stern was even nearing puberty. I could fill this entire paper with Grease Man stories that had me running down the battery in my work truck every day as I switched the ignition over to auxiliary so I could hear what he was up to.

(The Grease Man, incidentally, left Jacksonville for a much larger station in Washington, D.C., where he promptly angered most of the city with comments about Martin Luther King Day.)

But what about night time, you might ask? Was there no radio entertainment after WAPE cut its power and went to static?

Well, as it turned out, at 6 p.m., converse to WAPE’s schedule, WLS out of Chicago boosted its power, and, in Ocilla, we could listen to jocks like John Landecker as clear as a bell. The on-air personalities at WLS were not as colorful as someone like the Grease Man, but the Chicago station offered us country bumpkins insight into one of America’s great cities, a city none of us ever dreamed of visiting. And it held its signal, you might guess, until 6 a.m., when WAPE came back strong.

There were other great AM stations as well: WOWO out of Fort Wayne, Ind. (“The wonderful WoWo!”) and WLAC out of Nashville, Tenn., (with the Spe-I, De-R, M-A-N … Spiderman) were two that come immediately to mind. Then, around ‘74, 96 Rock out of Atlanta became the coolest FM station ever, but, of course, FM stations are directional and territorial, so we only got to listen to 96 Rock when we made trips to the capital city, for a concert or a Braves game.

Now … I think of the Who’s “Teenage wasteland” refrain (from “Baba O’Riley”) when I think about modern-day radio. Paraphrasing Kurt Cobain’s sentiments from his Rolling Stone cover shoot when Nirvana exploded onto the music scene, “Corporate radio sucks.”

Some guy in New Jersey somewhere, who’s read all the surveys and “knows” what people want to listen to, picks music for different genres, and stations all over the country owned by the conglomerate he works for plays the same stuff. Get outside the range of one station, the next one is playing the same stuff.

No, thanks. I’ll just keep moving the radio dial, hoping to catch one of the few songs in the mix that I haven’t heard 50 or so times already … dreaming the impossible dream that one day the Grease Man’s voice will cut through all this boring stuff with one of his hilarious tales. Sure, it’s a dream, but as Eurythmics told us, “Sweet dreams are made of this.”