WBAB

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 113: Taped Off the Radio

This time around, I’m back to looking at my history with music by going deep into the early 1990s and my early teens, recollecting those nights I spent in my room listening to the radio and rushing to hit record so that I wouldn’t have to wait for the station to play that Brian May song.  I talk about the stations I grew up listening to, the tapes I made, my unfortunate music choices, and how I learned about what was popular (and what wasn’t) before I finally got my own CD player.

You can listen here:

Apple Podcasts:  Pop Culture Affidavit

Direct Download 

Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page

So here’s some extras for you …

So the picture above isn’t of my exact radio, but it is the radio I owned and used to tape all of those songs. It’s the Sony CFS-230 cassette-corder boombox. I got this for either my birthday or Christmas sometime in the late 1980s and it was eventually replaced with a cassette/CD player that I received for my fifteenth birthday.

And here is the Spotify playlist that includes the songs I featured in the episode. Enjoy!

Twenty-Five Hours a Day

Out of Body by The Hooters, the album featuring "Twenty-Five Hours a Day"

I think it’s been well-established that I never really seemed to like the right music when I was in high school.  Sure, I have an entire collection of the various grunge and metal bands that were popular during the early 1990s, but I am pretty sure that what I listened to was largely different than my Metallica-worshiping friends were digesting.  I think the reason for this was two-fold: first, my parents didn’t have cable and I therefore had no access to MTV; second, the radio in my room picked up a handful of stations, and since I didn’t want to listen to WBLI and WALK spew forth the vile death wail of Michael Bolton and Celine Dion, I tuned into WBAB, a classic rock radio station out of Babylon that I’d recognized from the bumper stickers that were often handed out at Fourth of July fireworks celebrations.

By the time I was a junior, I’d have one of those black WBAB bumper stickers in my locker and while my appreciation for Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith grew and I knew all of the words to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” (what is it with classic rock radio and Rush?  Do they have a quota for this band?), it didn’t put me on the fast track to awesometown as far as my musical taste was concerned.  While my friends were deep into that world of metal and the Seattle band of the month, I was discovering bands like The Hooters.

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