Rock, rock, rock ‘n’ roll radio (and more)

I’ve long lamented the demise of commercial rock radio, that long-lost tradition I’d call free-form, a radio station on which one might hear the Von Bondies and Bruce Springsteen, The Beatles and Curtis Mayfield and the latest from underground scenes around the world.

I’m not talking about just any Beatles track or Springsteen singing “Hungry Heart” — you can get that from a class rock station — but so-called deep album tracks and outtakes and the kind of eclectic soup that matches my CD, download and vinyl collections (filed under C, you can find not only the expected artists like The Clash, Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, but also bands like the Come On, Hayes Carll, The Cult, the Cruzados, Sheryl Crow and others).

Most commercial radio disdains this kind of variety. The idea is to tightly manage the playlist so that you can control who is listening and the ad folks can target their advertising. That’s why we have Classic Rock, and Top 40, and R&B and Light Music and Soft Rock and Adult Contemporary and never the twain shall meet, as they say. At least in the local (New York and New Jersey) markets.

Philadelphia is only nominally better, though it has the more eclectic WXPN. And there are the college stations.

The solution, some friends have been telling me, is to invest in satellite radio, to take what had been free and buy into the subscription model. It was a model that seemed wrong to me, one that gave in to the money-driven approach to music.

Of course, free radio was never really free. We paid for it by giving up about a third of our listening time to commercials, to ads for everything from McDonalds and Burger King to obnoxious sales pitches from ex-football players who now own car dealerships.

This brings me to my point: I’ve been wrong about satellite radio all this time. We bought a new Toyota Rav4, which is satellite-ready and came with a month free of XM. I didn’t use it much of the first week — I was having a good time listening to my iPod and playing with the Bluetooth — but I decided to program the presets for the satellite stations and, well, I am hooked.

I have 18 stations set, 13 music stations and five talk. The music stations include the Springsteen station and Little Steven’s great Underground Garage channel, a station devoted to Outlaw Country, a jazz station, one called First Wave (early punk and new wave), stations devoted to the ’80s and ’90s, and several others. The talk stations include two public radio channels, a sports station, CNN and something called AmeriLeft, which plays liberal and left-leaning talk, much of it from Air America.

It is the Little Steven channel, however, that has me hooked. Consider this recent string of songs: “Not Fade Away” by the Stones, “Circles” from Les Fleur De Lys, “Too Good To Be True” by The Yum Yums (a recent punk track), “He’s a Rebel” from The Crystals and “Cara-Lin” by The Strangeloves.

This morning, I heard The Beatles, “Every Little Thing”; Springsteen, “I Wanna Be With You”; Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, “Fool for You”; the Stones, “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love”; The Clash, “Clampdown”; The Stray Cats, “Fishnet Stockings”; Down Beat 5, “Dum Dum Ditty”; and the Purple Hearts (an Australian band from the ’60s), “Just a Little Bit.”

Part of my wonder at this, I know, is its freshness, its newness. I am sure to grow tired of the Underground Garage. But I have myriad other choices, enough to keep me interested for a long time.

The question is whether I want to pay the money ($12.95 a month) to keep the XM streaming in.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet