It's still radio...

I listen to internet radio.

I have a real radio. It’s a clock radio that I bought at Zeller’s. It wakes me up to some random station I set it to. When I hit the snooze button it tells me the time. “Good morning, 4:54 AM” it tells me, in a woman’s voice. There is only one voice. No choices. In the PM, it just says “Hello” followed by the time.

I don’t use the radio for actual radio purposes. I haven’t listened to an old-fashioned radio since about 1980. Well, not on the radio, anyway.

I have taken, though, to listening to radio while I work. It helps to pass the day and to keep my soul from dying. I’m lucky that my young colleague, with whom I share an office, is indulgent. Indeed, he comments every so often. “This is pretty old” he says, referring to something that may have been recorded in 1990.

The real challenge, though, is finding suitable stations. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard. There are thousands of stations.

Try it. How many jazz stations can you find that play a good mix of 50s and 60s jazz. The answer, so far, is zero. You find stations that play Dixieland, classic jazz (that means Dixieland), cool jazz, bop, “smooth jazz” (as if there could be such a thing), vocal jazz, jazz trumpet, jazz saxophone. I like Mingus, Davis, Coltrane, Cannonball, Monk. But I can’t imagine listening to nothing but bebop from 7:30 AM until 4:30 PM. Mercifully AOL has a station called “Jazz Mix.” It’s not bad, eclectic style, but with a limited artist repertoire. So if you don’t mind hearing Louis Armstrong followed by Ella Fitzgerald followed by Miles Davis followed by Vince Guaraldi followed by Louis Armstrong followed by Ella Fitzgerald etc etc then you’ll be happy.

Classical music stations suffer from the same disease. Take your pick: piano music, vocal music, baroque, chamber music, symphonies. Baroque music is nice and all, but with all those staccato notes all day long, I’d get so jittery that I wouldn’t need my caffeine fix. Vocal music is an ok diversion, but listening to those sopranos and tenors scream their heads off all day… well… And hey, I love chamber music, nothing better than a good string quartet, but after a few hours it all starts to get kind of screechy. Again, AOL to the rescue: they have a decent “classical mix” station among their more narrowly focused selections.

Some of these internet-only stations play nothing but music streams; other mimic real-world stations with ads, station jingles, “announcements,” and the like. And I listen to those too. But the best, hands down, are the real-world radio stations, the ones that have news, and real life announcers, and up-to-the minute traffic and weather reports (and who cares if the traffic report is about the 401 into Toronto and the weather is the forecast for the Boston area), and even real commercials. I’ve tuned into classical music from Toronto and from The Netherlands, jazz from Hamilton, (pure coincidence that some of the best stations are Canadian?) country from San Francisco, oldies from Toronto (again), and even some stations from right here in Montreal (check out 99.5, quatre-vingt dix-neuf virgule cinq – ecoutez comme c’est beau! – one of the most idiosyncratic classical stations I’ve heard yet).

So having abandoned radio in my early adulthood, I have come back to it in my dotage. What goes around comes around. And what comes around is radio Bop, playing “all the hits YOU REMEMBER” from the first decade of rock and roll!, Merle Haggard and Kitty Wells from Loud City, Shostakovitch on NPR. My grandmother had a floor standing radio that I remember from her house and which now sits in my sister’s living room, and I had a vacuum tube desktop radio and then a little black transistor, and I now have high speed internet access that gets me Myrtle Beach in full fidelity, and I can email my request half way across the continent in a few seconds, but radio is still radio, and the feeling of having company while you work hasn’t changed.

So, what IS the forecast for Boston, anyway…

"Hear how nice it is..."