Your Family Car AM Radio

I grew up with WABC too.......listened to it a lot more than just in the car. First memory being 5 years old was “Joy To The World.”

 

Let Your Love Flow - Belamy Brothers sounded good on AM.

 

Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey

 

Our trips in the family car were a constant battle between me wanting to listen to Top 40 on WLS and my dad wanting to listen to White Sox baseball games on WCFL. My dad usually won the battle. The best present I got as a kid was a clock radio. I could lay on my bed and listen to whatever I wanted. My music education mostly came from WLS.

 

Summer '65, we're heading north somewhere on holidays for a week, my recollection is that it was going up the 400 highway north of Toronto. We pulled off to a restaurant for lunch and I always associate it with California Girls by the Beach Boys which I heard around there for the first time ever.

 

A Hard Days Night played when my parents took me to a Cleveland Indians game summer of '64. Honky Tonk Women was playing when I visited a friend summer of '69 in Massachusetts. Lay Lady Lay was playing when I went with my Dad shopping for a new car sometime 1969 , and I was embarrassed he might not like the "big brass bed" lyrics. CSNY Helpless was playing summer of '70 when I was behind the wheel in drivers training, and the instructor said that guy sure can't sing.
Those are the first ones to come to mind.

 

In Philly it was WFIL. On a summer evening, you could listen to WFIL as it boomed out of virtually every car radio passing by with the windows rolled down.

Though the station gained its fame in the later 60s, my strongest song memory stems from the early 70s and " It's Too Late " by Carole King.

 

We had a little metal panel in the dash where normal people would have had a radio installed.

 

You bet.........1970 Pontiac Le Mans with country music coming through those "speakers" while my 3 year old sister and my four year old self are playing in the back seat with no seatbelts. Hang on, my dad is pulling over to pick up a hitchhiker. All true

 

Never on a Sunday. My parents would sing along and giggle like the good Brit Episcopalians they were. It was lost on me what you shouldn’t do on a Sunday.

 

I didn't know FM radio existed til i was 12,all we had was am radio in the car WNBC WABC playing top 40 hits of the 70s.

 

I Want To Hold Your Hand-The Beatles and tons of others...

 

Oddly enough, I remember the local Top 40 AM station playing The B-52's "Private Idaho". Was a new release at the time (around 1980).

 

While my dad and I were in the car waiting for my mom and sisters to come out of a store, I vividly remember hearing a few seconds of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” before my dad changed the station.

 

Burning Down The House

 

Not necessarily a car thing, but when I think of AM radio, I'm inevitably reminded of Creedence Clearwater Revival and songs like "Have You Ever Seen The Rain" and "Down On A Corner."

Its funny because I almost think of my little AM radio as a childhood friend. Or at least, constant companion. These days kids have the Internet and literally everything at their fingertips. Progress, I guess. Have to wonder if there's going to be a downside to that.

 

All I remember is CKLW AM 800 playing their top 40 songs.

Good times. Seem to remember a lot of 3 dog night songs.

Joy to the world, Mama told me not to come, etc...

We owned an Oldsmobile 98?? convertible growing up. Too young to ever drive it. Big v-8 fun car....

 

Serenaded in the Midwest KXOK St. Louis

 

Louie Louie

 

I too remember exactly where I was when I heard "My Sweet Lord" for the first time. It wasn't on a family car radio, though. I was in the middle of nowhere on I-80 East in Pennsylvania. My college roommate had invited me to his folks' place in New Jersey for Thanksgiving, and we were on our way there in his VW bus.

P.S. I instantly made the connection with "He's So Fine" when I heard it that first time. I can never figure out those who say they hear no commonality between the two songs.

 

I remember frequently riding through our local municipal park with my mom, my soon-to-be stepdad and soon-to-be stepbrothers and listening to WHOT. I actually "pre-heard" a song once when we were doing this. They played a jingle, and somehow I just knew that the next thing I'd hear after the call letters would be "You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips." And that's exactly what happened. It was a little weird!

Flash forward to a few years later when I was driving my stepdad's car. He had an add-on reverb unit that threw the radio signal into the back speakers and mixed some reverb in. But most of the time, it just didn't sound good. The only thing it worked well on were CCR songs, which already had that slap-back echo sound. This just enhanced it a bit more.

 

The AM radio in our car had better bass response than the 3" speaker in my record player (ceramic cart, 7" platter, the speaker faced the underside of a 12" record playing). I didn't get much money to buy many records. My tastes had left light pop and I was wanting to listen to "heavy" music, so the car radio offered access to current music and better bass.

I recall loving the Stones "Brown Sugar" - a hard-hitting band with a full "heavy" rock sound. I would crank the volume of the radio high, with the bass control turned up, because that created a "heavier" sound. That "heavy" sound I loved I now know was just over-driving the speaker to max. distortion. Sure, it sounded like cr*p, but it was more exciting as anything else I had heard.

 

Goldmine!
WABC Musicradio 77
Between Love Is Blue and MacArthur Park, some of that music was (um) a bit overplayed. But then again, there was also All Long The Watchtower, Revolution (#1, the version on 45), White Room.... 1968 in our Plymouth Satellire wagon with the fake vinyl wood paneling on the sides (remember those?). Listening to the end of the year top 100 countdown...

 

Back in the summer of 84 my dad took me to Disneyland in a rented car and I vividly remember hearing in the radio " The body electric" by Rush and been totally floored. He was just parking the car and I asked him to please wait until the song was finished so I could know who was it. I didn´t knew Rush about that time, I was only 9. I asked my mother the next week to PLEASE get me Grace under pressure if I did well in school, which I did.

 

I remember hearing "That'll Be The Day" by Buddy Holly & The Crickets on the car radio while my father drove the family home after a visit to see my grandparents in the Bronx. In 1957 I was 10 years old but I still remember hearing the song, which I loved, and looking out the back window. My grandparents owned a bar in the Bronx which was closed on Sundays and us kids got to play shuffleboard my grandfather would give us quarters to play the jukebox. I also remember listening to a Yankee game in the car, this time on the way to the Bronx, when Gil McDougald hit the line drive that smashed Cleveland pitcher Herb Score in the eye. That happened in 1957 as well.