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Have there ever been any popular songs with a reference to DXing?

gar hi

gar hi

If there's even only one, I'm wondering if this is it.

Even when this song was popular on the radio, there was one line in the lyrics that caught my attention.

So tonight, I'm listening to one of the old shows online of Casey Kasem's 'American Top 40 The 70s' from this date in 1976 and this song was in the countdown.

It's Moonlight Feels Right by Starbuck.

There's a line in the song where they sing ... 'I'll play the radio on southern stations'.

If you listen to it in the context of the total song, it sounds to me anyway that it's referring to listening to distant AM stations at night.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYnQsvtfEsQ
 
Van Morrison's "Wavelength" refers to the Voice of America -- a shortwave listening reference! There was also a comedy record in the late '60s called "Go-Go Radio Moscow," by Nikita the K.
 
There was a Country Western song, I cannot remember the name of the song or the artist, that referred to a trucker who apparently was getting a little "action" on the road, and didn't want the women to dedicate songs to him because "my wife listens to all night country radio". In the song, he mentions several Clear Channel (Webster's Sense 1 but some may be both senses) stations with country formats, at least overnights at the time.

Another interesting thing relevant to radio is that "Devil Woman" by Cliff Richard, has some electric guitar sounds that are made to sound like Morse Code. It turns out that the sounds in the song do not spell out anything intelligible, that I could make sense of, but that Cliff Richard was a Licensed Radio Amateur, I believe in the US, not the UK, at least at one time.

There is also the song "Mexican Radio", by Wall of Voodoo, from 1983, which sounds like someone listening to a Mexican radio station from the 1960s or 1970s. Perhaps #1 Board Poster David should do a cover?
 
I had all the stations listed implicitly but it timed out researching the lyrics and stations. Mostly Class I-As and I-Bs, but WHO, WWL, and WBAP are referred to explicitly in the song. I guess the song topic was too unwholesome for some stations to endorse, or perhaps it was just too boring for a listing of stations like the list of songs and artists in "Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me)" by Joey Levine and Reunion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYN-YZFyfLw

I guess the guitar sounds by Cliff Richard may more likely to be electric organ sounds.
 
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I guess "What's The Frequency Kenneth" by REM would not apply, since a spy most likely uses HF, VHF, and UHF frequencies which are not AM or FM Broadcast Frequencies.

Very early in her career, Joni Mitchell performed at a Coffee House in Flint, MI called The Sippin' Lizzard. She performed such songs as "Both Sides Now" and "The Circle Game" at the club in the time frame of 1966-1967, much earlier than the songs were recorded and released. Her first Top 40 hit song was "You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio". She stayed in a house where WKMF (Country Station), WFDF (IF Whistle on 910) and WTRX, known as "TRiX" (Hip to your Trix) all had signals in excess of 100 mV/m where she presumably listened on a small transistor radio with bad AGC/AVC and IF Rejection. Listen to the song. Do the Math. I say she wrote the song there, or at least started to, jotting down notes as the ideas came into her head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSSi4jZsDmo

Oh, the name of the country song is "All Night Country Radio" by Jack Barlow.
 
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By the way, you mentioned "Moonlight Feels Right" by Starbuck. Great song, phenomenal vibraphone solo. Ever hear "Barefoot in Baltimore" by the Strawberry Alarm Clock? Same idea, decent vibraphone solo, but from several years earlier. The youtube recording is too low a bitrate, and doesn't do it justice. But give it a listen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF4Np1m8g5M
 
Maybe the oldest (1950) is "Dearie, do you remember...?"
It included this line in the lyric:
"Dearie, do you remember when we
Stayed up all night to get
Pittsburgh on a crystal set"

The song charted with recordings by Bing Crosy, by Jo Stafford and Gordon Macrae and by Guy Lombardo. The reference to "Pittsburgh" is apparently to KDKA.
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
I guess "What's The Frequency Kenneth" by REM would not apply, since a spy most likely uses HF, VHF, and UHF frequencies which are not AM or FM Broadcast Frequencies.

Very early in her career, Joni Mitchell performed at a Coffee House in Flint, MI called The Sippin' Lizzard. She performed such songs as "Both Sides Now" and "The Circle Game" at the club in the time frame of 1966-1967, much earlier than the songs were recorded and released. Her first Top 40 hit song was "You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio". She stayed in a house where WKMF (Country Station), WFDF (IF Whistle on 910) and WTRX, known as "TRiX" (Hip to your Trix) all had signals in excess of 100 mV/m where she presumably listened on a small transistor radio with bad AGC/AVC and IF Rejection. Listen to the song. Do the Math. I say she wrote the song there, or at least started to, jotting down notes as the ideas came into her head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSSi4jZsDmo

Oh, the name of the country song is "All Night Country Radio" by Jack Barlow.
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I don't recall about the other two, but during that period WFDF did not stay on all night.
 
>I don't recall about the other two, but during that period WFDF did not stay on all night.

The Sippin' Lizzard (I was never there, but I knew people from the extended family that owned it) was supposedly a teenage friendly and drug free environment, other than caffeine I guess. It probably closed well before WFDF's sign off, but if it was after 12:30 AM, "who needs the static" (usually from KGLC Miami, OK believe it or not, and still the primary interfering station as KVIS)"hurts the head". I loved the alliteration in the sign ON cart, with Dan Hunter, "WFDF is one of Michigan's strongest radio signals, FINEST and FOREMOST in FLINT". The schedule was 4:45 AM to 12:30 AM until about 1980. WTRX was 24 hours for a while, and then gave the impression of 24 hour service with a 4:30 AM to 1:00 AM schedule. WKMF was 24 hours except Sunday and Monday mornings until about 1980, when most stations were legally advised to go to 24/7 for public service reasons, except for "brief periods for necessary maintenance". WTAC 600 was 24 hours except Monday mornings, but being two miles further away and with 1000 watts day and 500 watts night, would have a harder time being heard on a cheap transistor radio 2 miles or less from the more powerful (5000 watt) stations with no decent AGC/AVC. Joni could have missed it. WTAC won out on 600 after about 10 miles or so from the low dial position, at least over the high dial position stations. However, as another poster here will probably tell you, the WTAC parallelogram pattern became more and more of a problem as years went by due to population migration and freeway and subdivision development nearby.
 
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Schroedingers Cat said:
>I don't recall about the other two, but during that period WFDF did not stay on all night.

The Sippin' Lizzard (I was never there, but I knew people from the extended family that owned it) was supposedly a teenage friendly and drug free environment, other than caffeine I guess. It probably closed well before WFDF's sign off, but if it was after 12:30 AM, "who needs the static" (usually from KGLC Miami, OK believe it or not, and still the primary interfering station as KVIS)"hurts the head". I loved the alliteration in the sign ON cart, with Dan Hunter, "WFDF is one of Michigan's strongest radio signals, FINEST and FOREMOST in FLINT". The schedule was 4:45 AM to 12:30 AM until about 1980. WTRX was 24 hours for a while, and then gave the impression of 24 hour service with a 4:30 AM to 1:00 AM schedule. WKMF was 24 hours except Sunday and Monday mornings until about 1980, when most stations were legally advised to go to 24/7 for public service reasons, except for "brief periods for necessary maintenance". WTAC 600 was 24 hours except Monday mornings, but being two miles further away and with 1000 watts day and 500 watts night, would have a harder time being heard on a cheap transistor radio 2 miles from the more powerful (5000 watts) with no decent AGC/AVC. Joni could have missed it.
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Ah, Dan Hunter! What pipes. No inflection but great pipes. If he were still working, Apple could hire him to be male version of Siri.

Too bad they couldn't come up with some word starting with "D" to stick between "finest" and "foremost." Now it would be "finest and foremost in Farmington Hills.

One of the strongest radio signals? I guess. Back then there was 'JR and then all the regionals, like WFDF, at 5kw. In any case, they were getting listeners from all over Southeastern Michigan for their Sunday morning polka show.

I always thought 4:45 was a strange time to sign on. It was the earliest stations in Michigan could go to daytime power during the year (when Michigan was still on Standard Time all year long). But what that had to do with anything, I never could see.

Still, the station was a class act during that period. I saw a little while ago that GM Elmer Knopf got a school named after him.
 
Yes, Elmer has a school auditorium and a special needs center named after him. He passed away in 1989. Not sure the name means anything to most people today. He was also President of the Flint Board of Education. Elmer's mother would spend hours on the phone with her sister in law, who also happened to be my grandmother. They would talk about radio and what they did and didn't like about changes at the station. Of course, they and everyone else over 40 were horrified when they went Top 40 in late 1970. There was that faction of FDFphiles, and then there were the friends and relatives of Comanager Marvin Levey, who the last I heard, is still doing well. I remember Marvin's daughter's friends telling our fifth grade teacher that she could get our class a tour of the WFDF studios and meet everyone, but the teacher would have nothing of it, telling her in no uncertain terms that the only station that they would be touring would be WFBE!

Actually, in 1957 when they went to 5 kW daytime, they were one of the strongest signals in Michigan, and still are today with 50 kW daytime. If only Frank Fallain had had the Foresight (alliteration again) to go 5000 watts fulltime in 1940 (actually changed from 1310 to 910 on March 29, 1941), the odd menagerie of FCC rules probably would have allowed them to also be 50 kW nighttime and not limited to 25 kW nighttime, like WWJ and WXYT(Z) were able to do because they ALREADY INTERFERED WITH MANY COCHANNEL STATIONS. They only had to pull back 10% when they moved Downriver. WFDF had to stay at the 25% to 50% RSS level or below of cochannel and first adjacent channel stations. They were not a primary interfering station to any other station at 1 kW night. Despite what Wikipedia says, WFDF could have put a predicted NIF signal over Flint at night with 50 kW. Just barely, and perhaps requiring taller towers or more towers, but it could have been done. It could then have done the whole 70 mile TL change as a MINOR CHANGE without changing the COL to Farmington Hills, where the then GM Mike Fezzey lived (Farmington Hills COL was his idea), and oddly, WWJ AM-FM-TV VP/GM, and WFDF alumni (and former WTAC GM) Don DeGroot lived until he retired from WWJ.
 
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Schroedingers Cat said:
I remember Marvin's daughter's friends telling our fifth grade teacher that she could get our class a tour of the WFDF studios and meet everyone, but the teacher would have nothing of it, telling her in no uncertain terms that the only station that they would be touring would be WFBE!
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Boy, I wonder what her problem was! Maybe she didn't know the station in question was managed by the president of school board.

Well, the school district sold WFBE and now it's a country station. Maybe class tours are no longer an issue.

WFDF wouldn't be the first business to get uprooted because the boss wanted a shorter commute. After I left Michigan, I worked for WCOJ in Coatesville, PA. Western Chester County did not get good signals from most of the Philly stations. But a new guy bought the station and decided he'd rather be in West Chester (where Philly stations come in just fine). The station lost most of its community connection and audience. And the station could barely be heard in West Chester. But he had a shorter drive and thought West Chester was a cooler place to be. And the head of Scott Paper came in hired from outside and moved everything to Florida - except the people, most of whom lost their jobs.
 
Wow. A lot of interesting stuff here I never knew about or never thought about before when hearing the songs.

Bruce, as many times as I've heard China Grove, it never occurred to me that it could be a reference to radio listening but now that you pointed it out, I'll see it that way from now on. Good observation!


And another thing I didn't think of before about the song Moonlight Feels Right is the next line that follows the one about playing the radio on southern stations.

.... 'Cause southern belles are hell at night'.

Could that mean distant stations stations with surprisingly strong loud signals?

I never knew those were the exact words following the ones I initially mentioned. I didn't know what they were all these years until I looked up the lyrics last night.

You know how easy it is to sometimes get song lyrics wrong. (For example, in the song Drift Away by Dobie Gray, I always thought he was singing 'Give me the Beach Boys and free my soul'. That's just one of many songs too I didn't get right.)

Schroedingers Cat, I didn't know the Strawberry Alarm Clock had another hit besides Incense and Peppermints, another example of a song I probably still don't know all the correct words to. LOL
 
gar fla said:
Bruce, as many times as I've heard China Grove, it never occurred to me that it could be a reference to radio listening but now that you pointed it out, I'll see it that way from now on. Good observation!
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You had to be there in places like Midland. KOMA Oklahoma City was a very popular DX target with the kids at night. The cities were associated with everything fun, because there wasn't much to do in Midland at night other than drive around aimlessly.

About 10 years ago, I discovered some kids DX'ing Radio Disney DAllas from Lubbock, TX. They were actually quite advanced in the hobby - one using an All American Five tube radio, others with various radios - wires wrapped around them and put out to a fence, etc. They knew when to switch from 620 Dallas to 1160 San Antonio to 1690 from Denver. I told them about GE Superadios - and there was probably a flurry of birthday present / Christmas present requests that year! Never underestimate the desperation people feel out in isolated areas. A GE Superadio tuned to a Dallas station at a pool out there brought them out of the woodworks. If there were that many in one random neighborhood pool, there may have been dozens or even hundreds around that town.
 
gar fla said:
Schroedingers Cat, I didn't know the Strawberry Alarm Clock had another hit besides Incense and Peppermints
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Yup! I can think of three of them...."Tomorrow", "Barefoot in Baltimore," and "Sit with the Guru". All had some absolutely terrific harmonies. I have the first two of those on my ipod/iphone....and, of course, in regular rotation with vintage jingles from WLS, WQAM, CHUM, WTIX, KFWB, and a few others. The other Alarm Clock single, "Sit with the Guru" may have been a just little bit "out there", even for the late '60s.
 
cyberdad said:
Yup! I can think of three of them...."Tomorrow", "Barefoot in Baltimore," and "Sit with the Guru". All had some absolutely terrific harmonies. I have the first two of those on my ipod/iphone....and, of course, in regular rotation with vintage jingles from WLS, WQAM, CHUM, WTIX, KFWB, and a few others. The other Alarm Clock single, "Sit with the Guru" may have been a just little bit "out there", even for the late '60s.
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I've had a lot of problems finding them in stereo. I have 64G on my phone, hundreds of oldies - I haven't even filled half the thing and that is with videos and pictures on there as well. Amazing stuff, this technology
 
cyberdad said:
Yup! I can think of three of them...."Tomorrow", "Barefoot in Baltimore," and "Sit with the Guru". All had some absolutely terrific harmonies. I have the first two of those on my ipod/iphone....and, of course, in regular rotation with vintage jingles from WLS, WQAM, CHUM, WTIX, KFWB, and a few others. The other Alarm Clock single, "Sit with the Guru" may have been a just little bit "out there", even for the late '60s.
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I remember "Barefoot in Baltimore" and, yes, "Sit With the Guru" getting brief exposure on WRKO Boston, a week, maybe two at best. I don't think either got beyond "Hitbound."
 
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