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

CTListener said:
Seeking distant radio transmissions on HF, VHF and UHF isn't DXing? Since when?
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I guess I just didn't think intercepting foreign intelligence frequencies and asking them for QSL cards would be very good for your health. So I guess I just dismissed that one. Certainly you can DX HF, VHF, and UHF for less nefarious uses without putting your life in jeopardy. With what they did to Rather, who knows what they would do to us if we knew "What The Frequency" was.
 
Here's a song with a lot of phasing that always sounded like a Class III station fading in and out and getting cochannel interference. WAKR used to sound like this when I listened in Southeastern Michigan at night. It's "Crimson and Clover" by Tommy James and The Shondells.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3gkA-x0O4

Is it just on my computer of is all the audio phasing confusing the CODEC somehow? The audio seems to be jumping around like its trying to compress the nodes in the phasing and jump over them or edit them out.
 
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Wow. That makes me think of something I had forgotten about.

Back when I first heard the Beatles song 'Birthday', I thought the brief parts with the piano sounded like it was recorded off shortwave radio because it didn't sound as clear as the rest of the instruments in the song and it even kind of sounds like it has that characteristic shortwave fade.

Maybe it's just me who hears it that way but that part comes at around the 1:30 point in the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmZ2ICOZ8mo
 
The phasing at 1:30 kind of sounds like that to me also, either a more typical shortwave fade, or WLAC or WKBW during an Auroral event, like when everything below 1000 kHz is groundwave, and stations in the 1500s keep punching through with rapid fades.
 
Oh, good. So it's not just me.

The Beatles were known to have put all kinds of things in songs that weren't supposed to be obvious.

Who knows if it was really an actual recording off shortwave radio or intended to sound like it or we just perceive it that way because of our interest in DXing.
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
Here's a song with a lot of phasing that always sounded like a Class III station fading in and out and getting cochannel interference. WAKR used to sound like this when I listened in Southeastern Michigan at night. It's "Crimson and Clover" by Tommy James and The Shondells.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3gkA-x0O4

Is it just on my computer of is all the audio phasing confusing the CODEC somehow? The audio seems to be jumping around like its trying to compress the nodes in the phasing and jump over them or edit them out.
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Remember when that song was done.....in the psychedelic era of the 60s....the sounds were intended to take the group in a different direction, not to imitate a fading radio station. The version you hear is actually a rough mix...WLS got the rough copy and played it on the air prematurely....the record company rushed the rough copy into production so the final version was never done.....(which would have had a better sound and echo mix)

Didnt think of Moonlight Feels Right.....(and I played that song as a DJ!)

One that reminds me of the heyday of Top40 AM is Everclear's AM Radio but they don't mention the DX aspect of the days..(except for the video that mentions 93KHJ)

However, the one song that does come to mind in this field is "Video Killed the Radio Star"....the lyrics say it all as the audio is phased to make it sound like an old AM broadcast (though most AMs in the golden days were wider than they are now and the TRF radios had wider audio b/w than the digital tuned narrow filtered ones of today!):

"I heard you on the wireless back in fifty two
Lying awake intent at tuning in on you
If I was young it didn't stop you coming through..........."
 
Can you believe that WLS, the World's Last Station to play records, actually broke this one? Actually, it wasn't that uncommon for WLS to break records in the 1960s, but usually they were at least acetates, not secretly recorded from master tapes. The most famous one was "Please Please Me" from 1963, played first by Dick Biondi as I recall. Not only were they the first to play the song, but the first to play the "Beattles" in America, as it was spelled on the original Vee Jay release (yes VEE JAY, as in Vivian Carter of WGES and WGRY/WLTH fame and James Bracken, a whole topic in and of itself). It is well documented on oldiesloon.com and possibly ARSA, with the actual chart scans as I recall. But "It Could Be We're In Love" by The Cryan' Shames, the quintessential Chicago only multiweek #1 local record, actually broke first at the aforementioned WTAC Flint, MI (also once owned by Chess Records before WVON was owned by Chess Records) one week before WLS and two weeks before WCFL, but it wasn't a big hit there. Between ARSA, oldiesloon.com, ct30.com, Musicradio77.com, and americanradiohistory.com, we can now easily verify all this.
 
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Perhaps not 'DX' in the true sense, sans loop antennae or a headset and a Vane A Jones logbook, but ones to come to mind:

'Pilot Of The Airwaves' by Charlie Dore. It's essentially the Joni Mitchell song 'You Turn Me On ; I'm A Radio', sideways. Both are neat tunes.
The Mitchell song, of course, is from where those lyrics came: 'Who needs the static? It hurts the head.'

The incredibly underrated Michael Stanley Band, from Ohio, had at least two songs on the subject. One of them, a decidedly Springsteen-ish thing called 'Lover' -- complete with Springsteen's own sax player Clarence Clemons -- mentions 'the news at the top of the hour, which no one really believes'.
(There is another radio reference in that fine blend of melody and poetry about weary and lonely nighttime driving, too. But the best line is 'Thank God for the man who put the white lines on the highway').

And in their rockier 'All I Ever Wanted', perhaps a definitive MSB tune of more recent vintage, he sings about things like 'turn up the radio, til this one's through' , and 'The Dee-troit station came screaming'.
Gosh. I wonder which station he meant? :)

Perhaps fatefully, Stanley now does an air shift at classic-rock WNCX in Cleveland.
 
Going way back - Toni Fisher - "The Big Hurt" sounds like it was recorded off of a shortwave station. Anybody remember shortwave :)
 
The Big Hurt-Toni Fisher

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlE6eHEENg4

Also, "You Are Everything" by The Stylistics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8Ttbzqdns

The phasing was no doubt first inspired by fading AM stations, though I guess all the simulcast shortwave stations may have been a factor. Most sophisticated radios included shortwave, even in the early days of transistor radios, before FM was expected to be on a radio.

Only when FM began to take over did phasing become anachronistic, and take on a life of its own, as you say in "Crimson and Clover" phasing was intended more as Psychedelia than "radio geek" phasing effects.

Oh, I forgot "Itchykoo Park" by Small Faces.
 
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"Invisible airwaves crackle with life
Bright antennae bristle with the energy
Emotional feedback on timeless wavelength
Bearing a gift beyond price, almost free"

Not specifically DX but I'm surprised nobody mentioned it. Rush's "Spirit of Radio" of course.

Can't forget about Everclear's "AM Radio": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouTbcRUDS3U

Or what about Wall of Voodoo's "Mexican Radio"?

"I'd take requests on the telephone
I'm on a wavelength far from home
I feel a hot wind on my shoulder
I dial it in from south of the border
I hear the talking of the DJ
Can't understand just what does he say?"
 
"Heard It on the X" was the first title I thought of when I saw this thread.
And for those in Ohio (and anywhere else that might care), the Michael Stanley mentioned earlier in this thread is the same one who's done afternoons at WNCX in Cleveland since 1990. I have never heard his music, but might look for it now.
 
K6JHU said:
Going way back - Toni Fisher - "The Big Hurt" sounds like it was recorded off of a shortwave station. Anybody remember shortwave :)
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Yes! I was thinking about this one when you guys were talking about "Crimson & Clover" . Ditto "Itchycoo Park". These two on my iPod sound like KAAY and WBZ used to sound on my radio during their top 40 days. :)
 
Also, "You Are Everything" by The Stylistics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8Ttbzqdns
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Wow. I had forgotten about that one too.

It was my early days of discovering DXing on AM radio when I was 10 years old. I first heard that song on WABC which was about 80 miles away and I thought the signal was really fading.

Then when I heard that song after that, I associated it with the nighttime characteristic AM multipath fading sound.

(Of course, I didn't know it was called 'multipath' back then. LOL)
 
Lionel Cartwright (I believe I have spelled his name right!) had a country hit in the '90s, with a line in it about a distant station from Nashville coming in clear at night. Obviously, that is a reference to WSM and the Grand Ole Opry, but I do not recall the name of the song. And I probably played it a time or two back in the '90s, myself!
 
There was a hit song in Canada by a band called Pukka Orchestra called Listen To The Radio which features the following verse:

Atmospherics after dark
Noise and voices from the past
Across the dial from Moscow to Cologne:
Interference in the night
Thousand miles on either side
Stations fading into the unknown:
 
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