AM Radio: Solid Gold

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Speaker 2 Everybody, we have a big announcement, but Josh, I think you need to do your traditional tour announcement.

Speaker 2 There we go. That means it's tour time, everybody.
We took off 2025

Speaker 2 because it just felt like the right thing to do, but we are hitting the road again next year. Yeah.
And we are super excited.

Speaker 1 Yes, get this. So we're going to start hitting the road in January, starting January 27th at the Paramount Theater in Denver.
The next day we'll be at the Paramount Theater in Seattle.

Speaker 1 And on January 29th, we'll be back to our beloved Sketch Fest at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco, CA.

Speaker 2 That's right. That's our January run.
And then in April, We're going to hit the Midwest and we're going to some cities we haven't been to yet.

Speaker 2 And I'm super excited because on April 16th, we'll be in Madison, Wisconsin at the Orpheum Theater. On the 17th we'll be back in Chicago at the Chicago Auditorium, a city we love.

Speaker 2 And then to my wife's hometown, finally, April 18th in Akron, Ohio at the Goodyear Theater.

Speaker 1 That's right. And get this for the January leg, tickets are on sale now and we're actually running a pre-sale today, November 18th.
You can use our code SYSKLive to get tickets early.

Speaker 1 Go to stuffyushadknow.com. It'll have all the tickets and info that you need.
And you can buy Sketchfest tickets right now as well.

Speaker 2 That's right. Sketchfest on sale the 16th of November.
There's no pre-sale on that one. General on sale is happening as we speak.

Speaker 1 That's right. So we'll see you guys in 2026.
We're really excited to get back out there. We hope you're excited too.
If you're not, just fake it when you see us.

Speaker 2 That's right. And pay attention, the Great White North, because there is more to come this summer.

Speaker 1 That's right. So we'll see you soon.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and we're just kicking it old school, real mellow style, which is what I understand all the kids say today.

Speaker 2 That's right. And hey,

Speaker 2 before we get going, this is probably the perfect episode to mention that our episode on how vinyl works that was released on vinyl

Speaker 2 is being reprinted because that thing sold out. And I think people would love to have one of these things for Christmas.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're releasing it just in time for the holidays. As a matter of fact, it's coming out on Black Friday, November 28th this year, which also happens to be Record Store Day from what I understand.

Speaker 1 And our friends at Born Losers Records put this out again. They did the first one, did a magnificent job, of course.

Speaker 1 And they printed 300 red and black marble records that are just beautiful. Those are available online at SYSK Vinyl.com.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then for the actual record store where you have to leave your home, probably put on a cap because it's late November, maybe a coat, go down to your local indie record store. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There might be a chance that they have one of the 300 gold royalty records. Those are exclusives for record stores.

Speaker 2 Well, you can bet your boopy. I'll be going to my local record store and supporting ourselves by buying one.

Speaker 1 That's awesome. You should draw more people by just spending like a full day there and telling everything.

Speaker 2 Yeah, maybe I could work something out with Wuck Street here in town. I can go

Speaker 2 sit up there and those guys can not talk to me.

Speaker 1 We'll see if we can get a cutout of you too

Speaker 1 to stand behind you while you sit there.

Speaker 2 That's great.

Speaker 1 I'm really excited this is back out though because people really seem to enjoy it and um what is it again sysk vinyl.com that's right awesome and thanks again to our friends at born losers you guys are great yeah they're the best yeah they are okay chuck so yeah this is a really good episode to shout out records because we're talking about am radio and um we talked a little bit about it in our beautiful music short stuff aka bm

Speaker 1 which

Speaker 1 i'll never get over um

Speaker 1 but there's a lot more to AM radio. And in fact, I didn't realize this.
Julia helped us with this one. And

Speaker 1 I didn't realize before that AM broadcasting basically set the standards

Speaker 1 for all sorts of different things, like how news is presented,

Speaker 1 soap operas, all sorts of different stuff that lasted for decades and decades and decades.

Speaker 1 That all started with AM radio because ultimately it was the very first form of mass communication that was not printed.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean top 40 radio started on AM, which is, I mean, I think these days the kids, if they hear of AM radio, probably either don't know what it is or may not, if they have, as we'll see,

Speaker 2 a newer model car, especially EV, may not even have AM radio

Speaker 2 or a radio in their house, like a transistor radio or something, or receiver, but they may think AM radio is as like, you know, news talk, sports talk, maybe some foreign language stations, maybe some, if they're driving through a rural community, some like weird farm report or something that they've never heard.

Speaker 2 I remember this. And that's kind of what AM Radio became, but it launched top 40.
It was the,

Speaker 2 up until like 1978, it beat FM, and FM had been around since what, like the 30s?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it had. And everybody said, nope, we're really happy with AM and stuck with it even after FM came around for quite a while.

Speaker 1 But let's talk about this

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 you hit on some really good points, and we're going to touch on all of those. But let's start at the very, very beginning when AM radio really started to come around.

Speaker 1 Because people had been messing with

Speaker 1 AM broadcasting since the very early 1900s.

Speaker 1 There were some inventions that all kind of came together around the same time. And I do not understand how this could possibly happen.

Speaker 1 But putting these disparate inventions together and figuring out how to broadcast radio waves that have encoded sound in them is just, I mean, hats off. That's like mad genius stuff.

Speaker 1 But that's what happened in the very early 1900s.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there were people broadcasting AM signals at the time. And, you know, the only people that had these AM receivers that could listen were like soldiers at sea or something like that.

Speaker 2 This is before they made it into the homes of Americans.

Speaker 2 That paused during World War I because they said, hey, we can't have you broadcasting your daughter playing violin, even though our soldiers love it that are out at sea.

Speaker 2 We need to kind of lock this down for now. But starting in about 1920, in fact, exactly 1920, was when commercial broadcast AM radio started with KDKA, Pittsburgh.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that was the very first one. I think that they read the results of the Warren Harding election.
I can't remember the other guy's name, somebody Cox. Warren Harding obviously won.

Speaker 1 But right after that, I mean, like, this was so clearly a groundbreaking medium.

Speaker 1 It was basically for the people in the 1920s, it was what people in the early 90s experienced with internet.

Speaker 1 It was almost like... Like, holy cow, I can't, like, you can't even begin to imagine all the different ways that this thing is going to change the world.
You just know it's going to change the world.

Speaker 1 That's kind of what happened. And so right after that first broadcast,

Speaker 1 it just exploded all over the world. And one reason why it exploded all over the world is because the person who's considered the father of radio,

Speaker 1 Guglielmo Marconi, he set up companies everywhere. So very quickly, radio stations started to develop in just a year or two after KDKA went on the air.

Speaker 2 I'm, by the way, a little mad at you because ever since you sent me the Marconi tidbit this morning, I cannot get

Speaker 2 we built the city on rock and roll out of my head.

Speaker 1 How? Why?

Speaker 1 That's odd.

Speaker 2 Marconi played the mamba.

Speaker 1 Oh, I never listened. Listen to the radio.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And

Speaker 2 I mean, I hate that song so much, and I can't get it out of my head all because I just saw the word Marconi typed in an email.

Speaker 1 I always thought, seriously, it was some gibberish I had in my head. I knew it wasn't right, but it was like, and Angela says Labamba, something like that.

Speaker 1 I had no idea Marconi was name-checked, but that's appropriate.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm not really mad at you, but boy, that thing really gets rooted in your head pretty well.

Speaker 2 But like you said, by the early 1920s, everybody was on board.

Speaker 2 In 1922, in fact, AT ⁇ T had the first radio network built when they linked 38 radio stations by phone lines and could broadcast, you know, WEAF out of New York all around the country.

Speaker 1 So, like, people.

Speaker 2 It was literally, like you said, like the internet. It was American life before and life after, as far as AM radio goes.

Speaker 1 Well put, well put. And not just American life, too.
Like this, like I said, it spread around the world very quickly. The BBC started broadcasting in 1922.

Speaker 1 Australia's first radio station, 2SB, which is now ABC Sydney, they started in 1923. Canada got its first one in 1932, XWA out of Montreal.

Speaker 1 It was just

Speaker 1 like the internet. It's not like it was just one country.
It was everybody who got in involved because it was a humanity-altering invention.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. By the late 1920s, the major networks had launched, and you know, these are radio networks, NBC and CBS.
These were international broadcasts from the United States all over the world.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, they worked by, you know, you had to have a receiver. So early on, you know, vacuum tubes.

Speaker 2 worked with radio receivers, connected to loudspeakers, and that's how you could hear things.

Speaker 2 Later on, transistor radios came along and that's what really changed the game because that's when it was like

Speaker 2 TBs for the olds. The young people had these little radios in their pocket and then they started, you know, putting radios in cars.

Speaker 2 But it's funny to think about a time when like, yeah, TV is outdated and we want AM radio in our pocket.

Speaker 1 And then it came roaring back eventually, thanks to LA Law.

Speaker 1 You mentioned something that I think is worth calling out, too. You mentioned that there's a speaker that converts

Speaker 1 that sound signal back into actual acoustic sound.

Speaker 1 They weren't headphones. They were speakers.
So that meant that early radio was a thing that the family gathered around.

Speaker 1 It was a social activity, listening to all the stuff that was on the radio, which is really important because,

Speaker 1 I mean, that's definitely become fragmented and fractured today as, you know, personal

Speaker 1 media has become like more and more available. But that was like whatever was on the radio right then, probably whatever your parents wanted to listen to, that's what the family was listening to.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for better or worse.

Speaker 2 I think by 1930, there were 40% of U.S. homes had AM receivers.

Speaker 2 Hopefully most of them had speakers. Otherwise, they just sit there and look at it.

Speaker 2 There were more than 600 radio stations in 1930. Obviously, all of them AM, but like we mentioned, FM came along pretty quickly in the 1930s and had a better sound.
But,

Speaker 2 you know, it just didn't take over until 1978. I think by 1940, even 83% of the households in America, I mean, that's really massive coverage,

Speaker 2 had AM radio signals like, you know, being broadcast through their homes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And you said, I mean, like FM was around, but people said, no, we're, we're sticking with the AM.

Speaker 1 One of the big reasons is because the FM receiver needs more power because of the way FM radio is pumped out. And that was a big thing for a long time.

Speaker 1 That was one reason people stuck around with AM, but there's definitely an affection that developed for AM radio over the years.

Speaker 2 Yeah. There's also something called FM drift.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, if you're driving around listening to an FM station, it can kind of go in and out,

Speaker 2 you know, to the left or to the right. I guess you could kind of turn your dial a little bit and try and dial it back in, but that was an issue.
And we'll talk about some of the AM radio issues.

Speaker 2 But if you're looking at the dial,

Speaker 2 AM, according to the FCC, AM waves have to be broadcast on frequencies between 535 megahertz and 1.7,

Speaker 2 and FM is from 88 to 108.

Speaker 1 Sounds legit.

Speaker 1 That's right. Let's check out based on the radio call signs I'm familiar with.

Speaker 2 Do you ever listen to AM radio anymore?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I listened to the Bulldogs game on the way home from Yumi's parents' house on Saturday.

Speaker 2 Wasn't that nice?

Speaker 1 The ball game or listening to the radio?

Speaker 2 Listening to a sports broadcast on the radio.

Speaker 1 Yes. I used to do that in college.
I can't remember

Speaker 1 the sportscaster's name, the legendary one for Georgia with the hobnail boot.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Larry Munson.

Speaker 1 Larry Munson.

Speaker 1 Yeah, back in college, I would listen to him and watch the game

Speaker 1 like on mute, and hopefully they would sync up.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was the preferred method. But

Speaker 2 I still love, and it doesn't doesn't happen a lot because, you know, I watch the game on TV generally, but if I'm traveling like you were just talking about, or I remember when I built,

Speaker 2 we couldn't afford to build like, to get a fence company to build our fence 20 years ago. And so I built our privacy fence like picket by picket over the course of two months.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 And a lot of that was spent with me listening to Georgia Bulldogs on the radio.

Speaker 2 I mean, it was pre-podcast even. And it's just, it's still, to me, a great way to catch a game.

Speaker 1 For sure.

Speaker 2 Not even nostalgia-wise, like it really is a great way to listen to catch a game.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, the play calling is like you have to be really good. There's no assist there.
You're telling everybody what's going on, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I say we take a break because we're getting nostalgic already. What do you think?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm going to park that and we'll stick to the facts.

Speaker 1 Okay, baby. We're taking a break, everybody.
We'll be right back.

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Speaker 1 So, if we're talking

Speaker 2 the golden age of radio as a whole, that was about a three to four

Speaker 2 decade period from the 20s through the mid-50s or so. That was when AM radio starred.

Speaker 2 We'll also talk a little bit later about sort of the 70s period when AM radio music was like, you know, the mellow gold stuff was a big deal. But that,

Speaker 2 you know, that first decade of radio ushered in,

Speaker 2 you know, it was blowing people's minds. Like they had never heard sometimes any of this stuff

Speaker 2 or certainly had not heard any of this stuff live like a live broadcast and speaking of sports in in 1921 over about 125,000 square miles from where it broadcasts out of Jersey City, New Jersey, people listened to the heavyweight boxing championship and I can't imagine what that was like to hear a sports broadcast like that for the first time as it happened.

Speaker 1 Hopefully the commentator knew what he was doing too. And when there weren't like long pauses like the boom goes the dynamite guy.

Speaker 2 One of them's punching another one repeatedly.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention Carpentier just went down. That's right.

Speaker 1 One of the other things that we'll see about AM Radio 2, Chuck, is that

Speaker 1 it was long considered a public good.

Speaker 1 So that the government had like a little more willingness to be like, no, you can say this and you can't say that and you have to do this.

Speaker 1 But one of the reasons why is because it was very quickly used to kind of spread public information. Like presidents took to it very quickly.

Speaker 1 Remember, I said that KDKA announced the results of the Harding election. Within just a couple of years, Warren Harding was using it to talk to America.

Speaker 1 And FDR was probably the most famous president who used the radio to talk to America. He had a series of

Speaker 1 like just informal speeches, basically called fireside chats that really made a lot of the country just fall in love with him.

Speaker 1 But it was very, it was, it was very clear early on just how much influence it could have on people's political opinions.

Speaker 2 Well, and it was a lot of people the first time they ever heard the president's voice speak.

Speaker 1 You know what he sounds like?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it wasn't around during Lincoln because everyone would have been like, really?

Speaker 2 But yeah, you know, there was definitely public good, and we'll dive into that a little bit.

Speaker 2 along with tons of entertainment. And, you know, it was basically like 15-minute chunks for a long, long time of

Speaker 2 all over the map variety style stuff, kind of reminiscent of vaudeville.

Speaker 2 Like there were a host of shows, but the DJ thing didn't come along till much later. So you had like advice shows and news shows and obviously comedy stuff, game shows,

Speaker 2 you know, radio dramas were a big, big deal.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's where soap operas came from, too. They were broadcast almost exclusively with women as their target audience.

Speaker 1 And at the time, this is just post-World War I,

Speaker 1 where women had helped the war effort in the factories. The men came back and they were like, get back in the house.
And women were stuck in the house all day.

Speaker 1 So these radio dramas were broadcast to them, and they were almost exclusively sponsored by cleaning product companies. That's right.
So they became known as soap operas.

Speaker 1 And one of the longer-lasting soap operas of all time actually made the jump successfully from radio to TV. That was Guiding Light.
No way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it started in 1937 on the radio and was finally canceled in 2009 on TV. It was 72 years of guiding light.
Every weekday, too.

Speaker 2 I had a very, very brief foray into soap operas.

Speaker 2 I guess it was in college or something. I don't know why, but I got hooked for, I mean, not too long, but I was hooked.
I was like, these things are stupid. I was like, yeah, but what happens?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the same thing happened to me again in college, too.

Speaker 1 And I cannot remember the name of it, but it was just off the chain.

Speaker 1 I know there was a main character named marlena and she was possessed by the devil at one point someone will remember and like yeah certainly that's like a very famous plot line um that was going on when i was hooked on him and then i got hooked on him enough that i would switch channels during ads and what see what was on other soap operas and on general hospital once there was a scene where this couple was in bed and they did such a poor job of editing that they left in the director saying cut and the two actors roll out of bed

Speaker 1 I'll never forget it. It was one of the greatest things I've ever seen on television.

Speaker 2 They're like the sheets are pulled up, you know, to their bare skin, and then they roll out of bed and they have on like blue jeans.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't remember what they were wearing or anything, but yeah, I'm sure it was just like that.

Speaker 2 That's really funny.

Speaker 2 Oh, God, to have that time again where you could just like maybe sort of get hooked on a soap for no reason.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 Religion was also a big deal early on AM radio.

Speaker 2 All of a sudden, evangelists could broadcast far and wide from what they called the electric pulpit.

Speaker 2 And they became like, you know, big-time personalities and stars during the Depression era.

Speaker 1 Yeah, one of the first people that the question of freedom of speech was raised around was Father Charles Coughlin, who was a bigoted hate speech

Speaker 1 Catholic priest who really kind of pushed the envelope, you could say. I think he said the Nazis didn't go far enough during Kristallnacht.
Like he was that kind of guy.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 So he definitely rose to prominence during this time.

Speaker 1 On the lighter side, one of the most popular long-running shows was the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy show,

Speaker 1 which was a ventriloquist act on the radio.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, the jokes still work, but it's definitely a visual medium.

Speaker 1 For sure. But he managed to make it like super radio friendly, and it was super popular.

Speaker 1 You said that the golden age of radio ended around the 1962 and we should say this was

Speaker 1 it this depends on your perspective because a lot of people say nope golden age of radio went all the way to the 70s.

Speaker 1 This would be like the first wave of golden age radio where it wasn't music, it was like dramas, scripted comedies,

Speaker 1 like sports, all this stuff. Like what TV is today.

Speaker 1 This was the first iteration of radio and it was all AM radio.

Speaker 1 But there was a year, 1962, when two shows were canceled, two long-running shows, and people point to their cancellation as essentially the end of that era.

Speaker 2 What were those?

Speaker 1 Yours truly, Johnny Dollar.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 It was about an insurance fraud investigator.

Speaker 2 Sounds like true crime.

Speaker 1 It is. It sounds interesting.
Each episode was a flashback of him going over the line items for his expense report for that particular case.

Speaker 1 And then each line item would kind of bring up like a new scene. Pretty interesting.

Speaker 2 The radio network guy is like, Can he kill his lover?

Speaker 1 And then suspense was another one. And it sounds like it was a little bit of a predecessor to like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and maybe the Twilight Zone here or there.

Speaker 1 And both of those were really well-produced shows, and they got canceled the same year. And everybody said, That's it.
That's the end of the golden age. And they spat on the floor.

Speaker 2 Well, you mentioned the public good starting in the 1920s to jump back a little bit.

Speaker 2 You know, like you mentioned president speaking, inaugural addresses were being broadcast, and the government really realized, hey, like we have a

Speaker 2 sort of a public service we need to enact when we're sharing information because we got to get the word out about stuff sometimes. And this is the way to do it.

Speaker 2 So the USDA radio service began talking to farmers. In 1926, the U.S.

Speaker 2 Bureau of Home Economics had a chat program they launched, I believe in the same year, where they could talk about like, you know, any emergencies happening in regards to kids, like health and safety stuff, like a new disease going around that your kid maybe should get vaccinated against, stuff like that.

Speaker 1 Newfangled polio.

Speaker 2 But by the end of the 1920s, they were like, hey, there's a limited bandwidth and people are getting political messages out and we need to make sure that everyone in America is is getting sort of equal access to these messages.

Speaker 2 So, you know, no particular message gets out more than any other. And that's where the fairness doctrine came about, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, we talked about that in the presidential debates episode, but I think it deserves its own episode. It's so controversial.

Speaker 1 But basically, the fairness doctrine is what I was talking about earlier when I said the government wasn't shy about getting involved in regulating radio. because of what you just said.

Speaker 1 Like you can't just use radio, or at the time, you couldn't to just put out one, say, specific political viewpoint.

Speaker 1 So, the fairness doctrine said you have to have equal time when you're talking about political matters. You have to give equal time to both opposing viewpoints.

Speaker 1 It also said some other stuff, too, that I thought was pretty cool.

Speaker 1 It made sure that commercial concerns did not eclipse social ones, so you couldn't screw over the public for your own bottom line, which is just refreshing these days.

Speaker 1 The radio served the public good,

Speaker 1 and that you have like a kind of public programming that's essentially like, in addition to all of the, you know, ventriloquist acts and soap operas and all that, you have like stuff that makes people, helps people be more informed citizens.

Speaker 1 Like that was what the government was getting involved in radio for.

Speaker 2 Yeah, maybe perhaps. If we would have been around at the time, it might have been stuff you should know.

Speaker 1 Oh, I could see that.

Speaker 1 I could see that. Yeah, we would have been great for AM radio, I think.
As a matter of fact, we should probably just stop podcasting and start broadcasting on AM radio.

Speaker 2 We've got to get the message of jackhammers out far and wide. That's right.

Speaker 2 You know, the fairness doctrine went away.

Speaker 2 And, you know, like you said, we should do a whole episode on that.

Speaker 2 But one of the things that happened was, you know, the FM becoming a dominant force and just way more choices and way more bandwidth for radio. So they didn't need it anymore.
Right.

Speaker 2 So then, you know, that's where, that's really literally where the echo chamber of politics started, where you could turn into just your person who only talked about things that you agreed with. Yep.

Speaker 2 And that's it.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Not coincidentally, 1980s is when talk radio like really started to become a thing with like people like Rush Limbaugh.

Speaker 1 That did not exist before that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And, you know, FM, when that came around,

Speaker 2 it did create that echo chamber, but it was mostly like a wealthy, educated crowd that could afford FM receivers. They were more expensive, like you were talking about.

Speaker 2 I think there were more than 2,000 AM stations on the air in the 1950s. Some of them would broadcast on both.
I definitely remember, you know, both AM, FM stations.

Speaker 2 But FM did have some

Speaker 2 and still do have some sort of things that weren't in their favor. Like

Speaker 2 if you were inside a building, sometimes the AM signal could get blocked and get a little more difficult to get.

Speaker 2 A lot of AM stations, I think most of them, in fact, have to either reduce their power or just go off the air at night.

Speaker 2 So, you know, back in the day, and maybe still you hear those sign-offs at the end of the night, which is kind of fun, where they play like the Star Spangled Banner or something, and it just goes dead.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like in Poltergeist.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 2 But another cool thing about AM is...

Speaker 2 If you've ever been like driving around out west or something, and you know, probably not these days, but back when I was taking my big out west trips, when all I had was like a cassette player and the radio, um, once the sun went down, sometimes you could get an AM station on your radio that's like four states away

Speaker 2 because of those airwaves bouncing off the ionosphere and saying, we'll take it from here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, during the day, the ionosphere is super ionized. That's where it gets its name.
Uh, at night, it's less ionized.

Speaker 1 So, there's um, it for some reason, AM radio signals can bounce off of it easier and, like you said, end up down in Mexico, for goodness sake.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Which is pretty cool. For that reason, though, that's why they stopped transmitting at night.
A lot of them, like I'm with you, I don't know if they still do or not. Seems like the kind of thing that

Speaker 1 maybe was licked, but it also seems so fundamental that maybe it's still a problem. But there were some

Speaker 1 stations that were designated clear channels.

Speaker 1 They were allowed to broadcast 24 hours a day, and they were spread out both physically around the the country and in Canada and Mexico, and also spread out on the dial so that their signals wouldn't interfere with one another when they traveled really far distances.

Speaker 1 And one of the reasons why

Speaker 1 they had AM stations designated to operate 24 hours a day is, again, part of that public good,

Speaker 1 which was a service that AM radio offers that is kind of overlooked a lot here in the United States, which is it is like a national security alert system, essentially.

Speaker 1 We'll talk a little more about that later, but that's why the clear channel thing is a thing.

Speaker 2 Right. And to be clear, I didn't even mean that.
Not to be confused with former iHeartMedia company, Clear Channel.

Speaker 1 No, but I bet that's where they get their name.

Speaker 2 Oh, man. That'd be a real coincidence, huh?

Speaker 1 Wasn't that the name of the city that was built on rock and roll?

Speaker 2 Clear channel?

Speaker 1 Yeah, Clear Channel City.

Speaker 2 I'm not falling for anything you ever say anymore, so don't even try.

Speaker 2 Should we take another break? Yes. All right, we'll take another break, talk about the rise of TV and, you know, music on AM Radio right after this.

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Speaker 1 Okay, Chuck, we're back. And we talked about how the golden age of radio ended, but that was what the oldsters considered the golden age.

Speaker 1 If you were young and hip, the golden age was still yet to come.

Speaker 2 That's right. I mentioned Top 40 was invented on AM, and it was specifically developed by a station owner named Todd Storrs in Nebraska at the beginning of the 1950s, I guess.

Speaker 2 And he said, hey, you know, radio has all these great shows. I love those puppets.
That ventriloquism is great.

Speaker 2 But we've got rock and roll now and RB and soon, you know, pop music coming our way. Pop and

Speaker 2 pop music.

Speaker 2 Who was that? Is that Valco?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 I shouldn't have opened my big mouth because I don't remember. I even have that on my phone.
So maybe I'll look sometime soon.

Speaker 2 But he said, hey, let's start playing this music. Let's create a,

Speaker 2 what Julia calls a jukebox driven media. And, you know, play people stuff.
You know, DJs became a thing. That's when they became personalities.

Speaker 2 Each station started having, you know, these sort of wacky, that's where those first, you know, like the Wolfman and all those sort of wacky early DJs came from that were like real personalities people would tune into just to listen to their specific show.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like each station had to have their own personality. Like the Big Bopper, one of the most famous of all time.
Yeah. He was DJing for a station in Beaumont, Texas.

Speaker 1 Like it had like if you had a station, you had to have a personality.

Speaker 1 And some of them just happened to be so popular that they became international icons essentially yeah it's amazing yeah like the wolf man went on to own a um furniture store in north georgia called gallery furniture if you wanted a water bed you would go ask for the wolf man

Speaker 1 boy that's a niche joke uh should we even explain it or not nah okay good I think if you go onto YouTube and you look up Gallery Furniture and the Wolfman, there'll be something on there.

Speaker 2 Oh, sure. But that wasn't Wolfman Jack.

Speaker 1 Are you sure?

Speaker 2 You didn't really think it was the same guy, did you?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 See, I don't know what to believe anymore.

Speaker 1 I'm not trying. You know, I just want to come clean about this.
Okay. I've never tried to fool you.
That was a thing that just kind of evolved.

Speaker 1 I've just been making dry, random jokes all this time, but it's never been to fool you.

Speaker 1 You took that and ran with it. I've never done it directly to fool you.

Speaker 2 This is not what you said during our therapy session last week.

Speaker 1 Well, Dr. Krantz said that.

Speaker 2 Dr. Katz, that's who we should have gotten.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Dr. Katz said that I needed to make more stuff up.

Speaker 2 So that's what's going on. We're not therapy together, by the way, everybody.
That was a joke.

Speaker 2 But if we did, we'd get the guy who therapied Metallica right.

Speaker 1 Oh, I forgot that they were in therapy together. Yeah.
I guess it worked.

Speaker 2 I'm not knocking it at all. I mean, we haven't had to do it, but I think that's a great idea for any kind of partnership, you know?

Speaker 1 Agreed.

Speaker 1 Okay, good. Was that the therapist that talked Metallica out of their emo phase? Right.
Because hats off to that, that therapist.

Speaker 2 Maybe.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, we were talking about what was going on with this transition to music. Yeah.

Speaker 1 One of the reasons why AM radio transitioned to music and away from things like soap operas and all that stuff was because those things ended up on TV. Yeah.
The older people followed those.

Speaker 1 Remember, they're like radio is the pits now because the golden era is over. And then they turn on their TVs and they're like, oh, the golden era is over here now.

Speaker 1 Let's just keep going and watching now instead of just listening. And that left the kids to fill this vacuum, which was AM radio.
And like you said, the top 40 format started there.

Speaker 1 The like big internationally known DJs started there. And it just kind of took off little by little,

Speaker 1 but really picked up steam when a few things kind of came together. And one of them you already mentioned, which was transistor radios.

Speaker 1 So now you didn't just have to sit at home with the oldsters to listen to your favorite hits. And then also AM radio started to show up in cars essentially as

Speaker 1 not even an option after a while. Like you got the AM radio whether you wanted it or not.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think more than half of American cars had AM radio receivers factory installed by the 1950s. And that was a huge, huge deal, obviously.

Speaker 2 And, you know, it was the dominant paradigm for music until 78. And there was that period from

Speaker 2 kind of the early 70s to the early 80s, a little under 10 years where that

Speaker 2 sort of yacht rocky AM mellow gold stuff really, really took over.

Speaker 2 You had to kind of watch what you put on the radio because FM was playing,

Speaker 2 you know, they were playing the AOR, album-oriented rock, stuff that had a little more machismo and testosterone-fueled, like, you know, rock bands.

Speaker 1 Big hair.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. Big hair, long hair.

Speaker 2 Not a mustache in sight, unless it was part of a beard, probably. But it wasn't the case on AM with Yacht Rock.
They were mustachioed dudes generally,

Speaker 2 sensitive guys. The songs weren't about usually like conquering women.
Most of them were about getting dumped by women. A lot of sad sack music coming out

Speaker 2 on AM radio in the 1970s. I still listen to a lot of that stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and a lot of the constraints, I found this to be true throughout my life.

Speaker 1 That when you put constraints on something, it automatically fuels creativity because it doesn't mean you don't still want to get across

Speaker 1 subversive ideas. You just have to cloak them within the confines of these constraints, and it makes you more creative than just saying the idea out loud, right? Which is why

Speaker 1 album rockers are typically dumb compared to yacht rockers as far as the artists go.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So like if you're a songwriter and you're like,

Speaker 2 I'm a yacht rocker. I'm not going to sing about,

Speaker 2 you know, teenage girls. I'm going to sing about things I like like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain.

Speaker 1 Man, that guy. I think he's one of the most reprehensible songwriters of all time.

Speaker 1 I hate that song. Not just...
That song, the piña colada song. Have you ever heard the song him? His song him?

Speaker 2 I don't know. I don't know it by name.
Would I recognize it, you think?

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 It's considered yacht rock, but it's a really despicable song about this guy whose girlfriend is sleeping around on him, so he's got to teach her a lesson to basically bring her back to heal and how he's not heartbroken or hurt.

Speaker 1 He's just mad that this guy, he says, like, nobody should get it for free. Yeah.
That's what he's upset about.

Speaker 1 It's a nutso song. Go listen to it.
But yeah, Rupert Holmes, I don't think he like embodies

Speaker 1 the worst part of men in the 70s, I think.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I really don't like that song at all, but I do love most Yacht Rock.

Speaker 2 And I know we've probably talked about it briefly at some point as a recommendation, but the Yacht Rock documentary that came out last year is really, really good.

Speaker 2 And we do definitely want to say that that. term was not coined until the 2000s when a comedy web series spoofing the genre made up the name Yacht Rock.

Speaker 2 Before that, I think like, you know, Time Life put out those the A.M. Gold series of CDs.
I think A.M. Gold or Mellow or Easy Listening.

Speaker 2 That sort of is what we called it, right? Isn't that what you called it?

Speaker 1 Easy listening? Yeah, that's what I was first introduced to it as.

Speaker 2 Our mutual friend Allison, who we used to work with,

Speaker 2 my friend Eddie's wife calls it car sick music because it just brings back days of like riding backwards in a station wagon and being car sick and that stuff just droning on and and on.

Speaker 1 That's a perfect name for it. Yeah, it's good.
But when you know, when you're familiar with the idea that they had to kind of cloak subversive ideas in like non-obvious terms,

Speaker 1 and you go back and listen to some of this mellow gold stuff, it's like, whoa, they were really, it's a little crazier than you thought. Like, for example,

Speaker 1 Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes is code for Let's Smoke Some DMT.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That was the only one I turned up.

Speaker 2 I mean, what do you think Ride Like the Wind is about? Come on.

Speaker 1 Right. That's about DMT as well.

Speaker 2 Oh, wow. All right.

Speaker 1 But he's talking about what it's like to be on DMT, not just inviting you to smoke DMT.

Speaker 2 Well, you know what's funny? I think Christopher Cross wrote Ride Like the Wind when he was on LSD.

Speaker 1 I believe that.

Speaker 2 I think he said that in that Yacht Rock doc.

Speaker 1 Did he really? Yeah. It's a great song.

Speaker 2 It's a great song. It has one of the like most

Speaker 2 one of the greatest guitar solos because he's a killer guitar player, but it's so buried in the mix.

Speaker 2 And there's all kinds of YouTube videos now where they're like, yeah, let's bring it up in the mix and talk about this solo and like how amazing it is.

Speaker 1 That's kind of like those videos of Van Halen with nothing but David Lee Ross vocals. Have you heard those?

Speaker 2 Yeah, those are those are very funny.

Speaker 2 And to be clear, it's a rip and solo for Yat Rock.

Speaker 2 It's not like the solo for My Sharona or anything, but it's still good.

Speaker 1 I don't, yeah, neither of the solos stand out to me. I can't bring either one to mind.

Speaker 2 Oh, man, the My Shirona solo is a top five guitar solo of all time for me.

Speaker 2 And you got to listen to the radio version cut out a full minute. It's like 90 plus seconds, the full version.
Wow. And they cut out two-thirds of it for the radio version.

Speaker 2 So you got to listen to the real full version. It's like, it's way better than it should be for that song.

Speaker 1 That would be the album edit, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I guess so. It's Killer.

Speaker 1 Or the 12-inch version?

Speaker 2 I don't know about the 12-inch. Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, regardless, go listen to some mellow gold. It'll make you happy.

Speaker 2 For sure. But where are we these days with AM Radio?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 there's this battle over it. Just like absolutely every single other thing that people, more than one person talks about in America, AM Radio has actually managed to become politicized.

Speaker 1 A bunch of car makers, from what I can tell, led by Tesla, I think they were the first ones to announce this back in 2020, that they were going to discontinue AM radios in their cars.

Speaker 2 Boo.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And now I think now you can kind of imagine why it's a politicized idea.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the ostensible reason is that the AM stereo is interfered with by the EV.

Speaker 1 Long story short,

Speaker 1 AM waves are much more susceptible to noise because of electrical interference. Well, an electrical vehicle is lousy with electrical interference.

Speaker 1 And so the whole car industry is like, we're going to have to spend a bunch of money just to keep this AM radio in there.

Speaker 1 And the U.S. government is pretty adamant that AM radio needs to stick around.
Again, not just for the public good thing.

Speaker 1 the nostalgia factor, but also because if you are going to get an alert that, you know, the Cubans have invaded, invaded, you're going to probably get that alert over an AM radio station because that's what the whole system is set up to do.

Speaker 1 Not because it's antiquated, but because AM radio does all sorts of things. Those,

Speaker 1 the waves can travel very far, so it reaches a lot of people. Rural people listen to AM radio still today, like it's just part of rural life.

Speaker 1 So it's everybody is reached by AM one way or another. And I didn't know this, but you can make a type of of radio, a crystal receiver radio that

Speaker 1 can

Speaker 1 play AM radio broadcasts without any battery or power source.

Speaker 1 The crystal manages to take the energy in the radio carrier wave and

Speaker 1 use that alone to basically reproduce the sound. So for all those reasons, AM

Speaker 1 radio really makes a lot of sense to put all of your eggs in that basket as far as getting like emergency broadcasts out. So the government said, long story short,

Speaker 1 you need to keep AM radios in cars, and they're trying to figure out how to get that mandated.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 it's called the emergency alert system now. It used to be the EBS, the emergency broadcast system.

Speaker 2 And if you're thinking, like, man, I get my Amber Alerts, like, all that stuff comes through my phone now.

Speaker 2 And this isn't like Gen X are saying, like, you know, you're too relying on your phones, but like, if you expect that phone to always work in all cases for the rest of time,

Speaker 2 you're sorely mistaken because if that system is taken out, then you're going to rely on something like AM radio to get important information out. You know, I mean, that's why it's still there.

Speaker 2 That's why they're, you know, going to the car makers and saying like, hey, like

Speaker 2 you may not listen to it. You may think it's old-fashioned.
But there are still 4,000 AM stations and 80 million listeners a month that some of them rely on this stuff to get information.

Speaker 1 And you can't just say like well It seems old-timey So we don't and it interferes with our stuff So we don't want it anymore Yeah, I do kind of have the feeling that there is like a certain scorn toward the nostalgic factor of AM radio Yeah and that that's part of maybe what's driving it which really ticks me off because who are car makers to decide whether AM radio sticks around or not?

Speaker 1 Congress says no, we're we actually have come up with a law called the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act that basically says if you sell a car in in the United States, it has to have AM radio as a feature, not even an option.

Speaker 1 And a lot of car makers are like, sure, fine, we're on board with that. Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar, Kia, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Solantis, Subaru, Toyota, all said we're keeping AM radio.

Speaker 1 Ford had said they weren't. And they said, okay, we didn't realize AM radio was so popular.
We're going to keep it too.

Speaker 1 So I guess if you want to show your support for AM radio, everybody should just go out and buy a Jaguar.

Speaker 2 Well, Tesla, Rivian, Polestar, BMW, Volkswagen, and Volvo dispensed with AM Radio and some of their new car models. I don't think completely across the board for each of those manufacturers.

Speaker 2 But that

Speaker 2 every AM for Every Vehicle Act failed in 2024, unfortunately.

Speaker 2 It was reintroduced this year in 2025, just I think recently in September, and has a lot of support like on

Speaker 2 both sides of the aisle. Um, so, you know, if the 119th Congress ever decides to do anything at all, perhaps that will be reconsidered.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's got legs like an intern carrying coffee back to the office is how they put it in Washington.

Speaker 2 That's good. That was the original ZZ top line, but it was a little baggy.

Speaker 1 Don't forget the ZZ Top Eliminator video trilogy or feminist.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 1 You got anything else, man?

Speaker 2 No, I think that was good.

Speaker 2 Support AM Radio. It's not a relic.
It's still important.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well put, dude.

Speaker 1 If you want to know more about AM Radio, start listening to AM Radio. And since I started to sign off this episode like it was one of the OG episodes, that means it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 2 This is from Cara. Just kind of a thank you.
Cara started listening in 2008 when she was sick at home from high school with pneumonia.

Speaker 2 Yours was the very first podcast I ever listened to back when hardly anyone knew what a podcast was.

Speaker 2 I've been an avid listener to a lot of shows since, but you have been a constant in my life through the end of high school, college, grad school, and beyond.

Speaker 2 Your voices have always been a sense of comfort and familiarity when things in life got really difficult. I went to see you live in Boston three times.
Nice.

Speaker 2 Always on my own, and each show felt like a small celebration for myself of something that had carried me through so many years.

Speaker 1 I wonder if that's the person who had the laugh that we called out in Boston every time.

Speaker 2 Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 2 Maybe.

Speaker 2 I think Carol would have mentioned that probably. Probably.

Speaker 2 One rule with Stuff You Should Know for me, though, is I could not listen to a new episode until I could really pay attention.

Speaker 2 Like other shows were background podcasts for me, but not yours. The only downside was that I fell further and further behind

Speaker 2 unless I had the focus to listen.

Speaker 2 This year I've had to do a lot of driving though and things have settled down some.

Speaker 2 So I made it a goal to catch up in time to listen to the the 2025 halloween special on halloween on me uh also told myself if i did it i could finally write in and tell you how much i appreciate the information banter humor and uh movie wrecks and stuff like that so uh this is a day before halloween uh email coming from kara or kara k-a-r-a that's awesome thanks kara kara you're obviously very goal motivated and i appreciate that um and thank you for listening to all of our shows for so long That means a lot that we have friends who are travelers like you, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, we've said it before. If there weren't the Karakaras,

Speaker 2 then we would not exist as a show anymore. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 That sounds like a t-shirt, if you ask me.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and Karakara sounds like, I don't know, like a food.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like a place of patata.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 If you want to get in touch with us like Karakara did and let us know what we meant to you, we love those emails.

Speaker 1 You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

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