El Burro Volador

I would like to tell you about the first time I fell in love with a radio station.  It was the spring  of 1996, and I’d heard somehow about this new radio station that was starting up on 99.5 FM.  I don’t know if that frequency had been empty previously, or if some other station was going under, but now it was going to be “ninety-nine five, The Hawk” and play classic rock.  Another thing the ads were very specific about was the time that the new station would begin broadcasting.  I thought it would be cool to hear a radio station being born, so I sat down in front of my radio a couple minutes before the appointed hour and tuned it to 99.5 FM.  At exactly the appointed time, the beginning of Springsteen’s “Born to Run” rumbled out of the radio, and I was smitten.

I listened to The Hawk for the next five years, whenever I was in Colorado.  It became my standard for what a classic rock station should be.  One time when I returned from “back east”, however, my radio station was gone.  It had been replaced by something called “The Mountain”.  Since this new station promised to play classic rock, and to break away from conventional classic rock radio by playing “deeper tracks” and album sides,  focusing on more music and less talk, and by eschewing tired gimmicks like giveaways and shock jocks, I decided to give it a try.  I was soon turned off by how seriously they seemed to take their mission, however.  I remember one station ID spot where they quoted Mahatma Gandhi, and I just said “that’s it!” and turned the dial to 107.9 The Bear.  I mean, c’mon guys, it’s frickin’ radio.

I never really got comfy with The Bear, however, and after a period of drifting and playing nothing but cds I eventually came crawling back to 99.5, the station where I had been happy in simpler times.  Luckily, The Mountain had toned down the self-righteousness a notch, and I’ve been able to listen to them for the last four or five years.  They’ve grown a lot as a station in that time, and have endeared themselves to me by doing some genuinely cool stuff.  Their 3-hour block of no commercials, minimal talk (song IDs and such), maximum music every weekday from nine to noon is how radio should be.  I love the daily “barrel of monkeys” request segment, and the integration of their station with their website is a model for other stations.

Lately, though, it seems like The Mountain has forgotten how to rock.  I mean, they are still playing “classic rock” but a lot of it is mellower, less intense and passionate stuff.  Their station slogan could be: “The Mountain, where you can go to hear the softer side of Billy Joel and The Moody Blues”,  or how about “The Mountain: where Crosby, Stills, and Nash never played with Neil Young”, or maybe “Do you remember Yes or Emerson, Lake, and Palmer?  Have you forgotten about ELO or Gary Wright?  Well, The Mountain didn’t forget about them.  The Mountain plays them all the mother-loving time.”

Well, I say that it’s not hard to come up with songs that aren’t over-exposed on classic rock radio but that still rock hard, and to prove that I’m not just a filthy prevaricator, I’m going to put together a three hour rock-block myself.  I figure that a 4-minute per song average is acceptable, so I’ll post a 45-song playlist here later today or possibly tomorrow.  I invite other classic rock aficionados to chip in via comment, and we’ll see if we can’t get at least a nine-to-five no-repeat, no-talk playlist together.  And remember, “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye is a terrific song, but it does not rock.

P.S. One more slogan: “99.5 The Mountain asks ‘Are you ready to Rock?’  If so, we hear that 103.5 is playing Bob Seger right now.  Or you can stay here and listen to James Taylor.”