Gotta Be Honest

[JSngry]

I really dig listening to music, especially YouTube videos, on my phone speaker. Especially late at night, holding it up to my ear. It's like hearing everything on an old AM transistor radio. Only, I never heard this music on an old AM transistor radio. But that was so much fun, hearing what I did hear, and this is fun too, now, it's like all the music I love is AM Top 40 Smash Hit, a splendidly delirious delusion to have.

[Eric]

Yeah, I have noticed the same thing.  Of course I, like you undoubtedly, once owned a transistor radio.  That was the shit back in the day.  I am sometime pleasantly surprised at how good my phone sounds.  Good music always sounds good though.

[A Lark Ascending]

This was probably a British experience where the technology was still rather weak, but my memory of the transistor radio was of stations fading in and out, frequently to virtual oblivion before reemerging. Even BBC Radio 1, the main pop station (until it shut down at 7.00 p.m.!!!!), would find it difficult to hold a signal in its last hour or two. Radio Luxembourg was even worse. Yet it was off the latter (alongside John Peel's BBC afternoon programmes) that I got my first exposure to music beyond the charts.

I just recall wishing for something better. Which came initially with the arrival of FM on the middle-of-the-road Radio 2 in 1971 - luckily they turned it over to Radio 1 from 10-00 to 12.00 pm for the album rock segment. That was a godsend. 

  

[BillF]

For real ear strain you had to be listening c.1960 in Britain to Willis Conover presenting "The Voice of America Jazz Hour". Well worth putting up with the static ! AFN (American Forces Network) was another ear teaser carrying the sounds that the BBC shunned.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I vividly remember being in my parents' car on a hot summer night and hearing the AM radio pick some distant station out of Ohio or some such faraway place. AM radio could be dramatically affected by the atmosphere and the atmosphere on those hot & humid summer nights allowed for some very long distance transmissions.

I actually won one of these from the Springfield Republican newspaper company. I was a paperboy and they had a contest to see who could sign up the most new customers. I won.

[JSngry]

AM after dark meant all these far off stations coming in and out, sometimes for long periods of good signal. I was down in central east Texas getting stations from Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, Des Moines, Mexico, Nashville, hey, when stations had their own local playlists, that was fun.

But daytime local transistor radio AM meant all your favorites (including baseball games) played loudly and crisply through a small cheaper than cheap speaker that shot fuzzy lasers right into your ears. Geez,,,,Beatlemania in 1964, KEEL AM 730 out of Shreveport, when we were living in Shreveport, snap, crackle and u r damn straight POP.

Remember, those AM stations played 45s, not LPs, and the record labels mastered those 45s to be HOT.

Actually, my phone speaker probably sounds a little better than the transistor radio did in terms of bass response, and there's no static or crackle from atmospheric interference. But it's still tinny enough and barky enough to get me to the same experiential zone, and that zone holds many strong, powerfully stron, reflexive associations of ginormous musical impacts coming out of little bitty boxes.

This has nothing to do with "sound quality" as a metric or, really, as an abstract. It's more a mind game thing, a touching of familiar memoryneves by musics that have never touched those particular nerves before. I can hear a Braxton cut "sounding" like the next thing I'll hear is Gene Elston coming on saying "The Astros Batter Up Show is ON THE AIR!!!" and...wow...perhaps I am getting senile and just folding all my memories into one big brain omlette, who knows, but it's a groovy feeling.

Plus, hey, with MLB AtBat, streaming a radio feed of a ballgame through a phone speaker...talk about same thing only different! You can still go to bed with the ballgame on low volume right next to your ear. Suddenly I have knees again, and I can look forward to waking up the next day and running all damn day long, over to the empty lot, me, Matt, Bill, and whoever else comes along, just pitching, hitting, throwing, and running...my god the running. I'll never be able to run like that again. Never.

Kids, run. run everywhere, run all the time. Get it while you can, because...it's freedom.

[mikeweil]

I don't know how much jazz was in the air in the USA in the 1960s and 70s, but over here it was just a few hours during the week, so missing them always hurt, and listening always was full of surprises and had a magical quality that the ubiquitous availablity of internet files does not have - at least for me. I do listen to foreign stations on the internet radio offered by our TV server, but the musical level is not as high as during the years when real people were selecting the records in realtime. The times they are a-changin', I suppose. Even local classical programs sound to me like they have a few hundred albums on hard discs they keep repeating and rarely add something new.

Edited August 18, 2016 by mikeweil

[JSngry]

Do you ever listen though your phone speaker though? Not on your phone with earbuds, that's going to sound like MP3s on a phone with earbuds. I'm talking old-school treat your phone like a transistor radio and hold it up to your ear or strap it to a belt loop and crank it up or something like that. Take it to the beach and prop it up on a ice chest so it doesn't fall in the sand, and then crank it up. That's the sound I'm talking about!

YouTube is great for this. They got old R&B and such 45s that were made to be played either on a jukebox or on a transistor radio. And big band stuff too, those old 78s sound edgy coming out of a phone speaker or a transistor radio!

For years, I avoided listening to music on my phone unless left with no other immediate choice. But then one day, it dawned on me - this is not a piss-poor audio playback system, this is a freaking 21st Century transistor radio. I'm not doing studious listening here, I'm listening to the goddam RADIO, it's a lifestyle accessory, where once there was Beach Boys, there is now Bela Bartok, if I went to the beach, I could have both and although the musics would be distinguishably different, how they sounded coming out of the speaker would more or less be identical.

I'm not saying abandon real audio systems, no, not that. I'm just saying, take your Bartok to the beach, figuratively if not literally, let that transistor radio vibe happen where you never had it happen before, see what that does to your outlook on life.

Then again, the kids are looking at me and looking at that picture of Kevin's transistor radio and wondering what the fuck is THAT all about, right?

Dig this cat, he's checking out Interstellar Space and Too Much Sugar For A Dime:

 

[Kevin Bresnahan]

1 hour ago, mikeweil said:

Even local classical programs sound to me like they have a few hundred albums on hard discs they keep repeating and rarely add something new.

Back in the days Jim is talking about, all of my music came from 56 HYN in Springfield, MA. They played the top 100 pretty religiously. No variation. You heard the same songs all the time... until they fell out of the top 100.

I remember in the summer of 1970 when our family took our annual trip to Lincoln, ME, we must've heard Alive 'N Kickin's "Tighter, Tighter" about 30 times in 8 hours.

[JSngry]

Yeah, 1970, "consultants" were already entering the mix and playlists were becoming standardized across the nation. Before that, though, the, uh...."influence" of promo men could and did result in regional, and even local hits. those were the fun days, especially after dark when the DJs could pull out the stuff they probably weren't being told to play. We had overnight one guy at a very low-wattage station in Longview, KFRO, would would play flipsides and sub-Hot 100 records at least once an hour. That was great.

 

But see, this is the greatness of the phone - you can get that AM sound and feeling with YOUR music now! You can be on that family trip to Lincoln, ME and be hearing Pepper Adams instead of Alive 'N Kickin' (and really, is that not the worst Tommy James imitation ever?).

[mikeweil]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Do you ever listen though your phone speaker though? Not on your phone with earbuds, that's going to sound like MP3s on a phone with earbuds. I'm talking old-school treat your phone like a transistor radio and hold it up to your ear or strap it to a belt loop and crank it up or something like that. Take it to the beach and prop it up on a ice chest so it doesn't fall in the sand, and then crank it up. That's the sound I'm talking about!

Will give it a try, when the occasion arises - still without a smartphone right now, but might get one sooner or later.

[JSngry]

If it's not a "sound" that brings back good memories, then hey, can't bring back what was never there, right? But I do have a lot of great memories involving that "sound", thought they were all in the past, but now, not!

[Kevin Bresnahan]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

and really, is that not the worst Tommy James imitation ever?

What are you talking about? Isn't that Tommy James?

Funny how James actually wrote "Tighter, Tighter" for Alive 'N Kickin' after he decided not to give them "Crystal Blue Persuasion" because he wanted to record that song himself.

[JSngry]

I think he decided well in that regard.

[medjuck]

1 hour ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

Back in the days Jim is talking about, all of my music came from 56 HYN in Springfield, MA. They played the top 100 pretty religiously. No variation. You heard the same songs all the time... until they fell out of the top 100.

I remember in the summer of 1970 when our family took our annual trip to Lincoln, ME, we must've heard Alive 'N Kickin's "Tighter, Tighter" about 30 times in 8 hours.

Weren't top 40 stations everywhere?  But I remember driving to Florida with my parents in 1958 and coming across a station that kept playing the top 10 over and over.  Fortunately one if the hits was Chuck Berry's School Days.

[Scott Dolan]

Transistor radios did indeed have a sound unto themselves. And I can dig the nostalgia angle. Though oddly enough, I have a very different reaction to them. More along the lines of, "ugh, remember when all radios sounded that way?!" I'm about as happy to re-live those days as I am the days of tooling around in my sister's 1976 Ford Pinto. 

Bad is bad, nostalgia can't fix that...

[sidewinder]

7 hours ago, mikeweil said:

I don't know how much jazz was in the air in the USA in the 1960s and 70s, but over here it was just a few hours during the week, so missing them always hurt, and listening always was full of surprises and had a magical quality that the ubiquitous availablity of internet files does not have - at least for me. I do listen to foreign stations on the internet radio offered by our TV server, but the musical level is not as high as during the years when real people were selecting the records in realtime. The times they are a-changin', I suppose. Even local classical programs sound to me like they have a few hundred albums on hard discs they keep repeating and rarely add something new.

Interesting. Back in the early to mid 80s I made quite a few visits to Southern Germany and my reaction was that the local airwaves were full of jazz every night. If the German stations weren't broadcasting hard bop then you could rely on the Swiss stations. This was around the time that a lot of British musicians such as Ian Carr were doing lots of tours on the continent. The roster of Wolfgang Dauner's 'Mood Records' were also on the airwaves quite a bit too.

The UK of course was rubbish - apart from a couple of outstanding shows per week by the likes of Charles Fox and Peter Clayton.

Edited August 18, 2016 by sidewinder

[mikeweil]

Southern Germany: Südwestrundfunk, which Joachim Ernst Berendt made big, and Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian) - especially the latter played a lot more jazz than the average radio. No wonder you got that impression. The 1980s were the best time span for jazz in Germany, Travelling costs were not as high as today, so you had more people touring than later. Congratulate yourself you were there when it was the best 

[sidewinder]

That's it - It would be the Stuttgart and Munich stations and I've got the feeling that JEB was presenting at least one of those programmes and as I already had his book (in English) I was aware of his background. The thing that stood out was that the music was not at all 'smooth jazz' but usually of the adventurous type such as Jackie Mac and quite a bit of it was of sessions done especially for the stations by the likes of e.g Benny Bailey. Great stuff indeed - that late Cold War era had a lot going for it..

Edited August 18, 2016 by sidewinder

[JSngry]

Put the phone on vibrate and let the Seducey SexJazz play on it!

[JSngry]

 

Please have phone with flipout stand up at any angle suppourt stand, please?

[johnblitweiler]

I can't get nostalgic about all the interference from other nighttime stations when I (northern Indiana) tried to listen to Randy's (Nashville)  at night ca. 1955-58. Even though WLAC was 50,000 watts. 

[JSngry]

Ah, phone speakers don't have static!

[Scott Dolan]

Ah, so they DON'T sound like transistor radios!

And that higher-pitcher squeal and warbling...where has it gone?!

[JSngry]

Ah, but they do sound like transistor radios!

But they don't sound like a transistor radio replicating an AM (or FM, if your daddy was rich and your momma was high) carrier wave.

Back in the day, a few of us young geek kings tried hooking up old record players to old transistor radio speakers, just to play with the wires. In those days, it could be done, basic shit really was basic, ya' know? Between Radio Shack and Heathkits, if a boy (or girl) wanted to play, that boy (or girl) could walk right in and sit right down, daddy let the solder roll on. And sometimes, if you got a little chesty, that boy (or girl) would dig around scrapheaps (personal, private, and/or public) just to see what was out there.

So now, that sound, minus the superfluous interferences, best of both worlds for those who will enjoy it. Endless horrors for those who won't. And a massive whogivesashit for those who have no idea what Heathkit means.