[fumo30]

Originally Posted by vienna

There are always new things to learn, as I am always learning. It helps having grown up in a very musically diverse city (San Francisco) and now currently living a rather musically diverse city (Los Angeles). Then, of course, there were the nights, in my youth, when I would listen to the transistor radio, sneaked under my pillow, and hear all the music stations of all sorts as they pointed me from one great new learning experience to another. Radio nowadays seems to be dying and the diversity has given way to niche programming. It is a shame really; the joy of the "Ah-Ha!" moment of finding something new and intriguing is pretty much gone for the causal listener...

Whenever someone asks about why I have such a broad interest in so many types of music, I point out Top 40 radio, in its day, was just that: the Top 40 selling singles or songs, regardless of genre or artist. Listeners got to sample every thing, from pop to rock to soul to jazz to folk, and so on. Serendipity was a staple on the airwaves. Later, when the FM free-form, album oriented stations began to appear, all rules about programming were tossed and the variety of musical offerings was far greater than today. There was also the influence of the people around me, who were very conversant on many forms of music and very open to new sounds; my first ex is a huge folk and roots music fan and she opened my eyes to artists I hadn't heard before and I returned the favor by introducing her to the deep blues, soul and rock music I favored. You never know where you'll find new inspiration: I first heard James Brown when the Filipino son of a friend of my father came over to our home one day carrying a stack of Motown, Tamla, Stax and other singles. It was an afternoon well spent playing those records over and over again...


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I was also eager AM-radio listener at the time before satellite TV-channels.
I loved Radio Luxembourg and all other distant radio stations playing good music. Part of the fun was the challenge of picking up the weak signals with proper antennae sets and keep them from fading. The sound quality was not always the best, but the benefit was to gaining information for what to buy when in record store.

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