The Big AM Voices

Tony Bender writes an ode to the big AM Radio voices in the Adam's County Record. Here's a short excerpt, which includes a tip of the cap to John Records Landecker...

I always had the voices to fall back on. They spoke to me every night from KSDN Aberdeen, KSJB Jamestown, KOMA in Oklahoma City and WLS Chicago. KSJB was king back then—in my mind at least. Bobby Gaye, Ole Olson and Wee Winnie Winslow spoke to me, assuring me that I was cool—maybe the coolest cat in the whole seventh grade, and so what if Tracy Lahr never did notice me. The voices knew. We rocked together every night.

John Hruby spun stacks of wax on K-Fire (KFYR)! The Doc of Rock machine gunned intros over only the coolest of the cool songs at KSDN, firing that AM signal from nine directional towers, sizzling, directly into my brain. Eric Snow and Norm Anderson and Les Cummings were there, cool, hip and happinin,’ but the Doc was the coolest because you knew he “just had to be on something” and anyone that could talk that fast, even if it made no sense at all, had to be more than all right.

The voices came through car radios at night as we aimlessly drifted on gravel roads. John Records Landecker “boogie checked” my socks off. “And Records truly is my middle name,” he would say, and I believe him still. And he, most definitely, was on something.

You can read the whole piece here.