The 60s are alive and well in my Spotify app.
Erin Carson / CNET
In the past week I have tried to bring something back from the dead. Especially a Nashville radio station called Oldies 96.3, which no longer exists and has not existed for a long time.
It all started last weekend when friends sent me a link to a Data Project by The pudding about generation gaps in music Knowledge. On the website, select your year of birth and listen to excerpts from songs from different decades, ranking them on a scale from “don’t know” to “singing the lyrics”.
Not surprisingly, the songs your generation thinks are ubiquitous may have never heard another generation. A typical example: Apparently Gen Z is not that familiar Hey you! by Outkast. I choose to believe that this is because they are newer to the planet and when you hear it you will actually feel compelled to shake it like a polaroid image.
The Supremes, one of many popular Motown acts that were regularly changed at Oldies 96.3.
Getty Images
I sat on my phone, plowing the 60s quiz, thinking about how much I could skew the data as a random 80s baby using the same frame of reference as the 1967 class. And I thought about why that is.
Maybe it was because nobody told me about Pavement or explained what a radio head was, but in the 90s I almost only heard Oldies 96.3, which mainly played the radio-friendly AM hits from about 1962 to 1972. I thought music would have climaxed with the harmonies of union and the falsetto by Frankie Valli.
It was Motown forever, Amen.
Except not. Now, if I wanted to open up this collection of songs – Love potion number 9 from the seekers, Wild Thing from the Troggs, Carrie Anne at the Hollies – where would I find them? I can adjust to the local oldies station in Louisville, WAKY, but 20 years later the parameters for oldies have changed and that older pieces have been removed from the rotation. And when I call up a playlist of “60s Music” on Spotify, the algorithm doesn’t understand that the Monkees confectionery daydream believer may not even have the same frequency as The Beatles’ Revolution 9. No AM pop jock played an eight-minute cut from page four of an album.
I know this because my father was a disc jockey in the 1960s and 1970s who wore a respectable number of sideburns and put together a huge record collection that followed us in at least five states. He taught me these important lessons in primary school. Over the years, he made sure that I knew practical things about how to write a cover letter, but also that Alex Chilton was only 16 when he started recording The letter with the box tops.
My solution? I got my father on Skype and started a Spotify playlist with every song we could imagine that would have been on Oldies 96.3 and we remembered hearing it.
In short, I was determined to bring Frankenstein this station back to life.
I tapped the memory banks and added wildly. Time of season from the zombies. Summer in the city from Lovin ‘Spoonful. Lightning strikes by Lou Christie.
I’ve even recorded songs that I’m still overexposed to all these years later Mony Mony by Tommy James and the Shondells or Devil with a blue dress on by Mitch Rider and the Detroit Wheels.
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And then there was something else 5 o’clock world from the Vogues. My love. In modern parlance it is a bop. It’s an airtight, two-and-a-half-minute hymn work on stiffeners that leads you to the visions of throwing up all the papers on your desk, grabbing your car keys, and leaving the office in a series of swirls and high kicks.
The Spotify algorithm has even been expanded and offers Elenore from the Turtles and 96 tears by ? and the Mysterians, even if they were still trying to suggest newer artists like Journey and Billy Idol. When I tap Add to playlist, I could see a shape form – over eight hours of music that I heard sitting in the car every morning on the way to school for years.
And that’s a cool little wormhole that only technicians can open, right? It was first a 100-year-old technology, a radio that allowed me to develop an intense affection for a time that I never lived through, and then a streaming service that allowed me to go back to another past era that was already 20 years ago.
This playlist is a triple stack of nostalgia that should logically collapse.
These songs were never mine. I never went in a boat-sized boat with fins on a Friday night. I have never used a jukebox. I never went to socks. Far from it. My high school dances were presented Lean back by Terror Squad and Sugar We’re going down by Fall Out Boy.
However, the oldies were magical, and I was able to recapture this magic with some bandwidth and the right amount of memory.
Now there are some notable differences in my version of Oldies 96.3. For one thing, there are no disc jockeys – no Coyote McCloud on the morning drive. There is no advertising for jewelry stores and freebies. No hourly news to remind you that Bill Clinton is in office and that someone is trying to get dressed – Pooh – another revival of Woodstock.
Admittedly, there I can see the stitches in my revived creation. I remember a day when he and my father were in the CD section of a media play and wisely begged me to buy something that was appropriate for the generation.
Of course, I still use Spotify to deal with the past. I can hear The Talking Heads, Warren Zevon and Joni Mitchell whenever I want, but it’s without the benevolent guidance of a disembodied voice in a studio that is falling somewhere in the release years, and band factoids amid weather reports and station IDs .
My father, the former radio disc jockey himself, has a wonderfully wistful idea that signals from past radio broadcasts somewhere out there may still be bouncing off the air. If you had the right receiver, you might be able to adjust to this perfectly preserved moment – the voices, the music that is long gone but still plays the way it came decades ago from a transistor radio hidden under a bed sheet .
I often wish I had a little magic radio that could receive these signals. I could go back to summer ’68. Or even in summer ’03 to experience the first wave of modern top 40 pop that flooded me just before high school.
Instead, I have a playlist that represents the best possible facsimile and the best attempt to keep that window in the 90s and 60s that I can manage. Maybe I can do something that squeaks through the seemingly inevitable hiding of generations.
Algorithms are not yellow. But thanks to a code and the convenience of having a father like mine, I can pretend that a piece of our two past, not to mention 5 O’Clock World, is still on the air.
