Confessions of a Transistor Mister

Or, why WIWS Radio is my latest obsession

In retrospect, the best gift I got for Christmas 1977 wasn’t the Ozzie Newsome Bama jersey or the Oscar Goldman action figure (“With Exploding Briefcase!”) that were waiting under the tree for me, but the introduction to my Aunt’s collection of old 45s.

When I say “old,” these were records that had only been released a decade or two earlier; but to an 11 year-old kid with only the vaguest grasp of music history, they seemed like relics of a blurry and distant past, in the same way that the Detroit Tigers’ 1968 World Series championship seemed more or less contiguous to the D-Day landing.

Up until that Christmas, my relationship with popular music had been fairly abstract. Top 40 radio was something that I primarily listened to in my parents’ cars — I heard way more of it whenever I was visiting my mom in LA, since there was a lot more driving to be done there than in Ann Arbor — and contemporary pop hits occasionally crept into the sports broadcasts and talk shows I listened to at night on Detroit’s WJR, but that was about the extent of my engagement with it. I had friends who were already buying records, hanging posters of their favorite bands on their bedroom walls, and even occasionally going to concerts, but I wasn’t quite there yet. Sports, GI Joe, comic books, BB guns — that stuff was all really more my speed.

But when Aunt Geri Michele pulled out her racks of old singles that Christmas, everything changed for me. Most of these little vinyl discs were records she’d bought between 1957 and 1969 — for her, ages 9 through 21 — and almost every one of them blew my mind in one way or another.

Some, like The Zombies’ “She’s Not There,” The Beach Boys’ “Fun Fun Fun” and The Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” sounded familiar to me, though I couldn’t place where I’d heard them before. Others, like Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue,” Jody Reynolds’ “Endless Sleep” and Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” seemed to come from another world entirely… but it was a world I desperately wanted to be part of. In fact, all of Geri Michele’s records (even the novelty ones like “The Monster Mash,” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett) seemed to come from a world much cooler than the one I was currently inhabiting. They made me want to know more about the music and the people who made it, igniting a quest that has never really slackened since.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that Christmas lately, thanks to my current obsession with WIWS Radio. Part internet radio station, part conceptual art project, and all record-nerd heaven, WIWS has been one of the few things to consistently bring me joy during this difficult and exhausting year. Their mission is best summed up via this quote from their website:

“Imagine it’s 1962, give or take, in Beckley, WV, and you turn on the radio… Join us today in yesterday, bringing back the days of exciting, dynamic, and colorful radio, complete with AM radio fidelity, and static! Relive hearing some of the best music ever made in a way that listeners first experienced it… with wide-open playlists spanning many styles of music with the bonus addition of vintage jingles and commercials.”

The phrase “wide-open playlists” is the key here. I’ve heard pretty much all of Geri Michele’s favorites on WIWS at one time or another, but this is in no way the sort of oldies station that recycles the same handful of Motown hits and plays “Rockin’ Robin” and “Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron” every three hours. These folks dig deep, spinning severything from early rock n’ roll and doo-wop to honky-tonk country and countrypolitan, Jump blues and greasy R&B to sharp-suited soul, garage rock and pop-psych to exotica-type instrumentals and EZ listening schmaltz.

Sometimes they play “the hits,” sometimes they play songs that barely scraped the charts, and sometimes a choice B-side will pop up. (Bob Dylan’s “Queen Jane Approximately,” anyone?) And while their news breaks are all filled with 1962 news, the music jumps the years fairly seamlessly while still imparting the experience of listening “back in the day”.

The vintage commercials they run (and new commercials that have been created to sound vintage) are part of the fun, as well. Not only do these lend a further sense of AM radio verisimilitude to the proceedings, but they’re often unintentionally hilarious, whether it’s a cigarette brand touting “healthful” qualities or a Detroit auto maker flogging new products that will catch a woman’s eye but can only truly be appreciated by a man. Back in my iPod days, I used to spike my 50s and 60s playlists with various MP3s of vintage ads I’d found on the internet and from other sources, but they didn’t seamlessly flow in and out of the mix the way these old commercial spots seem to on WIWS.

But the thing that really makes WIWS work — and makes the music that hosts Ray Ford and Dottie Greco play such a revelation — is the station’s sound. I don’t know how they pull it off, but somehow Ray and Dottie have managed to convincingly recreate the mono juju of vintage AM radio; whether you’re listening on your phone, through your computer or via a Bluetooth connection, WIWS broadcasts have the same alluring, crackling electricity that I remember bursting from my mom’s car radio. And if you have the WIWS app for Android or iPhone, your listening experience will be visually enhanced by gorgeous images of classic transistor radios, like so:

(Yeah, that’s right — “Circles” by The Fleur de Lys. When’s the last time you heard that scorcher sandwiched between “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Baby Love” on your local lowest-common-denominator golden oldies station?)

While WIWS’s throwback audio vibe is enchanting in and of itself, what’s really magical about this lo-fi wizardry is the way it actually enhances so many of the songs they play. I’ve heard Petula Clark’s “Downtown” hundreds, maybe even thousands of times since that Christmas of 1977, but it’s never knocked me to my knees the way it did when I heard it on WIWS for the first time. And it wasn’t until I heard James and Bobby Purify’s oft-spun “I’m Your Puppet” on WIWS that I realized just how hard their drummer was grooving on that ostensibly gentle track; I mean, that snare was being popped like it owed somebody money. This is truly the way these songs were meant to be heard…

A few weekends ago, WIWS did a countdown of the Top 20 songs from a certain week in August 1968; and while I had a fairly good idea of which hits would be played, I couldn’t wait to hear what they sounded like in this format, one after the other. As the show went on, my equally WIWS-obsessed pal John San Juan (check out his Hushdrops records on Bandcamp) and I started furiously messaging each other, sharing our sheer joy and wonder at how songs like Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men” and The Doors’ “Hello, I Love You” were sounding so much mightier on WIWS than we were used to hearing them.

But the one that really took the cake for us was the mono single mix of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild”. This is a song that I truly thought I’d never need to hear again; yeah, it’s fine, it rocks, it has the Easy Rider connection, yada yada, but whatever edginess it may have once possessed has been worn smooth by years of classic rock radio overplay. Or so I thought…

The version WIWS played that night definitely got my motor runnin’; it had way more teeth and hair to it than I recalled, and possessed an urgency that was almost frightening. Even with about 30 seconds excised from the instrumental break to ensure AM play, this version kicked some serious ass; in fact, the “surprise” of that edit kind of made the song feel fresher to me. And when the reverb on the drum break collided with that patented WIWS compression, I think both John and I saw God. Two days later, I bought the mono single mix of “Born to Be Wild” off Discogs.

Really, I can’t say enough about WIWS; if you love the music of the 1950s and 60s, if you love the whole sound and aesthetic of classic AM radio, if you love discovering obscure gems and rediscovering old favorites, if you love being musically transported to a world cooler than your own, you really need to check it out. And if you’re already hip to what they’re laying down, please consider supporting them with a monthly Patreon donation.

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