The official cutover is summer of 1983. A summer with the teenage babysitter converted my brother away from being an Alabama fan and me away from a reliance on country music. From the time WZZK came on the air, giving Birmingham an FM blowtorch to beat any of the AM stalwarts, the countrypolitan sounds of the early 1980s were all I had to listen to. But a summer listening to top-40 flipped the switch on my musical preferences just in time for sixth grade. Not even three years in Nashville would send me back to contemporary country, ever again.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not what this post is about.<\/p>\n
Two summers ago, I stumbled across Sirius XM\u2019s \u201cYacht Rock.\u201d It coincided nicely with the acquisition of the new car, and my commute was soon filled with Christopher Cross and Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers and, let\u2019s face it, everything that ever had a Michael McDonald vocal on it. It was a smooth ironic throwback to an era of champagne and teak and Quaaludes and General Hospital<\/em>, an era when Hall & Oates could top the R&B chart and Herb Alpert could be considered Top 40.<\/p>\n And the thing is, that whole era of soft rock was the last era before I arrived. It\u2019s been mentioned before how I missed out on New Wave and the second British Invasion, but I wasn\u2019t really around the first time for every song with a boat in it. But that doesn\u2019t mean I didn\u2019t hear it. On the contrary, it was always there in the background – at the swimming pool, on the tape players of other kids (and adults) at day care, out the windows of passing cars. WZZK might have been the Death Star of Birmingham radio, but it certainly wasn\u2019t the be-all and end-all of music in town, and there were plenty of stations, AM and FM alike, still busy pumping out the adult contemporary sound of the early Reagan years.<\/p>\n And at some level, I retained some of it, because it\u2019s not like I was hearing Toto or Rupert Holmes for the first time two years ago (well, I\u2019d definitely heard the Pina Colada Song before, but not the entire Rupert Holmes Cinematic Universe; you can\u2019t tell me the gag-gift-of-the-Magi story of \u201cEscape\u201d doesn\u2019t begin with the kind of couple who would propose and accept via answering machine message and end with him finding her side piece’s cigarettes). There are in fact a few songs that I would swear had appeared on WZZK as well; the confluence of soft rock and folk influence with the post-Outlaws version of the Nashville sound in the Urban Cowboy era meant you were as likely to hear Boz Scaggs on country radio as Michael Martin Murphey on the pop station.<\/p>\n Maybe part of the appeal is that I\u2019m just in the demo now for \u201cadult contemporary\u201d – hell, this is the music that was around when the \u201cEasy Listening\u201d chart changed its name, and I\u2019ve got the \u201cbeautiful music\/easy listening\u201d channel on SXM fixed on button number 5 in the car. Smooth, soothing, the sort of thing I need to help ease me out of the world a little. But I think part of it is that there\u2019s a section of my life that has been locked away for decades, as if my real world began in 2004 or 1997 or 1983. If I\u2019m going to be 46 years old, I should have something to show for all 46.<\/p>\n Besides, the beach and the boat shoes have become a much bigger desire in recent years. Why not indulge them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The official cutover is summer of 1983. A summer with the teenage babysitter converted my brother away from being an Alabama fan and me away from a reliance on country music. From the time WZZK came on the air, giving Birmingham an FM blowtorch to beat any of the AM stalwarts, the countrypolitan sounds of … <\/p>\n