MARCH 2021 | D 7
PRIME
Rock on, 50-somethings: Kids dig your ‘oldies’ too
outside of my dad’s sewing lady’s house and he was inside getting his clothes from the sewing lady. And there was a thunder- storm, and I was in the car terrified, and ‘Take My Breath Away’ was playing.” Carlson thinks the late 20th-century Top 40 hits had a special advantage that hasn’t been nearly as true since music audiences began to splinter in the ’90s. “If you think about the music of the ’80s, it’s really the last monoculture of music where everybody was listening to the same music,” he said. Carlson’s 98.1/1410 morning show stresses the somewhat lighter side of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s songbook. Then he plays the era’s harder-edged rock later on 100.7. “Obviously, the goal of programmers is to allow the listener to hear what they want to hear playing in that car for the five, six, seven, eight minutes that they’re in it,” he said. But if their 2021 kids are riding along, chances are better they’re not whining for Mom and Dad to change the station like Mom and Dad probably did with their own parents. Radio industry research backs that up, Carlson says. So does his experience with his own three daughters, the youngest of whom is in sixth grade and the oldest in college. “I’m telling you, if some of those old (1980s) Tears for Fears songs come on, they know them. And they like them,” he said. “I think that says a lot about the ’80s. It wasn’t just a fad. They were onto some- thing. They found a way to appeal to the masses. And it hasn’t been done since. Frankly, I don’t think it was done before.” Think about one of the hottest pre- COVID-19 rock acts, Queen + Adam Lambert, with the “American Idol” star fronting the late Freddie Mercury’s band- mates in front of roaring crowds of all ages. There’s one thing we’d tell our kids that our parents and grandparents who once dug the big bands would tell us: The 18-year- old in you never really dies. Maybe we can stay young together.
By TODD VON KAMPEN todd.vonkampen@nptelegraph.com Editor’s note: The writer will turn 57 in April. If you’ve seen 1985’s “Back to the Future,” you know how Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), rock guitar in hand, introduced Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” (1958) to his 1955 audience: “This one’s an oldie, but, uh ... well, it’s an oldie where I come from.” Well, 1985 McFly didn’t get a chance to rock out for anyone in 2015 in the 1989 sequel “Back to the Future Part II.” But what song might he have introduced the same way? “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975)? “Don’t Stop Believin’ (1981)? “Beat It” (1983)? Even Huey Lewis’ “The Power of Love” (the first movie’s No. 1 theme song)? Do you newest “seniors” — the ones who turned 55 in recent years — feel old yet? Guess what: Now our songs are the “old- ies.” That’s mind-blowing when you think about the pop “oldies” on the radio in the ’70s and ’80s and how today’s middle-agers usually thought about them. We’re talking pre-Beatles — the ’50s and early ’60s — when rock was an infant and stations featured bubblegum ballads, lush movie themes and copycat orchestras’ cov- ers of them all. Dr. Johnny Fever, played by actual ’60s DJ Howard Hesseman on the 1978-82 come- dy “WKRP in Cincinnati,” captured the re- action with his weary, bored introduction to “the Hallelujah Tabernacle Choir with their beautiful rendition of ‘You’re Having My Baby.’” But when new program manager Andy Travis (Gary Sandy) said WKRP was changing to Top 40 rock — immediately — Fever vengefully dragged the needle across the “elevator music” and cried out: “All right, Cincinnati, it is time for this town to get down!” The sound was night and day. Those “new” hits that Top 40 radio played six days a week and Casey Kasem played on Sundays
Todd von Kampen/The North Platte Telegraph When he announces 1970s, ’80s and ’90s hits on two different Eagle Communications radio stations (KOOQ 98.1 FM/1410 AM and KRNP 100.7 FM), radio personality Scott Carlson, 42, finds himself playing the songs he himself heard growing up in North Platte.
“oldies” on 1410. “All the music we play (now) on 98.1, I lis- tened to as a kid on 97.1,” Carlson said. Because FM stereo became widespread in the ’70s, today’s “oldies” have long sound- ed in the car like they do in living rooms or headphones. Not so with AM, the original “monau- ral” radio broadcasting method — and the place where pre-Beatles music mostly went in the 1970s. “I think the fact that they called it ‘oldies’ summed it up,” Carlson said. “That’s what you heard it described as — ‘old people’ music. ... “And I think part of that is the fault of the radio industry, because if you think about it, the new sounds were on FM stations with that FM quality sound and the oldies stations were on the AM side of the dial.” Carlson thinks the ’70s and ’80s hits en- dure in part through music’s power to take people back to when or where they heard a particular song. He enters the time machine whenever he hears Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” the love song for Tom Cruise’s and Kelly Mc- Gillis’ characters in the 1986 movie “Top Gun.” “I was deathly afraid of storms as a child,” he said. “To this day, when ‘Take My Breath Away’ comes on, I can remember sitting
had a beat. They had power and energy. They felt young. Are they really “oldies” now? Or is it just us? Well, it’s definitely us. But North Platte native and radio personality Scott Carlson has good news: Your kids love them. “It’s not a turnoff to them,” he said. “It doesn’t make them feel like they’re hang- ing out with Grandma and Grandpa or the old Mom and Dad. Everyone’s in the music together.” Carlson, 42, won’t be qualifying for “senior discounts” for a while. But he’s playing his own boyhood soundtrack when he plays ’70s, ’80s and ’90s hits twice a day on Eagle Radio stations in North Platte. Carlson, the son of Larry and Linda Carl- son of North Platte, does the 5-10 a.m. morning show six days a week on KOOQ (98.1 FM/1410 AM). You’ll also hear him on Eagle’s “classic rock” KNRP (100.7 FM) during the 2-7 p.m. “afternoon drive.” He has some theories about the genera- tions’ views of late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s songs as radio programmers moved them from “current” to “recurrent” (the recent past) and then “classic” (today’s term for “old- ies”). When today’s “classic rock” was new, it mostly played on FM stereo stations like Eagle’s KELN — still a “current” rock sta- tion — while KOOQ was playing older
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