Get The Lead Out

I don't listen to the radio anymore. It just sort of happened. Living in New York, which is, I think, the single worst radio market in the whole world, it's pretty easy to just assume that any time you turn it on, you're going to hear crap. (Unless, of course, you can get FMU or FUV.) I know, I know, you can get good stuff streaming on the internet or on Pandora or whatever. But that's not really the radio to me. I'm still old school. You listen to the radio on a radio, beamed to you from some tower with a line-of-sight path to where you are. If you're in a valley, you're S.O.L. In New York, that means you get to choose from pop, pop, talk, pop, dance-pop, hard rap, soft rap, easy listening, doo-wop or classic rock. Or at least you used to have that many choices, back in the day. Now, who the hell knows. I don't. I don't listen to the radio. But sometimes I miss it. And at 5 p.m. on a slow, draggy day that's just now turning sunny, what I miss is Getting the Led Out. In case you never listened to classic rock radio, it was a daily staple: at 5 p.m., any decent, self-respecting classic rock radio station would play a block of Led Zepplin tunes for all those now-middle-aged former burnouts and dirtbags, who'd traded their Camaros for minivans and were stuck in traffic on the commute home (and some still lingering dirtbags, polishing their Firebirds in their driveways). Also tuning in were suburban boys who wanted to be cool. In the 7th grade, Led Zepplin was cool. Listening to the radio was cool. Black t-shirts and Camaros were still cool. It was a ten-minute block of being cool and pretending that you were never going to be commuting, that you would always stop to rock out at 5 p.m., no matter what.

But here I am. Wrapping up a work day, and getting ready for my commute. And I could use some rocking out. I'm not so into Led Zepplin these days. But I am into this.



So...get out and enjoy a sunset after a few stormy days. Looking at the forecast, it might be our last for a while.