This series of posts covers my long, beloved history interacting with the medium of radio, including the music that flowed through the airwaves.

This week, I’m slated to participate in the eleventh annual staging of Reunion Weekend at my undergraduate college radio alma mater. It wasn’t long after the conclusion of last year’s go-round that I decided I wanted to use my next shift to honor my many different stops town to town, up and down the dial. As I’ve planned for that, slotting each of my different eras into one hour of Reunion programming time, I’ve thought a lot about the swirl of radio influence in my life. That starts, as this week’s show will, with my time before I ever crossed the threshold of a studio, when I was an uncommonly attentive listener.

I listened to a few different radio stations during my high school years, but the one that stirred the most devotion in me was WMAD-FM, located at 92.1 on the FM dial. In the nineteen-eighties, that station followed an adult album alternative format. Triple-A, as it was more widely known, was a relatively new format that drew on many of the staples of classic rock while determinedly sprucing up the playlist with a few left-of-center acts that were riling up the airwaves on college radio. Although there were clear limits to the station’s programming daring, they satisfied a craving I had for music I couldn’t hear anywhere else in the era long before anything a person wanted to clear was an artful digital search and a couple clicks away.

Because the station’s general disposition was to value albums as the prime rock ‘n’ roll art form (for many years, they played a different album start to finish every weeknight at midnight), they made a point of really digging into the new releases of the acts that held the most exalted positions on the station playlist. One of the prime places where this largesse of attention occurred was on the program The Radio Deli (which I swiped from when I soon got the chance), which would often devote a full segment, twenty minutes or so, to highlighting a new release.

I was listening raptly in the fall of 1987 when The Radio Deli featured Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, the long-awaited follow-up to his 1984 blockbuster, Born in the U.S.A. The album was barely out — it might have even been the day of its release — so the only song that had been heard by the general public to that point was the lead single, “Brilliant Disguise.” I didn’t have the means to rush right out to the record store and get my own copy of this LP that I absolutely knew would be added to my collection, so getting a preview of around half of the album was like a special gift. A weirdly emboldened music dork at the time, I called the station’s request line as soon as the show was complete and yammered at the poor DJ for several minutes about my impressions of what he’d played.

Even at the time, before I had any personal experience with programming a radio station, I understood and appreciated that several of the cuts the DJ played were unlikely to again find a place on commercial airwaves. Album opener “Ain’t Got You” had a long a cappella opening before it loped into a spare Bo Diddley riff. I couldn’t have been more out of step with the pop chart prevailers of the moment, and yet there it was, coming through my speakers. And, it should be noted, it sounded damn good on the radio.

Previous entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Radio Days” tag.