Nostalgia trip

While driving home home tonight, I tuned to KFRC on the car radio, and there I heard Casey Kasem announcing that Spanish Harlem by Aretha Franklin had dropped to number 21 "this week" on the Billboard charts. I was listening to an entire broadcast of American Top 40 from 1971--even the jingles. It was like I was back in seventh grade all over again, except without the zits and the social awkwardness.

For an aging fogy like myself, this is a pure nostalgia trip. Back when I was a kid, my local home town radio station began playing "American Top 40" on Sundays the same year that the show was syndicated, in 1970; and I used to listen to it fairly regularly, on my AM clock radio, in the years that immediately followed. Listening to the rebroadcast of an old show tonight--oh my God, even a song by the Partridge Family I probably haven't heard in 36 years, called "I Woke Up In Love This Morning"--really takes me back.

I can't tell from KFRC's web site if this is a regularly scheduled syndicated program for their Saturday night schedule, but that seems like a reasonable inference.

As I write this, they are now playing "Every Picture Tells a Story" by Rod Stewart--the title track of what Casey Kasem said was the number one album in the country at the time of the broadcast.