Sunrise, Sunset

Mike Doonesbury started aging in 1982 and is roughly my age (actually about four years older).

His daughter, Alex Doonesbury, graduated from MIT today..

Two stories about why I stopped listening to classic rock stations

One is recent, the other much older.

Back in North Carolina in the 1980s and early 1990s, my best friend was a fellow named Mike Cullen. He worked the Wednesday afternoon shift at Second Foundation, the comics and sf store at which I worked on Thursday through Tuesday. We generally had free choice of what to play on the radio; I had already shifted over to college radio by that point, but Cullen still preferred the local classic rock station (WRDU, now an all-talk station) and would play it for his whole shift, noon to 6 PM.

One week, he noticed that he had heard Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" every week for at least the previous four, and decided to keep count. Starting with that day as week 1, WRDU played "Baker Street" some time Wednesday between noon and 6 PM for 17 straight weeks. On week 18, they didn't play "Baker Street" until 6:05. Thus did the streak end with a whimper.

More recently, yesterday I was driving around running some errands. My first- and second-preferred stations, "The Peak" and "The Rock Xperience" were in commercial breaks, so I switched over to the classic rock station, Q104. I enjoyed a couple of pleasant songs that now elude me, and then they played Jethro Tull's "Locomotive Breath", which I like but which got me thinking about the fact that classic rock stations play maybe five Tull songs ("Aqualung", "Locomotive Breath", "Bungle in the Jungle", and a few other tracks off of the Greatest Hits album), and how the thing I hate about classic rock stations is that it isn't even that they overplay a small number of bands, it's that they only play three or four songs from those bands. I'm not a big Tull fan, but there are a lot of good pieces on those early albums that aren't "greatest hits".

So I switched over to The Peak, which was midway through Procul Harem's "Simple Sister", which I probably hadn't heard in fifteen years. When the song was over, the dj came on and said, "Procul Harem: so much more than just 'Whiter Shade of Pale'". He then mentioned that Procul Harem would be performing at Jones Beach this summer, in a double bill with . . . Jethro Tull.

Bill Watterson once wrote, "You're listening to Boomer 102 classic rock -- where we promise not to expose you to anything you haven't heard a million times before!" But sometimes it's like the universe just shouts at you.

(ETA: I just looked at the contents of M.U., Tull's first Greatest Hits album, from 1976. There are ten songs on it; all of the Tull I've heard on a classic rock station in the last two decades comes from side one. In classicrockworld, Tull don't even have an entire Greatest Hits album!)