Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

I've always listened to audio late at night. As a kid, I would flip the dial of my tiny boombox  and listen to whatever weird audio oddities I could find. I was never content with listening to the average music that saturated the FM bands, so I often would switch over to the AM dial to find suitable alternatives. I have written before about playing pool and listening to the radio while always searching for something interesting. Other times I would record myself talking or intersperse my dialogue with snippets from the radio and television and listen to them over and over again. I particularly loved recording dialogue from old television shows on Nick At Nite. Sometimes I even recorded full episodes and listened to them. It's sad that I never found that many old time radio shows. My great aunt Alice had a ham radio, and I remember loving when she would go on and find people from other countries and places talking. I knew nothing about numbers stations at that time, but I re...

Does anyone have the fond memory from childhood of listening to the radio late at night under the covers? This habit seems to be common among the record collecting breed. The Ramones song "Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio?"celebrates it. For me, it was as ubiquitous as hiding under the covers reading an old superhero comic book, or staying up late watching old horror movies with the subtitles on. Although I can't say that I listened to the same stuff the Ramones did. There was no Murray the K coming out of the speakers in my quiet northern Wisconsin town. In fact, the frequency from the local Top 40 station often drowned out the other stations with a constant buzz of mainstream static. But the nights that I could get other stations in, I found some interesting music. One of the local public radio stations would play a mix of Native American music, indie folk, and rock 'n' roll. The station regularly blew my mind -- you just didn't hear such variet...