The music that drives us
With a full tank of gas and the radio on, you surrender your night to dragging Main and hoping the next song on the radio is a good one. From a distance of eight blocks, you can identify the unique headlight configuration of more than 40 vehicles. This gives you ample time to prepare for honking at your 15 closest friends when you meet them. You make a U-turn and do it all again, maybe for hours, the only variation being who decides to park and ride with someone else for a while.
That pretty much sums up all of my small-town Saturday nights, post-driver’s-license. It was an innocent time, before most of the friends I knew could afford eight tracks, cassette tapes or CDs. It predated the sophisticated algorithms and curated playlists of music streaming services, and the niche stations of Sirius XM.
At 50,000 watts, KOMA radio from Oklahoma City was the AM King of the Cruise from sundown to sunup. The station played all the Top 40 rock ’n’ roll hits of the 1960s and 1970s. Tuning in was a ritual.
How many curfews did we miss because KOMA was on a roll and we couldn’t go home when the music was this good? Windows down, we sang along, not knowing we were self-selecting the soundtrack of our lives.
We were too young to be a part of the “American Graffiti” experience, but we did understand the DJ connection. Sometimes it felt like the person queuing the music could read our minds, playing exactly what we needed to hear, just when we needed to hear it — a breakup song, a victory anthem, a lament for the championship that might have been.
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